Ethics And Affects In The Fiction Of Alice Munro

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.

Focusing on Alice Munro's last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'. Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro's art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and, especially, Dear Life (2012). This recursion and return manifest themselves not only in Munro's return to previously published pieces, but also to her discovery and meditations on her Scottish heritage, which can be read as entrance to her own understanding of herself and her life. Its provenance, displayed through archival evidence, is complex yet reveals a writer intent on a precise late style. Munro's final works serve as a coda to both her late style and to her entire career as arguably one of the finest short story writers ever to put pen to paper.

In eight “riveting [and] lovely” (San Francisco Chronicle) stories, Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro stunningly explores the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. “Superb . . . dazzling . . . Munro’s feel for her own characters is as pure as Chekhov’s.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Munro is indisputably a master. . . . A better book of stories can scarcely be imagined.”—The Washington Post Book World Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, the eight tales in The Love of a Good Woman lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim expresses his deepest secret to a young bride in what may be the last act of intimacy left in him. A daughter confronts her father with the open secret of his life. And in the riveting title story, a selfless nurse tending a dying patient discovers the social utility of lies. Sparklingly detailed, unwaveringly courageous, these are stories that extend the limits of fiction.

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different genres. It argues that scholarship on literature and the body is of fundamental importance to discussions about gender, race, sexuality, class, age, narrative form, and processes of reading and writing. Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction understands 'literature' in a broad sense: as fundamentally connected to changes in technology, culture and the environment. Offering a lively and accessible synthesis, it explores how literary writing of present and recent decades is concerned with the challenges of conveying physical experiences, experimenting with sensory perception, and thinking through the relationship between embodiment, identity and knowledge.

All the Feels / Tous les sens presents research into emotion and cognition in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writings in English or French. Affect is both internal and external, private and public; with its fluid boundaries, it represents a productive dimension for literary analysis. The emerging field of affect studies makes vital claims about ethical impulses, social justice, and critical resistance, and thus much is at stake when we adopt affective reading practices. The contributors ask what we can learn from reading contemporary literatures through this lens. Unique and timely, readable and teachable, this collection is a welcome resource for scholars of literature, feminism, philosophy, and transnational studies as well as anyone who yearns to imagine the world differently. Contributors: Nicole Brossard, Marie Carrière, Matthew Cormier, Kit Dobson, Nicoletta Dolce, Louise Dupré, Margery Fee, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Smaro Kamboureli, Aaron Kreuter, Daniel Laforest, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Heather Milne, Eric Schmaltz, Maïté Snauwaert, Jeanette den Toonder

Researching and writing about contemporary art and artists present unique challenges for scholars, students, professional critics and creative practitioners alike. This collection of essays from across the arts disciplines—music, literature, dance, theatre and the visual arts—explores the challenges and complexities raised by engaging in researching and writing on living or recently deceased subjects and their output. Different sections explore critical perspectives and case studies in relation to innovative, distinctive or otherwise leading work, as well as offering innovative modes of discourse such as a visual essay and a music composition. Subjects addressed include recent scandals of Canadian literary celebrity, late-career output, the written element of music composition PhDs, and the boundaries between ethnography and hagiography, with case studies ranging from Howard Barker to Adrian Piper to Sylvie Guillem and Misty Copeland.

In a country that conceives of itself as a caring society, Imagined Care discusses texts which depict the ethical dilemmas that arise from our attempts to respond to the needs of others.