The Reader in the Mirror: The Power of The Short Story

What can literature teach us about communication and human connections? In this interactive class, we will discover how reading can enhance our abilities to navigate challenging conversations, bridge different points of view and communicate across differences. Through reading stories, we come to understand aspects of our own lives as we explore richly nuanced characters and the dilemmas they face, which often reflect our own. We will engage in class discussion as we consider the tools that writers use to create finely-wrought dramas, such as point of view and narrative structure. In doing so, we will explore our own relationship to the text and its characters – the memories, associations, and curiosities we bring as readers – which will enable us to better comprehend the perspectives and experiences of others, as well as our own. We can use such self-awareness to improve our appreciation of diversity and ability to communicate in both personal and professional settings. The course will include stories by James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Anne Porter, Yiyun Li, and Leo Tolstoy.

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