Alice Munro - Wikipedia
Writing
Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of the features of her fiction. Another is the omniscient narrator who serves to make sense of the world. Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers from the rural South of the United States. As in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions, but the reaction of Munro's characters is generally less intense than their Southern counterparts'. Her male characters tend to capture the essence of the everyman, while her female characters are more complex. Much of Munro's work exemplifies the literary genre known as Southern Ontario Gothic.[26]
Munro's work is often compared with the great short-story writers. In her stories, as in Chekhov's, plot is secondary and "little happens." As with Chekhov, Garan Holcombe notes: "All is based on the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, the concise, subtle, revelatory detail." Munro's work deals with "love and work, and the failings of both. She shares Chekhov's obsession with time and our much-lamented inability to delay or prevent its relentless movement forward."[27]
A frequent theme of her work, particularly evident in her early stories, has been the dilemmas of a girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and the small town she grew up in. In recent work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she has shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, of women alone, and of the elderly. It is a mark of her style for characters to experience a revelation that sheds light on, and gives meaning to, an event.
Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life.[28] As Robert Thacker wrote:
Munro's writing creates... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude – not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism' – but rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being."[29]
Many critics have asserted that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, gave a simple answer: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."[30]
Research on Munro's work has been undertaken since the early 1970s, with the first PhD thesis published in 1972.[31] The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo first conference on her oeuvre was published in 1984, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable.[32] In 2003/2004, the journal Open Letter. Canadian quarterly review of writing and sources published 14 contributions on Munro's work, in Autumn 2010 the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)/Les cahiers de la nouvellededicated a special issue to Munro, and in May 2012 an issue of the journal Narrativefocussed on a single story by Munro, "Passion" (2004), with an introduction, a summary of the story, and five essays of analysis.[33]
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Who Do You Think You Are? (book)
First edition
| |
| Author | Alice Munro |
|---|---|
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Macmillan of Canada |
Publication date
| 1978 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 206 pp (hardcover edition) & 272 pp (paperback edition) |
| ISBN | 978-0-7705-1712-0 (hardcover edition) |
| OCLC | 5099798 |
| 813/.5/4 | |
| LC Class | PZ4.M969 Wh PR9199.3.M8 |
Who Do You Think You Are? is a book of short stories by Alice Munro, recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, published by Macmillan of Canada in 1978. It won the 1978 Governor General's Award for English Fiction, her second win of that prize.
Outside of Canada, the book was published as The Beggar Maid. Under that title, it was also nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980.
The collection of short stories revolve around protagonist Rose. The collection has been labelled by some critics as a novel, as the same characters and similar themes recur throughout the book, but there is no formal cohesiveness in plot. Each story explores an idea, and is not bound by a particular time, place, setting, or narrative voice.
Stories[edit]
- "Royal Beatings"
- "Privilege"
- "Half a Grapefruit"
- "Wild Swans"
- "The Beggar Maid"
- "Mischief"
- "Providence"
- "Simon's Luck"
- "Spelling"
- "Who Do You Think You Are?"
Summary[edit]
As suggested by the title, the theme of identity is central to the collection. The short stories can be described as a bildungsroman. Rose grows up in a small town, abused by her father, and living in an impoverished home. In "Half a Grapefruit", she begins attending a school on the more affluent part of town. In class, when asked what she ate for breakfast, she lies and says "half a grapefruit" rather than revealing her mundane, considerably less glamorous meal. The lie haunts her, and she is embarrassed by her upbringing.
Rose ends up winning a scholarship to attend university. On a train ride to Toronto, she is molested by a clergy man; she chooses to ignore this incident, but it has irreparable damage on her future relationships with men. At university she meets her husband who has a medieval perspective of women—he is drawn to her because he sees her as a damsel in distress. Her marriage eventually ends, and she has to juggle being a mother, meeting other men, and her acting career.
One of her significant relationships is with Simon, a charming man she meets at a friend's house. The two spend the weekend together, and she grows attached to him (she describes it as developing an understanding for Simon's many personas). He disappears unexpectedly afterwards. She later discovers that Simon has died.
The final few short stories have her returning home; this gives her a chance to close the chapter of her life involving her complicated relationship with her stepmother Flo.
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