Alice Munro and ‘Alternate Realities’

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Kluge

AbstractThe critical discussion of Alice Munro’s short stories began under the heading of realism but has moved on to recognize her combination of the ordinary with the amazing. This has continued to move towards the exploration of ‘alternate realities’ in human life which may lead to double or multiple lives of originally single characters in the same story. This division does not happen in Gothic fantasy but in Munro’s ordinary and commonplace (fictional) reality.

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-97
Author(s):  
Shruti Das ◽  
Deepshikha Routray

This paper argues that difficult relationships in human life followed by memories, introspection, retrospection, foreshadow, flashback, and awful remembrances are coloured by pain and trauma. Unresolved trauma affects the way one perceives others and oneself in relation to others, which has a significant impact on relationships and often results in behaviour that is not conducive to healthy relationships. Complicated, disordered feelings and distressing emotions that give rise to anxiety find an expression in relationships, either overtly or covertly. This paper will focus on how the characters, suffering from anxiety due to stressed relationships, in the short stories in The Progress of Love, written by Alice Munro, employ defence mechanisms to repress their trauma and project a different version of themselves as responsible individuals who are capable of leading a normal life. The dialectic of trauma covertly present in the narrative will be unravelled using Judith Herman’s theory of trauma. Further, this analysis will investigate and foreground how the underlying trauma finds indirect expression in complicated relationships.


Jurnal KATA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 89
Author(s):  
Nanny Sri Lestari

<p>Sebuah peristiwa, dalam kehidupan manusia, dapat menjadi inspirasi bagi penulisan sebuah cerita. Pengarang, sebagai bagian dari masyarakatnya, mengangkat relung-relung kehidupan manusia, ke dalam sebuah cerita. Namun harus dipahami, bahwa pengalaman pengarang dalam kehidupannya sehari-hari, juga mempengaruhi subjek yang ditulisnya. Saat ini tidak dapat dipungkiri lagi, bahwa teknologi komunikasi yang sangat canggih, telah mempengaruhi perkembangan karya sastra. Media penulisan karya sastra, tidak lagi melalui media cetak seperti kertas tetapi sudah melalui peralatan modern yang sesuai jamannya. Namun demikian ragam karya sastra prosa, seperti cerita pendek, justru mampu mengisi ruang media kommunikasi tersebut. Dua orang pengarang, yang menulis cerita pendek di media masa, berusaha mengangkat isu tentang lingkungan. Isu yang diangkat, lebih menekankan kepada masalah lingkungan alam dengan mengangkat isu tentang pohon sebagai bagian dari kehidupan manusia. Tujuan penelitian ini, untuk menelusuri struktur cerita pendek yang mengangkat isu lingkungan dalam jalinan ceritanya. Untuk memenuhi tujuan penelitian, langkah awal dari penelitian ini, adalah melakukan pendekatan struktur cerita, yang kemudian dikaitkan dengan pencarian makna cerita tersebut. Sering sekali di balik sebuah cerita ada pesan yang ingin disampaikan kepada masyarakat pembacanya. Bentuk pesan tersebut tersirat, dalam jalinan struktur cerita pendek tersebut. Pesan yang disampaikan, dalam kedua cerita pendek tersebut,  adalah pesan tentang lingkungan alam, yang  saat ini tidak pernah diperhatikan oleh masyarakat. Dengan alasan, kebutuhan ekonomi yang sangat dominan.</p><p><em>An event, in human life, can be an inspiration for writing a story. The author, as a part of his society, lifts the niches of human life, into a story. But it must be understood, that the author's experience in everyday life, also affects the subject he wrote.</em><em> </em><em>Today it is undeniable, that highly sophisticated communication technology, has influenced the development of literary works. Media writing literature, no longer through print media such as paper but have been through modern equipment that fit his era.</em><em> </em><em>However, the variety of prose literary works, such as short stories, is able to fill the media space communications. Two authors, who write short stories in the mass media, try to raise issues about the environment. Issues raised, more emphasis on the issue of the natural environment by raising the issue, about the tree as part of human life. The purpose of this research, is to trace the structure of short stories, which raised environmental issues in the composition of the story. To fulfill the purpose of research, the first step of this research, is to approach the structure of the story, which is then linked with the search for the meaning of the story. Very often, behind a story, there is a message to be conveyed to the readers. The form of the message is implied, in the composition of the short story structure. The message conveyed, in both short stories, is a message about the natural environment, which today is never noticed by society. The message conveyed, in both short stories, is a message about the natural environment, which today is never noticed by society.</em></p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 241-248
Author(s):  
Faiha Fakhari Mousa Alkayed

The paper presents a discussion of three selected short stories written by Leo Tolstoy namely: “God Sees the Truth but Wait, Three Questions, and What Men Live By”. Thus, the aim of this paper is to reveal the social consciousness as appeared in such literary kind because awareness plays an important role in people's lives and all our lives are built on the awareness of things. However, it has been noticed that this work of Leo Tolstoy mirrors awareness of traditional and modern values and have thematic varieties, deep insight into human realities and characters. The stories of Leo Tolstoy represent an authentic and real picture of human life which considered being a convincing story.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Arijit Chakraborty

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the first non-European and the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was awarded the prize for Gitanjali. Tagore was a multi-faceted personality who not only composed poems, verses, short stories, novels etc but also sketched and painted with equal brilliance. As a flag-bearer, he presented the best of India to the West and vice-versa. In Breezy April, Tagore combines romanticism with spiritualism. On the other hand, Anita Desai (born-1937) is the youngest among the women novelists of eminence in India. The spiritual aspect of human life is at the centre of attention in her works. Women protagonists of fragile exterior and strong interior take the lead in Anita Desai’s works of fiction. Spirituality is an integral part of most of her works. In her first novel Cry, the Peacock (1963), Desai minutely depicts both love as well as deep spiritual intricacies.


PARADIGM ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Agung Kusuma

<p class="15" align="justify">Literature plays an important role in psychological and social development of a child. Literature stimulates children<span style="font-family: Calibri;">’</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">s imagination and sharpens their awareness of the world around them. It teaches our children about values, norms, equity, and firmly establishes the qualities of tolerance, compassion, sharing, caring, and ability to solve conflict. Therefore, it is undeniably important to shed a light on what our children read as they will project what they read in stories through their behavior. Using a post-colonial discourse, the writer put forward a well elaborate analysis and findings of magical realism study on JK Rowling</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">’</span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">s short stories </span><em>The Tales of Beedle the Bard</em>. Moreover, the analysis focuses on how magical object describing the magical realism aspects is depicted as a part of human life and how it brings affects for the child readers. </p>


1991 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Allen

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. (Foucault [SP, 224])According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power asWille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-325
Author(s):  
Pilar Somacarrera

In his introduction to Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature, Michael Gardiner argues for bringing together these two separate bodies of texts which are intimately joined. Within the context of the “‘postcolonial’ spaces of Scotland and Canada” (Gittings, 1995: 135), in this article I offer a comparative reading from the standpoint of Sara Ahmed’s affect theory of the post-millennial short stories of A. L. Kennedy and Alice Munro, based on their shared belief in a transatlantic new humanism which privileges emotions.


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