Susan Lohafer

Short story theory,
advanced nonfiction writing, narrative essay.

I began my career by studying the rhetorical and stylistic features of nineteenth-century American novels about characters who themselves created fictions for a living -- that is, "confidence men" (and women). From some of these same authors came the earliest poetics of the literary short story, a genre of special interest to me as a writer and teacher, and in my next project I aimed for a new aesthetics of the form via reader-response theory. This work emphasized the effects of closure, so imminent in short fiction, on the way textual features of the narrative "worked" on the reader in ways unique to the genre. In later years, I added a variety of perspectives (discourse analysis, cognitive psychology, and text-processing theory) and conducted a series of experiments (on reader-selected preclosure points in short narratives) to develop a contemporary narrative theory linking empirical, cultural, and aesthetic approaches to literary short fiction. Today, my research continues to explore the applications of this theory, while my teaching extends these interests to practitioner courses in literary nonfiction, or essays that tell stories.

Sticking to Stories: A Career Outside the Mainstream - An informal talk about my career history, given to the UI English Department on September 9, 2004