Alice Munro
the master of the contemporary short story
2013 Nobel Prize in Literature
Alice Munro
Nobel Prizes in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 107 times to 111 Nobel Laureates
between 1901 and 2014.
There have been only thirteen female Nobel laureates in literature
There have been five female Nobel laureates writing in English
• 1938 Pearl Buck
• 1991 Nadine Gordimer
• 1993 Tony Morrison
• 2007 Doris Lessing
• 2014 Alice Munro
•
Munro is the first writer who was born in Canada and who has been actually
living in Canada to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature since it began in
1901. Saul Bellow who won the prize in 1976 was also born in Canada, but
emigrated to Chicago at the age of nine and was usually described as a
Canadian-born American writer.
Canadian short-story writer
Alice Munro
The power of the short story
„And by such means, and with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of
him who contemplates it with kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has
been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable in the novel. (Edgar
Allan Poe)”
„It does not present whole lives but fleeting moments in a life through a dramatic or poignant incident or a
turning point. This might be an incident which triggers a conflict between characters or marks a change
in a mindset of another and that is followed through to a kind of resolution. The short story’s very
shortness and the ability to be read at one sitting can be an advantage, helping create the kind of “unity
effect” recommended by its “patron saint”, Edgar Allan Poe, and still advocated today.(Maunder, A.
2007. The Facts on File Companion to the British Short Story ,viii)”
„In the novel there is space to spell things out and in effect to tie up all lose ends, but in a quality short story
little must be said yet everything implied (Bill Naughton)”
„Every word must tell- there is no room for in-filling…The short story is an unforgiving form. (Susan Hill)”
The short story is “the art of the glimpse” (William Trevor)
“You play a different game with the short story. You demand far more of the reader than you do with a
novel, or television” (William Trevor)
The short story: “art in highly concentrated form”, “a compressed blast of discerning, intellectual pleasure”
(William Boyd)
“The short story- a form by nature nervous adrenalized, very quick, not restful that works by giving you raw
ingredients and telling you to make the meal yourself” (Helen Simpson)
Alice Munro short stories
„Mostly in my stories I like to look at what people
don’t understand. What we don’t understand.
What we think is happening and what we
understand later on and so on (Alice Munro in
Howells, Coral Ann. 1998. Alice Munro.
Contemporary World Writers. Manchester
University Press, 69).”
stories usually set in southwestern Ontario
characters of Scotch-Irish stock
Life and career
• born - July 10, 1931,
Wingham, Ontario, Canada
• In 2009 Munro won the
Man Booker International
Prize
• In 2013 Munro won the
Nobel Prize in Literature
the town of Wingham ,rural
southwestern Ontario and the Huron
County geography in Munro’s stories
"I am intoxicated by this landscape, by the almost flat fields, the
swamps, the hardwood bush, by the continental climate with its
extravagant winters," The Selected Stories (1996).
"I am at home with the brick houses, the falling-down barns, the
occasional farms that have swimming pools and airplanes, the
trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Wal-Mart, and Canadian
Tire. I speak the language."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees
with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small
untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not
level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to
ice in the act of falling. (Dear Life)
Autobiographical elements:
the small town community,
the need to fit in
the complicated relationship with her
mother
"We didn't live in the town and we didn't live in
the country. We lived in this kind of ghetto
where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and
hangers-on lived”.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
Reading and telling stories
"Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of
the magic."
"And after a while it wasn't enough, and I started making up
a very imitative type of story, set in Canada - which was
kind of odd, but it didn't bother me. It was a kind of
recompense for not being able to get right into the world
of the book. Books were so important to me. They were
far more important than life." But in Wingham, such
tendencies "didn't add to my status as a normal person
or as an attractive woman. I learned to try to be a
different person on the surface, though this never really
worked. People saw there was something wrong”.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
• 1949-1951- Univesity of Western Ontario
• „Dimensions of a Shadow", published in the
university magazine
• Marriage, a move to Vancuver
• 1959- her mother’s death
• A breakthrought: „The Peace of Utrecht”
• 1963 –Jim Munro’s bookshop, Munro's Books,
in Victoria, British Columbia
1968 the Governor General's award
1971
Del’s coming of age story
set in a town called Jubilee
Lives of girls and women
• "People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were
dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable - deep
caves paved with kitchen linoleum. It did not
occur to me then that one day I would be so
greedy for Jubilee ... what I wanted was every
last thing, every layer of speech and thought,
stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell,
pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and
held together - radiant, everlasting."
• 1973- a divorce,
• 1976 -the second marriage
• a return to Ontario
(Clinton- not far from Wingham)
"Royal Beatings„ published by
The New Yorker
the New York Times Book Review:
„[Munro] dealt with emotion on a kind
of raw and immediate level that I
don't think we had seen before."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8
Dance of Happy Shades (1968)
The Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell
You (1974)
Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)
The Moons of Jupiter (1982)
The Progress of Love (1986)
Friend of My Youth (1986)
Open Secrets (1994)
The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,
Loveship, Marriage (2001)
Runaway (2004)
The View from Castle Rock (2007)
Too Much Happiness (2009)
Dear Life (2012)
Taniec szczęśliwych cieni, Wydawnictwo
Literackie 2013,
Dziewczęta i kobiety, W.A.B. 2013,
Coś, o czym chciałabym ci powiedzieć,
Wydawnictwo Świat Książki 2014
Za kogo ty się uważasz?, W.A.B. 2012
Księżyce Jowisza, Wydawnictwo Literackie
2014
Odcienie miłości, Wydawnictwo Literackie
2014
Przyjaciółka z młodości, Wydawnictwo
Literackie 2013
Jawne tajemnice, W.A.B. 2014,
Miłość dobrej kobiety, W.A.B. 2013,
Kocha, lubi, szanuje..., Dwie Siostry 2011,
Uciekinierka, Dwie Siostry 2009
Widok z Castle Rock, Wydawnictwo
Literackie 2011,
Zbyt wiele szczęścia, Wydawnictwo
Literackie 2009,
Drogie życie, Wydawnictwo Literackie
2013,
Alice Munro’s farewell to writing
(2012)
• „Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to
undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are
exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the
particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two
ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex,
thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting
(somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only
the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she
deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary
devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely
revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of
life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank,
and shocking. (Douglas Glover „The Mind of Alice Munro” in:
Douglas Glover. 2012. Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on
Writing.Biblioasis, 85-104.)”
Munro’s narrative technique
• "She's a very modern and experimental writer in the clothing
of a classical writer. Like William Trevor, she penetrates
through various narratives, sometimes about exactly the
same events or subjects, and she keeps on parting the
curtains for you until you get to the heart of what she's doing.
You get the feeling she's trying to help you get at some true
emotional psychological insight, but that often takes the form
of a kind of philosophical surrender to the unknowability of
people's motives and characters, a dark existential
uncertainty about what makes people tick. And this, it seems
to me, is very important and very abstract - but doesn't do
justice to the liveliness and richness of her characters.”
(Daniel Menaker, the New Yorker's fiction editor and editorin-chief at Random House US)
at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8)