Module 1: Defining Short Stories

Most of you are taking this course to satisfy a NOVA degree requirement, so before we get further into the material, it’s worth asking why so many colleges and universities require their students, whatever their major might be, to take a literature course. What are you supposed to get out of it?

One answer is that literature encompasses several branches of knowledge: language, history, philosophy, psychology. The stories we’ll be reading were authored by people from a wide variety of cultural and historical backgrounds, giving us insight into a fascinating collection of experiences, beliefs, values, and modes of expression, most of which are unavailable to us in our day-to-day lives.

The study of literature, however, isn’t just about acquiring knowledge. It’s also about developing certain capacities for observation, analytical thinking, and communication. By immersing ourselves in masterful examples of the written language, we’ll learn how to extract meaning from writing in general and—just as importantly—how to hone our own skills as writers.