Caretakers Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro

DeFalco, Amelia

doi:10.1215/0041462x-2012-4001

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The narrator tries to recapture the image of their mother, so disturbingly transformed by her illness that she had become a Mrs Netterfield-like creature, using the plural first person in an attempt to unite her experiences with Maddy's: "and I realize that she became one of the town's possessions and oddities, its brief legends. This she achieved in spite of us, for we tried, both crudely and artfully, to keep her at home, away from that sad notoriety; not for her sake, but for ours" (195), although their shared past lays a gulf between them (DeFalco, 2012). But the picture remains incomplete, no matter how hard Helen tries to depict the horrors of the disease of "Our Gothic Mother" (Munro, 2011: 200) and its impact on their lives, because "[i]n the ordinary world it was not possible to re-create her.…”

Section: Closure: "Dear Life" and "The Peace Of Utrecht"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Before I Say Goodbye

Spillard

2021

Int. j. Engl. stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Alice Munro published in 2012 her last collection of short stories, Dear Life, which includes “Finale”, a quartet of stories introduced by the author in semiautobiographical terms. The relevance of the themes addressed is, as may be inferred, significant in relation to her life and previous work. In fact, they echo her first two collections of short stories —Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971)— not only in motifs and events, but also in style. This paper analyses and compares this last section —Munro’s conclusive contribution to the literary world— with her early work to establish joint features and similarities in order to support and extend the often-claimed autobiographical dimension of Munro’s fiction from this unexplored perspective. In addition, this process of analogy has recognised the author’s literary and emotional closure in relation to her mother, a hitherto elusive endeavour in her work.

show abstract

Section: Closure: "Dear Life" and "The Peace Of Utrecht"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Before I Say Goodbye

Spillard

2021

Int. j. Engl. stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Munro's life-long preoccupation with the themes of degeneration, loss, and death may spring, in part, from her personal experience growing up as the child of an ailing mother in a poor farming family whose hopes for prosperity were dashed during the Depression. 31 As the child of a mother with Parkinson's disease, who also served as her mother's caregiver, Munro lived under the literal sign of degeneration and death. 'The Peace of Utrecht,' from Dance of the Happy Shades, constitutes Munro's most autobiographical account of her mother's illness.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro

Goldman

2020

EJLW

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the autobiographical stories of Nobel Prize award-winning author Alice Munro, questions of ontology and mortality are inextricably connected to matters of space and place. Fundamental existential dilemmas expressed in Munro’s corpus – signaled by the title of her second short story collection Who Do You Think You Are? – are linked to basic questions concerning orientation. Although autobiographical fiction frequently interweaves concerns about identity and deceased parents with recollections of ancestral spaces, as the literary critic Northrop Frye famously stated, the question ‘Where is here?’ is characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is now also fundamental to the epoch of the Anthropocene. Although critics frequently praise Munro for her skill in presenting haunting, epiphanic moments, she is less often credited for her far less conventional tendency to tell stories covering years, even decades. My paper explores Munro’s preoccupation with these vast temporal arcs and their impact on her recursive autobiographical fiction. I argue that Munro’s penchant for ‘return and revision’ in her non-fictional works affords an opportunity for her protagonists and, by extension, her readers to revisit and ponder ancestral connections and the non-human dimensions of existence, which include sublime geological features and deep time.

show abstract

Aging in the Short Story

Barry

2021

Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Caretakers Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Before I Say Goodbye

Before I Say Goodbye

Autobiography in the Anthropocene. A Geological Reading of Alice Munro

Aging in the Short Story

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About