COLA 1500-Title – How Does Fiction Work? Reading Hemingway and Kafka

How does fiction work? In this course we will read (short) works of fiction while exploring how fictional texts work, i.e. how they create (and subvert) meaning.  We will focus on the writers Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, each renowned for his distinct, even idiosyncratic, texts.  Written in economically concise prose, Hemingway's short stories can be elliptical, but are not that hard to work through, displaying values not difficult to grasp.  Kafka's stories are in many ways easy enough to read, but place many obstacles in the way of understanding, dealing with problems and values both complex and elusive.  This course aims to provide students with strategies for reading such fictional texts, but these strategies carry over to non-fiction as well—from news reports and commentaries to works of history, sociology, philosophy, and so forth.