The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[alice wellintown]

I like the suggestion that a study of American authors would begin, or
might begin, with the exemplary stories, short stories, or tales of
great writers and not focus on novels these authors wrote. If this
were done, of course, there would be little or nothing of Pynchon
worthy of study. Though Entropy has been anthologized, though The
Secret Integration is more an apprentice work than the juvenile
hackings P released as Slow Learner, even these two stories, though
often studied,  are not worth study, not if we plan to study
excellence. We might call CL49 a long short story; sometimes the term
novella is used by German, Italian, French ctitics to describe works
the length of CL49, Bartleby, The Open Boat, Gatsby...In any event,
and I won't argue the definition by length, though I wouldn't mind
looking into Poe's claims about tales and their length, we might take
some pleasure from these discussions were we to focus on short tales
and, maybe a good way to proceed is to look into the elements, see how
they work, in other words, do some analysis of tales written by
Americans that are said to be great. There is nothing wrong with the
trite opinions offered, but that they are trite: Faulkner is the
Early 20th Century master and so on is such crap anyone can read at
Wikipedia. Someone with balls might argue that Faulkner is greater
only if we put emphasis on what he does better than most, mainly point
of view. If we are searching for a better ironist, we need look no
further than O. Henry. So on...of course, no one said ladies first,
but I couldn't resist, so...