Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro, 2018

Twentieth Century Literature, 2012

JEELL (Journal of English Education, Linguistics and Literature) English Departement of STKIP PGRI Jombang

This study analyzes Alice Munro’s feminism thoughts in her selected short stories; Alice Munro, whose family has undergone oppression especially her mother and her herself since she was in her childhood, expresses the right of ‘speaking’ through the female characters about equal rights of women she saw as well as she experienced since her childhood, the women who are oppressed by man as well as the cultural gaps. Using Feminism as the method and sociology of literature as the theory, I find that Alice Munro’s feminism’s thoughts are reflected through the female characters who are against men and culture domination in the selected short stories.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2015

SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)

Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 2024

Lacanian Beauty in his ethics is encapsulated as making decisions and “act[ing] in conformity with one’s desires”. This idea is thought while reading Munro’s short stories to argue humans reconfigure their life through decision, transgression, act and love. Munro’s characters are confined in the condition that contextualizes them through one limited interpretation, detaching them from their individuality. To get out of this condition they detach from the Other via acting on their Real desire. So the Real opens the space for the decision that postulates the possibility for transgression. Thus, it is claimed making decisions leads to transgression that necessitates act whereby love is experienced. This study through analyzing decision, transgression, act, love and their relation introduces neutrality as a novel idea about a stance in which Beauty in Lacanian ethics is founded. It demonstrates neutrality is a pure communication area not polluted by Symbolic Order, a singularity, a power stance, a varietal stance in which love is the law. In this neutral singularity, humans succeed in living a life in its full. Lacanian ethics and sociology are interconnected to demonstrate the new context of life human can live so as to bring forth new outlooks on ethics including Beauty.

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro, 2018

Even though structuralist and poststructuralist approaches to literature have largely shunned moral issues as a concern, the current turn to ethics proves "the resilience of ethical questions in literary criticism and theory." 1 The urge to justify the existence of the Humanities as a field of study in the neoliberal terms of economic and social profit 2 may well have contributed to this resiliency, as the function of the arts and of literature in particular, can be explained in terms of the ethical values they may stir. Marlene Goldman views the shift to ethics as one away from deconstruction's concern with the provisional to a revived interest in the values of

Thesis, 2020

Women throughout the world and in all ages have been the subject of many literary works written in different literary genres. A lot of literary critics have argued over the role and the status of women in the world and their self-development of their economic, social, political, literary, and cultural position in literary works. Women's oppression, self-complication, and self-recognition are worldly studied. In this respect, this thesis aims at exploring how Alice Munro has violated the established norms of writing in order to give women the chance to speak. It can be classified as a postcolonial study because Munro tries to deconstruct the centre: it is both the metropolitan and patriarchy. Moreover, she has used postmodernist techniques in order to distort both the west and men.

Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers De La Nouvelle, 2010

The major achievement of Alice Munro is to have conquered popularity and fame almost all over the world by dedicating her whole production to a rather unpopular and neglected genre: the short story. Short stories-and their longer cousins, novellasare considered by publishers and booksellers the most difficult to sell literary products. Moreover, since the authors of fiction are preferably canonized for their novels, short stories, thanks to their brevity, find their way onto University syllabuses only as pedagogic devices, to be anthologised, read and discussed in the classroom as samples of an author's literary craft. According to Canadian critic, Joan McCaig: The reasons for this neglect can be attributed to three factors. First, the short story has had a briefer history, as a literary form, than the novel, and thus has simply not had the time to achieve critical respect. Second, the short story is more popular than the novel, because of its marketability in magazines, and thus is deemed less worthy by critics, [...] Third, the formal properties of the novel more closely inscribe the ideology of the dominant culture, thus making it a more central form. (McCaig 86) 2 It is interesting to note that, to achieve her success, Munro had to challenge all these factors. First of all, she got critical respect for her short stories by disputing the very norms on which all the theorists of short fiction agreed, from Edgar Allan Poe onwards.

Hello-Teen Society, 2022

This study presents an overview of the existentialism philosophy to the women's lives in Alice Munro's stories and Munro's feministic attitude reflected in her short stories. Alice Munro has won the heart of all women around the world through her dedication and consistent contribution to establish the women's rights in the contemporary modern society. The paper was mainly based on secondary data from different books and internet sources. However, this article has depicted the application of the existentialistic theory of Jean-Paul Sartre to Munro's characters and shows how her characters are worthy enough to carry on this theory without conflicting feminism.