2013 års nobelpristagare i litteratur var Alice Munro. Hennes noveller är ofta enkla skildringar av ”vanliga människors liv” och hur specifika händelser från t.ex. deras barndom på ett mer eller mindre tydligt sätt påverkat deras liv i olika riktningar. Hur de berörts och utvecklats av dessa. Det handlar om moraliska dilemman och livsöden. Munro lyckas i sitt berättande beröra många av de existentiella frågorna, och ändå möta berättelserna "rakt upp och ner”; hon moraliserar inte över händelserna hon målar upp. Jag tyckete mig dock bakom de moraliska valen och livsödena skymta skuld och skuldkänslor i berättelserna, även om det inte uttalades. Det fick mig att tänka kring skuld… varför är det så svårt att tala om? Vad är skuld överhuvudtaget? När möter vi den, och varför? Jag bestämde mig för att börja nysta i dessa frågor, åtminstone litegrann. Resultatet blev denna uppsats, som berör ämnet skuld – vad det är, och vilken roll det kan ha i berättelser om mänskligt liv.

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This dissertation offers a new exploration of the relationship between geographic awareness and literary realism in Alice Munro’s depictions of female identity-formation. It demonstrates how Munro, the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, uses the discourse of place and positionality not just as a Canadian regionalist writer, but also as a writer implicitly concerned with the paradigms of intersectionality as advanced in Susan Stanford Friedman’s 1998 book Mappings and in the recent work of feminist geographers. These theories shed light on Munro’s efforts to represent her female protagonists’ individual and communal identities authentically. Following an introduction in which I explain how Munro’s cautious statements about feminism relate to these recent geopolitical theories, my chapters examine groupings of Munro’s stories through concepts associated with locational feminism. Chapter 2 compares Munro to one of her major influences, the American regionalist writer Willa Cather, through the concept of geopolitical space. Chapter 3 applies this concept more closely to Munro’s portrayals of female maturation in Lives of Girls and Women and The Moons of Jupiter, focusing on a thematic tension between belonging and alienation. Munro sees women’s dilemmas of identity as deeply connected to their sense of place and their definitions of their home places and positions. Chapter 4 examines how issues of place and space, especially regarding what Munro calls “home ground,” affect the construction of relational identity in the title story of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and in several stories from the collection Runaway. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Munro employs the tropes of women’s mobility and travel -- usually seen as tools of empowerment -- to depict their unsettled lives, characterized by instability, insecurity and imbalance. Because these experiences have to do with multiple nodes of difference, Munro’s depictions of mobility as a mixed reality overlap with recent theories of transnational feminism. Chapter 6 deals with the question of narrative agency vis-à-vis locational identity and positionality in her collection, Who Do You Think You Are? In sum, the dissertation argues that Munro’s realistic focus on women’s lives and experiences, and her emphasis on strategic place-awareness rather than the goal of equality, does carry an inspiring message to her readers about the nature of empowerment in today’s world.

<p>Uppsatsen ingår i kursen Skapande svenska C, 30 hp,  inom ämnet Litteraturvetenskap vid Umeå universitet</p>

Whether classified as realist, modernist, or postmodernist, the fiction of Alice Munro combines a strong mimetic impulse with a recognition of the limitations of mimesis. This dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of the balance between mimesis and the recognition of its limits. Chapter one provides an overview of Munro scholarship and brings particular attention to the manner in which this balance between mimesis and metafictional self-reflexivity has been analyzed since the earliest days of Munro criticism. Chapter two draws on the Munro scholarship of Naomi Morgenstern, Robert McGill, and Robert Thacker to argue that Munro’s fiction is connected, though not reducible to, her experience of reality. This connection, however imperfect, gives her aesthetics its ethical weight, particularly when the subject of her writing is the human Other. Munro’s combination of a sense of alterity with a powerful feeling of reality reflects a desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The tension that arises from this desire can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love akin to eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray: a representation, inscribed in each story’s form, of the possibility of a subject-to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. Chapter three compares the ethical vision in “The Ottawa Valley,” which ends on a moment of continuing, uncompromised alterity, with the feeling of love and catharsis produced in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Chapter four reads “Material” as an oblique gesture at the possibility that literature can open a relationship to the Other that is a kind love. Chapter five examines “Deep-Holes” as an attempt to reconcile the ethical tensions inherent in writing by representing a collaborative mode of meaning-making linked to love and fecundity. This dissertation also, however, follows Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between the self-Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-12-04 20:14:50.513

Cette thèse met en relation la représentation des corps dans l’œuvre d’Alice Munro avec le processus de l’empreinte tel qu’il a été mis au jour par Georges Didi-Huberman. La description des corps des personnages partage la même essence dialectique que l’empreinte : elle saisit une matière tout en laissant entrevoir le mouvement qui a donné naissance à la forme, elle est la conséquence d’un contact mais n’advient que dans la distance et son unicité fait signe vers le multiple. Le corps et son rapport au monde qui l’entoure met aussi en lumière une relation de ressemblance et de contact, une relation mutuelle que les mots eux-mêmes font transparaître dans une expression qui tend vers le lyrisme. Enfin, les corps représentés dans la fiction munrovienne ne sont pas de simples copies du réel mais sont véritablement créateurs en devenant les matériaux interpersonnels de la création artistique. Cette étude de la représentation des corps dans l’œuvre d’Alice Munro tente de montrer les enjeux de l’attention au corps, en particulier ceux du care, et comment cette attention influence l’écriture fictionnelle. / This dissertation examines the relationship between the representation of bodies in Alice Munro’s work and the imprint process as characterized by Georges Didi-Huberman. The description of the characters’ bodies gives evidence of the same dialectical essence as imprints: it attempts to fix the body matter while making movement visible, it is the product of a contact but becomes apparent only from a distance and its unicity foreshadows its multiplicity. The body and its link to the world around also displays a relationship of resemblance and contact based on reciprocity. It is conveyed through words and an expression that tends to lyricism. Finally, bodies represented in Munro’s fiction are not mere copies of the real but are creative and interpersonal as they become the very material of artistic creation. This study of the representation of bodies in Alice Munro’s work attempts to show what being attentive to bodies entails, in particular in the context of care studies, and how this attention to bodies influences fictional writing.

Ma recherche vise à étudier la nouvelle anglo-américaine par rapport à une forme à laquelle elle est inextricablement liée, le cycle de nouvelles, qui, à mi-chemin entre histoire et roman, est érigé en une série d'histoires interconnectées et qui présente certains éléments récurrents (personnages, lieu, thèmes). La réflexion sur le cycle de nouvelles, considéré comme un genre en tant que tel, donnera la priorité à l’analyse de l’oeuvre d’Alice Munro placée dans une perspective comparative, en relation et en continuité, non seulement avec le travail d’écrivains canadiens "maîtres" du genre, mais aussi avec la tradition du cycle de nouvelles américaine. / My research aims at studying the Nord-American short story in relation to a form to which it is inextricably linked, the short story cycle, which, halfway between history and novel, is set as a series of interconnected stories presenting some recurring elements (characters, place, themes). The reflection on the short story cycle will give priority to the analysis of Alice Munro's work placed in a comparative perspective, in relation and continuity, not only with the work of 'Canadian writers' masters' of the genre, but also with the tradition of the American short story cycle. / Il presente lavoro si propone di analizzare la forma narrativa del ciclo di racconti, mettendone in luce le caratteristiche in relazione all’opera di Alice Munro. Il corpus narrativo di Munro, formato da quattordici raccolte in un arco temporale che copre più di quarant’anni (la prima raccolta, Dance of the Happy Shades esce ne 1968 e l’ultima, Dear Life nel 2012), ben si presta a questo tipo di studio. Nell’ arco della sua prolifica opera Munro ha esplorato le potenzialità della forma breve, rimodulando progressivamente i confini fra i generi, scomponendone le prospettive e gli esiti possibili ora nella direzione della novella modernista (cara a scrittrici come Katherine Mansfield ed Eudora Welty), ora nella creazione di cicli di storie o di serie di racconti interconnessi, destrutturando o risemantizzando la nozione di brevità e di genere letterario. Il lavoro, che si presenta come un case study, si propone un duplice obiettivo: quello di estendere la nozione di ciclo di racconti e di includerla in quella di “politesto” , (ossia quella categoria critica che concepisce l’opera letteraria, la raccolta di racconti ad esempio, come processo aggregativo mettendo in luce tutti quei legami intertestuali e intratestuali che i singoli testi intrattengono fra di loro) e quello di applicare questa categoria all’opera di Alice Munro, ovvero studiare, con gli strumenti della teoria della letteratura e della comparatistica, i rapporti tra i racconti, nella loro natura intra ed intertestuale, e tra le raccolte stesse analizzate sulla base della loro natura politestuale.

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Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2008.

<p>The following study of Alice Munro's collections of short stories, Who Do You Think You Are?, The Moons of Jupiter, and The Progress of Love, closely examines the feminine perception of human relationships and traces Munro's theme of lithe pain of human contact. Chapter I explores the changing perception of life and relationships as seen through the eyes of the central character of Who Do You Think You Are? and discusses the paradoxical view of life articulated by Munro, a view which asks that the abuse which characters inflict upon one another be seen as both savage and splendid, as perversely necessary in any relationship between her characters. This idea of a necessary pain is discussed in Chapter II in light of Munro's more intense fascination with it in The Moons of Jupiter. Her vision of the humiliating necessity of inflicting and enduring pain does not, however, culminate in a clearly-defined resolution to the paradoxes of experience; indeed, The Moons of Jupiter suggests Munro's growing hesitancy to solve the puzzles of human experience. Chapter II also examines Munro's experimentation with narrative time shifts and discusses this new interest in technique as it pertains to her preoccupation with the disparity between illusion and reality in the lives of her characters. The shifting back and forth between past and present is a technique which Munro continues to employ in her next work, The Progress of Love, which I examine in Chapter III. This most recent work, like Who Do You Think You Are? and The Moons of Jupiter, looks closely at the delicate moments of exposure in experience and at the necessary painfulness of those moments, but with a difference. In The Progress of Love Munro seems to allow her characters moments of serenity and moments of self-knowledge; the feminine perception of experience has altered to the degree that her characters appear able to move beyond disillusionment through to a kind of survival of those moments of exposure which in the Moons of Jupiter appear to overwhelm and almost paralyze the characters. </p> / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)