Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Description

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro’s writing. The collection illustrates how Munro’s short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro’s fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro’s fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame” (Amelia DeFalco, Lorraine York)....Pages 1-11 Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories (Sara Jamieson)....Pages 13-33 The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility in Alice Munro’s Fiction (Amelia DeFalco)....Pages 35-56 Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (Ana María Fraile-Marcos)....Pages 57-77 Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)Ability by Playing with Oedipus the King and Embracing the Queer Art of Failure (Marlene Goldman)....Pages 79-108 “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of Cognitive Disability (Heidi Tiedemann Darroch)....Pages 109-126 Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder (Susan Warwick)....Pages 127-152 Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in the Work of Alice Munro (Katherine G. Sutherland)....Pages 153-176 Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes (Claire Omhovère)....Pages 177-194 “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career (Lorraine York)....Pages 195-217 Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice Munro (Naomi Morgenstern)....Pages 219-244 Back Matter ....Pages 245-250