ENGL 206, Lauren Porter03.20.14

ALICE MUNRO

Alice Munro• Born July 10th, 1931 in Wingham

Ontario to Anne and Robert Laidlaw.

• 1949-1951- Western University of Ontario, studying English

• 1951- Leaves University and marries James Munro, a fellow Student

• 1968- Dance of the Happy Shades published

• 1972- Marriage breaks up, she moves back to Ontario

• 1974-Writer in residence at University of Western Ontario

• 1976-Honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario. Marries Gerald Fremlin.

• 1980- Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, then at University of Queensland, Australia.

• Has won many awards. Most recently, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.

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Books

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• Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)

• Lives of Girls and Women (1971)

• Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)

• Who Do You Think You Are? (1978)

• Moons of Jupiter (1978)• The Progress of Love (1986)• Friend of My Youth (1990)• Open Secrets (1994)• Selected Stories (1996)• The Love of a Good Woman

(1998)• Hateship, Friendship,

Courtship, Love, Marriage (2001)

• Runaway (2004)• The View from Castle Rock

(2006)• Too Much Happiness (2009)• Dear Life (2012)

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

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“Material”• “Material” is a story about a woman who dredges up old memories of her writer ex-husband Hugo by reading one of his short story collections. She tries to come to terms with these feelings and tries to write a letter to Hugo to compliment him on his story, but her deeper, more unpleasant feelings spill onto the page instead. “Material” is about the choices women have to make in marriage, and the difficulties of dealing with incompatible partners.

“Tell Me Yes or No”• A married woman has an affair with a married man while they are both living in couple’s housing at university. When her lover moves away with his wife, they send letters back and forth, and those letters become the center of her world. When she reads about his death by a heart-attack in a newspaper, she goes to the town where he lives and finds his wife’s bookstore. The wife notices her and thinks she recognizes her, and gives the narrator a packet of letters that she didn’t write. She returns them to the wife and leaves back home. “Tell Me Yes or No” is about a woman coming to terms with the death of her lover, and what is real and what becomes unreal when memories are rewritten.

“The Ottawa Valley”• The story centers on one summer a girl spends with her mother and her extended family, as well as exploring how the narrator and her mother are finding out that the mother has Parkinson’s disease. The girl doesn’t understand at the time that her mother can’t control the outcome of her illness. The narrator tells this account of that summer to understand and to remember her mother and her illness, and to get rid of those memories, because she can’t seem to let them go. All the while building a better understanding and a deeper connection with the Ottawa Valley. This story is about remembering her mother and trying to come to terms with the past.

Ontario, Canada

http://www.greenfuels.org/uploads/crfaplants09-13_map_web.jpg Wingham, Ontario: https://goo.gl/maps/oSPv8

Ottawa Valley, Canada

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Craft Analysis• Language: dense, direct, un-ornamented, purposeful• Characterization: raw, flawed, done mostly through dialogue and narrator judgments, pulls you into the thought process of the character and what is most important to them• Sense of Place: Firmly set in Canada, done through character relationships with the land, through setting description (utilizing her language style)• Use of Point of View: first person (emotion, direct, confessional), third person (still connected with the characters, focus on story)• Use of Dialogue: characterization, purposeful, moving the plot forward• Summation: used to move the plot forward, take a step back and think

The End~!

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