Overview

Can fiction teach us how to live? This study offers a fresh take on the North American short story, exploring how the genre has engaged in the construction and circulation of 'life knowledge'. Echoing the resurgence of short story scholarship in recent years, it thus contributes a genre-focused perspective to the growing field of 'literature and knowledge' studies. Drawing on stories from the late 19th century to the present by authors such as Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Junot Díaz, and Alice Munro, Michael Basseler examines how knowledge about life and how to live it is generically constituted and, vice versa, how literary genres such as the short story are embedded in broader cultural frameworks of knowledge production.

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9783837646429

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Reviews

»Overall, this volume offers a prominent, holistic reframing of many familiar critical tropes to the scholar interested in short story criticism and literary history, and is certainly one of the fullest works to date focused on the cognitive work of the genre.« Andrew Levy, ALH Online Review, 27 (2022) »As it stands, An Organon of Life Knowledge is a well-balanced, theoretically well-informed and critically insightful monograph that opens new ground in the field of short story theory and criticism. We need more books like this oneto expand our knowledge of life and literature and of their mutual interaction.« Jorge Sacido-Romero, Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 (2019)

Author Information

Michael Basseler works as academic manager at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at the University of Gießen. His research focuses on U.S.-American literature and culture as well as literary and cultural theory, especially the study of narrative, African American literature, and the short story. His current project deals with the concept of resilience from a literary and cultural perspective.

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