21L.325  Small Wonders: Short Stories Collected

Characters in stories by Herman Melville (The Piazza Tales [1856])  and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth [2008])  travel through unknown seas and mysterious landscapes.  From quite different perspectives—those of 19^th-century New England mariner and farmer and 21^st-century urban Indian-American writer—these authors intersect in unexpected ways.  In their explorations of  “unaccustomed earth”—the new worlds their characters navigate with puzzlement, courage, resilience, and humor—they display uncommon mastery of the American short story. Students will discuss their stories as separate pieces and also as parts of carefully designed collections. Written work will include a reading journal and two brief essays.

Texts

Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales.

This text is difficult to find as a separate work.  Melville’s sixteen stories, first published separately in magazines, tend to get lumped together in anthologies, with little attention to the particular arrangement and structure of the smaller collection published as  The Piazza Tales: “The Piazza,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,”  “The Lightning-Rod Man,” “The Encantadas,” and “The Bell-Tower.” The scholarly edition of the text, from Northwestern-Newberry Press, is expensive. Cheaper editions have no notes and are not that helpful.  Your best bet may be Great Short Works of Herman Melville, ed. Warner Berthoff (New York: Harper Collins [Perennial Classics], 2004), somewhat dated by now but at least a reliable edition. You can also find the stories online as they first appeared in 1856, and you should consult this edition, whatever print text you use: http://books.google.com/books?id=4KYOAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Melville,+Piazza+Tales&cd=1

Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth: Stories (New York: Vintage, 2008).