Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-206) and index
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
The disruption of writing -- Early "signs of invasion" : Dance of the happy shades -- "So many created worlds" : Lives of girls and women -- The politics of deferral : power and suspicion in Something I've been meaning to tell you -- Acknowledging the nether voices : signs of instability in Who do you think you are? -- Towards a poetics of surprise : "change and possibility" in The moons of Jupiter -- "It's what I believe" : patterns of complicity in The progress of love -- (Re)construction and/as deception in Friend of my youth -- The problem of an ending
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Much of the critical writing on the fiction of Alice Munro has explored and emphasized Munro's 'realism.' But her stories frequently turn on what has been left out; they are rife with unsent (unfinished) letters, with things people mean to, but do not, say or tell. Ajay Heble's study focuses on Munro's involvement with a 'discourse of absence' and suggests that our understanding of these texts often depends not only on what happens in the fiction, but also on what might have happened. Munro's stories confer their meaning not simply by referring to an outer reality, but also by bestowing upon the reader a stimulating wealth of possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning. Characteristically, they articulate an unresolvable tension between variants on these positions: between, on the one hand, her delineation of a surface reality - a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true - and, on the other, her involvement with a discourse of absence that challenges the very conventions within which her fiction operates. Drawing on structuralist and poststructuralist theories of language and its relation to meaning, knowledge, and systems of power, and on theories of postmodernist fiction, Heble offers both a careful reading of Munro's stories and a theoretical framework for reading meanings in absence. His book extends recent revisionist analysis and makes a valuable and original contribution to the criticism on Munro
PERSONAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Munro, Alice,1931-Criticism and interpretation
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Discourse analysis, Literary
Postmodernism (Literature)-- Canada
Women and literature-- Canada-- History-- 20th century