Foreword: What Is a Short Story, and How Do We Teach It?

I. Making It Personal

Shared Weight: Tim O'Brien's ``The Things They Carried''

Susanne Rubenstein

Being People Together: Toni Cade Bambara's ``Raymond's Run''

Janet Ellen Kaufman

Destruct to Instruct: ``Teaching'' Graham Greene's ``The Destructors''

Sara R. Joranko

Zora Neale Hurston's ``How It Feels to Be Colored Me'': A Writing and Self-Discovery Process

Judy L. Isaksen

II. Seeing What Is Really There

Forcing Readers to Read Carefully: William Carlos Williams's ``The Use of Force''

Charles E. May

``Nothing Much Happens in This Story'': Teaching Sarah Orne Jewett's ``A White Heron''

Janet Gebhart Auten

How Did I Break My Students of One of Their Biggest Bad Habits as Readers? It Was Easy: Using Alice Walker's ``How Did I Get Away...''

Kelly Chandler

Reading between the Lines of Gina Berriault's ``The Stone Boy''

Carole L. Hamilton

Led to Condemn: Discovering the Narrative Strategy of Herman Melville's ``Bartleby the Scrivener''

James Tackach

III. Perceiving the Story's Underlying Structure

One Great Way to Read Short Stories: Studying Character Deflection in Morley Callaghan's ``All the Years of Her Life''

Grant Tracey

Stories about Stories: Teaching Narrative Using William Saroyan's ``My Grandmother Lucy Tells a Story without a Beginning, a Middle, or an End''

Brenda Dyer

The Story Looks at Itself: Narration in Virginia Woolf's ``An Unwritten Novel''

Tamara Grogan

Structuralism and Edith Wharton's ``Roman Fever''

Linda L. Gill

IV. Encountering Other Perspectives

Creating Independent Analyzers of the Short Story with Rawlings's ``A Mother in Mannville''

Russell Shipp

Plato's ``Myth of the Cave'' and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Dennis Young

Through Cinderella: Four Tools and the Critique of High Culture

Lawrence Pruyne

Getting behind Gilman's ``The Yellow Wallpaper''

Dianne Fallon

V. Discerning the Story's Cultural Perspective

Expanding the Margins in American Literature Using Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City

Barbara Kaplan Bass

Shuffling the Race Cards: Toni Morrison's ``Recitatif''

E. Shelley Reid

Readers, Cultures, and ``Revolutionary'' Literature: Teaching Toni Cade Bambara's ``The Lesson''

Jennifer Seibel Trainor

Learning to Listen to Stories: Sherman Alexie's ``Witnesses, Secret and Not''

Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez

VI. Refining Taste

``Sometimes, Bad Is Bad'': Teaching Theodore Dreiser's ``Typhoon'' and the American Literary Canon

Peter Kratzke

Teaching Flawed Fiction: ``The Most Dangerous Game''

Tom Hansen

Reading Louise Erdrich's ``American Horse''

Pat Onion

Opening the Door to Understanding Joyce Carol Oates's ``Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?''

Richard E. Mezo

Afterword: Writing by the Flash of the Firefly

A Bibliographic Postscript

Index

Editors

Contributors