Welcome to Keeping it Short: Flash Fiction in the Twentieth Century and
Beyond, a course that
focuses on literary texts known as flash fiction: stories under 1000 words, and often under 500.
‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn’. Ernest
Hemingway’s six-word story captures how a compelling story can be told in just
a few words. Or take this very short story called ‘Judgement’ by contemporary
writer Lydia Davis: ‘Into how small a space the word judgement can be
compressed: it must fit inside the brain of a ladybug as she, before my eyes,
makes a decision.’ Tracing its roots back to Aesop’s tales and to ancient
Persian writers, very short form fiction – whether we call it ‘sudden fiction’,
‘flash fiction’, or ‘micro fiction’ – is interested in the brief, the
condensed, the stripped bare. And as these two examples cited above attest, it
can be packed with as much passion, adventure, and wisdom as much lengthier
pieces of writing.
As with many literary labels, many writers
producing these stories did not know they were writing ‘flash fiction’. We
won’t be concerned with defining this category or settling on a name; instead,
we will focus on reading works that come under 1000 words and think about
questions such as: What is gained and what is lost in fiction of extreme
brevity? Why would a writer seek the brief and the condensed? Is it true what
they say that such fiction brings us to a point of recognition and then leaves
us there, absolutely suspended? Intriguingly, and as we will come to see,
writers have often turned to hyper short fiction as a vehicle for exploring
diversity. Throughout the course, you will be asked to think how flash fiction
has been used to negotiate issues that pertain to gender, race, ethnicity,
religion, age, and orientation.
Though we will focus almost exclusively on
fiction, the story this course tells starts in the late nineteenth century,
with Baudelaire’s short prose poems, and grounds twentieth and
twenty-first-century short form fiction in modernist poetry’s experimentation,
under the influence of Japanese poetry, with short, precise, and accurate
poems. The connection between poetry should not come as a surprise. As we will
see, especially when we consider a couple of short prose poems, short form
fiction crosses the boundaries between prose and poetry, just as it blurs
distinctions between fiction and non-fiction. For the vast majority of the
semester, however, it is works of fiction that we will read. We will read
several different authors and, towards the end of the semester, we will stay
for a bit longer with Lydia Davis, perhaps the most famous practitioner of
flash fiction.