Distant parts of the self : narrative fracture and the critique of the feminine subject in selected stories for Alice Munro's "Open secrets" and the "Love of a good woman"
Date
2003
Authors
Cecil, Cynthia Jane
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Abstract
This study discusses the short stories "A Wilderness Station," "The Love of A Good Woman," "Open Secrets," "Carried Away" and "My Mother's Dream" by Alice Munro in order to demonstrate how their subversion of linear narrative is related to the challenge of constructing the possibilities of a feminine subjectivity. In these stories, fragmented narrative structures represent the self as dual, both cuJturally defined and as different from the cultural prescription. An introductory chapter places these ideas in the context of W.H. New's fragmentation theory of the short story form as a "system of fracture" and Julia Kristeva's theory of a signifying practice that posits a "questionable subject in process/on trial," as well as Linda Hutcheon's theories of postmodernist fiction. Subsequent chapters relate the fragmented and disrupted forms to the critical concepts of the epistolary narrative, the gaze, and Freud's concept of the uncanny.