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Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes

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Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism ((PSATLC))

Abstract

This chapter approaches landscape writing in Alice Munro’s short fiction from an ethical and phenomenological perspective, namely one that envisions landscape as a milieu rather than as a set of pictorial or poetic conventions that aestheticize space. Munro’s landscapes are not meant to be viewed, but rather to be experienced. They originate in the singular coincidence of a voice with the environment, but also in the interactions that bind human lives to the place they inhabit, no matter how precariously. Fully participating in the stories’ ambiguous epiphanies, Munro’s landscapes hold exacting lessons for characters and readers alike as they decipher the traces of an intimate geography.

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Correspondence to Claire Omhovère .

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Omhovère, C. (2018). Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes. In: DeFalco, A., York, L. (eds) Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_9

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