Collection(s) : Collection CNED-PUF
Paru le 22/10/2014 | Broché 164 pages
Agrégation
A master of the short story genre, Alice Munro is also a literary stylist, which her debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, amply demonstrates. Her typical setting is her native southwestern Ontario, yet her stories are anything but prosaic. Munro has been said to defamiliarize the familiar ; she reveals the dazzle of outdoors but through the lightning cracks in the drawn-down blinds, also conjures up shadows, disquieting figures, or Gothic mother figures. She probes into patterns of exclusion or intrusion, and often conveys a sense of entrapment. Yet her text exudes a paradoxical sense of freedom as she makes the art of the short story her own. Writing from within, straying from dramatic descriptions, she depicts a landscape which is part sunlight, part shadows, and is always a mindscape. She describes lives of girls and women, exploring the haunting tensions between mothers and daughters, negotiating boundaries. Playing on intertextual scraps which she sews into the fabric of her stories, she seeks to reveal life's little ironies.
Corinne Bigot is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. A specialist of Canadian literature, she is the author of a monograph entitled Alice Munro. Les silences de la nouvelle (PUR) and has published several articles on Munro's stories.
Catherine Lanone is a professor of British Literature at the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She has published books on Emily Brontë and E.M. Forster, and articles on Virginia Woolf, Jane Urquhart and Emily Carr.
