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.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”, Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York.- 2. Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories, Sara Jamieson.- 3. The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility in Alice Munro’s Fiction, Amelia DeFalco.- 4. Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain”, Ana María Fraile-Marcos.- 5. Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)Ability by Playing with Oedipus the King and Embracing the Queer Art of Failure, Marlene Goldman.- 6. “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of Cognitive Disability, Heidi Tiedemann Darroch.- 7. Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder, Susan Warwick.- 8.Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in the Work of Alice Munro, Katherine G. Sutherland.- 9. Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes by Claire Omhovère.- 10. “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career, Lorraine York.- 11. Life after Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice Munro, Naomi Morgenstern.
