Alice Munro

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Alice Munro

Alice Munro (born Alice Ann Laidlaw ; born July 10, 1931 in Wingham , Ontario ) is a Canadian writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature whose work includes more than 150 short stories . Alice Munro revolutionized the structure of short stories. The stories, which are characterized by linguistic fine-tuning, often begin at an unexpected point, then the story is developed chronologically backwards or forwards.

With her stories Munro ties in with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the short story and is often compared to Anton Chekhov , the Russian master of this form. Alice Munro is a best-selling author in Canada and English-speaking countries. She has received numerous prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 .

Life

Alice Munro grew up as the eldest of three siblings on a silver fox farm in Wingham between Toronto and Detroit in southern Ontario. When she was ten years old, her mother developed a rare form of Parkinson's disease . Between 1949 and 1951 Munro studied journalism on a scholarship at the University of Western Ontario . She broke off her studies for lack of money, married James Munro and gave birth to four daughters between 1953 and 1966. The second daughter died shortly after giving birth. In 1963 Alice and James Munro moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast and founded a bookstore there that still exists today. In 1972 Munro separated from her husband and in 1976 married the geographer Gerold Fremlin. The couple moved to a farm near Clinton , Ontario, and later to a house in Clinton. Fremlin died there in April 2013. Munro's eldest daughter, Sheila Munro, published her childhood memories in 2002 in Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro .

Career

Munro had started writing when he was a teenager. When she was 20 years old and still a student, her first short story , The Dimensions of a Shadow (1950), was published. Her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), critically acclaimed, won Canada's highest literary award, the Governor General's Award for Fiction .

In 1951 Munro first sold a short story to the influential editor and publicist Robert Weaver of the Canadian state broadcaster CBC / Radio-Canada . From 1953 she sold short stories to the magazines Mayfair , Chatelaine and Canadian and to the literary journals Queen's Quarterly and Tamarack Review . Many more have been added over the years. From the 1950s Munro gave author readings at CBC / Radio-Canada. Munro's career as a sought-after author began with the story “Peace of Utrecht” (1960). In 1968 Munro published her first collection in Vancouver and from 1969 her works were included in leading Canadian anthologies. Munro wrote some of the scripts for TV adaptations for the CBC / Radio-Canada. Munro began teaching at universities in 1972 and was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario from 1974/75. From 1977 most of her new works appear in The New Yorker , and from 1979 Munro has a first-reading agreement with the paper. In the 1980s, Alice Munro traveled around the world, initially in Brisbane in Australia. China followed in 1981, where she was a guest at the Chinese Writers' Association with six other Canadian writers , and then the Scandinavian countries. Even before 1990 Munro was awarded numerous prizes for her work.

Munro has so far published 14 volumes of short stories containing more than 150 short stories in English. There are also numerous short stories in magazines that have not yet been included in any collection. For her complete work, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as “master of the contemporary short story” . The award went to Canada for the first time and for the 13th time to a woman.

After the publication of her collection of short stories entitled Dear Life (2012; German: Liebes Leben ), Alice Munro announced the end of her literary activity. According to her own statement, there will be no more books of her after Dear Life , as she can no longer muster the energy that it takes to write. In the article “Alice Munro Puts Down Her Pen to Let the World In” published in July 2013 in the New York Times , she is quoted as saying: “There will be no more books after Dear Life […] I don't have the energy anymore […] it's very hard, and you get very tired […] I feel a bit tired now - pleasantly tired “[…] I feel that I've done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.

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Munro's stories are realistic, profound, unsentimental and often have an open ending. Marcela Valdes writes that Munro's characters are gripping because they - like real people - are full of inconsistencies, which Munro depicts with a technique that is reminiscent of pointillism : one brilliant scene after the next without attaching importance to chronology. “As a narrator, Alice Munro is what is called 'sophisticated'. Life may seem absurd, but nothing happens with her without meaning “, writes Gabriele Killert at the beginning of her review of the most recent volume in German, Too much luck . According to Ailsa Cox, Munro's entire work is characterized by a certain resistance to consoling certainties. Leah Hager Cohen writes that when you read, you breathe to the rhythm of others, you see other people's perspectives as if they were your own. Munro's narrative ability to arouse empathy in the reader is almost imperceptible. Alice Munro conjures up the culture of reading by placing discreet references to suffering and hope, especially when her characters pick up books, says Michael Braun. Thomas Steinfeld notes that almost all of the protagonists in Munro's Short Stories are women and that there are hardly any other male characters. Many of the characters live in precarious circumstances. In scenes and dialogues that appear ordinary, the uncanny of everyday life in a globalized world becomes visible. The paradoxical nature of experience is a familiar motif with Munro, which is often shown by ambiguous beginnings and conclusions, says Dennis Duffy. The political dimension is implicit and lies in the fact that human relationships are carefully explored, writes Christopher Schmidt and quotes publisher Jörg Bong from S. Fischer Verlag as saying that Munro embodies the paradox in her work of being able to tell the most complicated in a very simple way. Jörg Bong attests to Alice Munro's work size, wisdom, depth and modesty with a unique aura.

Munro's prose shows an enormous range, because on the one hand it is very close to the characters and at the same time immensely far away, at the top. In his review of the fourteenth and most recent volume Liebes Leben (2012) for Berliner Morgenpost , Elmar Krekeler suspects that the strong pull with which one is drawn into the stories comes from this range. After the first sentence you are stuck "like a fly on the adhesive film". The fictional world described by Munro feels so believable and inevitably “like hardly any other literary world”.

Canadian literary scholar Tim McIntyre writes that Munro's works are artfully combined with precise descriptions and a fundamental skepticism about language and representation. Movements between being separate, belonging together and being separated again create a feeling of being alive, a feeling of presence. A cathartic effect is brought about, but without the stories having a comforting end. McIntyre comes to this assessment in his introductory analysis of the short story " The Jupiter Moons ", one of the works with which Alice Munro achieved her international breakthrough around 1980.

In his November 2004 review of Runaway for The New York Times , Jonathan Franzen states that Munro's short stories are even more difficult to summarize than those of other authors. Nevertheless, he tries it out, using the example of " The Bear Came Over the Mountain ", a work from 1999 and 2001, which became widely known mainly through the film adaptation of Sarah Polley , from the volume Heaven and Hell . Franzen first gives a summary as it can be read almost everywhere, and after describing the next lower layer of the work, he explains that he actually only wanted to quote for the third level in order to do justice to the complexity of the work.

As the first work in her books, Munro often chooses a framework narrative that focuses on two of her main themes, namely the activity of reading and writing and the importance of storytelling, notes Robert Lecker. At the beginning of his contribution about the story " Carried Away " it is said that this is about reading and writing as historically conditioned actions. This story addresses the fact that reading and writing influence people in how they define themselves in relation to their social environment and to their own present.

"Alice never wants to be very obvious about the endings of her stories", Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano stated at the VQR Symposium 2006 about Munro's work and gave some details about how Munro revised their narratives. In Runaway (2004), for example, she worked the most on the endings of “Silence”, “Powers” ​​and “Tricks”, and Munro created eight versions of “Powers” ​​alone. When asked if she wanted to reread the galley proofs, Munro said: “No, because I'll rewrite the stories.” An example of how Munro makes formulations more concise when revising is a passage from her work “White Dump ”, where the beginning of the third paragraph in the 1986 magazine version reads:“ On the morning of Laurence's birthday Isabel drove into Aubreyville in the morning to get the cake. ”In the book version of the same year it became:“ Isabel drove into Aubreyville in the morning to get the birthday cake. ”Another example can be found in Munro's story“ Post and Beam ”, section 2; Here the magazine version from 2000 is marked in square, the book version from 2001 in italics: “In front of them was a deep ditch called Dye Creek because [the water that ran in it was] it used to run water colored by the dye from the knitting factory . "

effect

Film culture

Munro's collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) is the background inspiration for Pedro Almodóvar's film Torn Hugs (2011) and the protagonist of his film The Skin I Live in (2011) reads Munro's collection Runaway (2004). Almodóvar's film Julieta is loosely based on three short stories from the Runaway collection .

In research

Research literature on her works has been available since the early 1970s. In 2003/2004 the trade journal Open Letter brought out. Canadian quarterly review of writing and sources an issue with 14 articles on Munro's work, the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle devoted a special issue to Alice Munro's short stories in autumn 2010 and in May 2012 the scientific journal Narrative published five analysis articles on a single work by Munro, namely on the short story " Passion " (2004).

Most published works

Munro's most important works before 2003 include those that were later included twice or more in the author's English-language collections:

Works that have been made readable online in English free of charge are also important for the effect. Sometimes, however, the accessibility is restricted again after a short time - as was shown in the example of the story “Voices” (2012), which is no longer online for free at the Telegraph .

Works

Between 1968 and 2012, Alice Munro published 14 collections of short stories.

In addition, at least these five anthologies have been published:

There is also in German

Film adaptations (selection)

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Janice Fiamengo, Gerald Lynch Eds .: Alice Munro's Miraculous Art. Critical Essays. University of Ottawa Press, 2017
  • Katrin Berndt, with Jennifer Henke: Love, Age, and Loyalty in Alice Munro's ' The Bear Came Over the Mountain ' and Sarah Polley 's "Away from Her." In: Care Home Stories: Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Residential Care. Ed . Sally Chivers, Ulla Kriebernegg. Transcript Verlag , Bielefeld 2017, pp. 197-218
  • Isla Duncan, Alice Munro's Narrative Art , Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011 ISBN 978-0-230-33857-9 , ebook ISBN 978-1-137-00068-2
  • Grand Master of the Short Story. Alice Munro, narrator from Canada , cover story from Literatures: The Magazine for Readers , Volume 12, Issue 4, 2011, pp. 26–43. With contributions by Margaret Atwood , Ingo Schulze and Frauke Meyer-Gosau. Among others: Ingo Schulze, Frauke Meyer-Gosau, almost a feeling of perfection. A conversation with Ingo Schulze about world literature and world success, revolution and convention and the peculiarity of the stories by Alice Munro , pp. 41–43
  • Robert Thacker: Alice Munro: writing her lives; a biography. Emblem, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, Ont. 2011, ISBN 978-0-7710-8510-9
  • Cathy Moulder (Ed.): Alice Munro. An annotated bibliography of works and criticism compiled by Carol Mazur . Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md. 2007, ISBN 978-0-8108-5924-1
  • Coral Ann Howells: Alice Munro. Manchester University Press, Manchester et al. 2007 ISBN 978-0-7190-4559-2
  • Judith Maclean Miller, Deconstructing Silence: The Mystery of Alice Munro, in: Antigonish Review 129 (Spring 2002), 43-52. (Study of intertextual references between Munro's three stories "Walker Brothers Cowboy" (1968), "Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You" (1974) and " Save the Reaper " (1998).)
  • JoAnn McCaig, Reading In. Alice Munro's archives , Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario 2002, XVII, 193 S., ISBN 0-88920-336-9 Table of Contents (This is a sociologically oriented study that traces with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus how Munro relied on the short story genre to be successful.)
  • The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, ECW Press, Toronto, 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5
  • Louis K. MacKendrick, Some other reality: Alice Munro's Something I've been meaning to tell you. ECW Press, Toronto 1993, ISBN 1-55022-129-9
  • Walter Rintoul Martin: Alice Munro: paradox and parallel . University of Alberta Press , Edmonton 1987

Web links

Commons : Alice Munro  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Julie Bosmans: Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature. In: The New York Times. October 10th, 2013
  2. ↑ In spring 2013 Lisa Dickler Awano formulated it as follows: "Her continual innovation in short-story structure has expanded our understanding of what the form can achieve." An Interview With Alice Munro , Lisa Dickler Awano, Virginia Quarterly Review , Spring 2013.
  3. ^ Nobelprize.org: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 , accessed October 10, 2013.
  4. ↑ Gerald Fremlin (obituary). In: Clinton News-Record. April 2013, accessed October 11, 2013
  5. ↑ Louis K. MacKendrick, Chronology , in: Some other reality: Alice Munro's Something I've been meaning to tell you. ECW Press, Toronto 1993 ISBN 1-55022-129-9 , pp. 9-11
  6. ↑ Canadian writer Alice Munro receives Nobel Prize for Literature. Great drama from tight quarters , Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 10, 2013, accessed on October 11, 2013
  7. ↑ Cf. Reingard M. Nischik : Alice Munro: Nobel Prize Winning Master of the Short Story from Canada. , Journal for English and American Studies, 62, no. 4, November 2014, pp. 359–377, here p. 364. Full text
  8. ↑ Marcela Valdes: Some Stories Have to Be Told by Me: A Literary History of Alice Munro. In: The Virginia Quarterly Review. VQR Symposium on Alice Munro. Summer 2006, pp. 82-90.
  9. ↑ Gabriele Killert: Stories about people in a state of emergency. Alice Munro: "Too much luck", Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt , dradio.de , November 2, 2011, last accessed on November 14, 2013.
  10. ↑ Ailsa Cox, “Age could be her Ally: Late Style in Alice Munro's To Much Happiness ”, in: Alice Munro , edited by Charles E. May, Salem Press, Ipswich, Massachusetts 2013, ISBN 978-1-4298- 3722-4 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-4298-3770-5 (ebook) table of contents , pp. 276-290, p. 277.
  11. ↑ Leah Hager Cohen, Alice Munro's Object Lessons , nytimes.com , November 27, 2009, last accessed November 14, 2013.
  12. ↑ Michael Braun, "Too much luck". Alice Munro receives the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature , kas.de , October 10, 2013.
  13. ↑ Thomas Steinfeld: How amazing, how terrible. Why the ordinary is always the uncanny and how good stories are created in the process: Canadian Alice Munro receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . October 11, 2013, p. 11.
  14. ^ Dennis Duffy, "A Dark Sort of Mirror": "The Love of a Good Woman" as Pauline Poetic, In: The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, ECW Press, Toronto, 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , pp. 169-190.
  15. ↑ Christopher Schmidt: Simply tell about the most complicated. The German publishers of the Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro hope that the short story will be upgraded. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . October 11, 2013, p. 14.
  16. ↑ Elmar Krekeler, Message in a Bottle for Therapists. In her new book "Liebes Leben", Alice Munro tells life stories, Berliner Morgenpost , December 13, 2013, No. 340, p. 31.
  17. ↑ Tim McIntyre, “The Way the Stars Really Do Come Out at Night”. The Trick of Representation in Alice Munro's “The Moons of Jupiter” , in: Canadian Literature 200 / Spring 2009, pp. 73-88.
  18. ↑ Jonathan Franzen: 'Runaway': Alice's Wonderland , nytimes.com , November 14, 2004.
  19. ^ Robert Lecker, Machines, Readers, Gardens: Alice Munro's Carried Away , in: The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro , edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto, ECW; 1999, pp. 103-127.
  20. ↑ An Appreciation of Alice Munro , by Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano, Compiler and Editor. In: The Virginia Quarterly Review . VQR Symposium on Alice Munro. Summer 2006, pp. 102-105.
  21. ↑ Regarding version differences according to sections, at least the following stories are worth mentioning: " Home " (1974/2006), " Save the Reaper " (1998/1998), " The Bear Came Over the Mountain " (1999/2001), " Passion " ( 2004/2004), and " Wenlock Edge " (2005/2009).
  22. ↑ "White Dump" was published in German with the title "Weißer Abfall" (white waste), in Munro's collection of short stories The moon over the ice rink (1989), see also the list of short stories by Alice Munro
  23. ^ "Post and Beam" was published in German with the title "Pfosten und Bohlen" in Munro's collection of short stories Heaven and Hell (2004).
  24. ↑ Pilar Somacarrera: A Spanish Passion for the Canadian Short Story: Reader Responses to Alice Munro's Fiction in Web 2.0 Open Access , in: Made in Canada, Read in Spain: Essays on the Translation and Circulation of English-Canadian Literature Open Access , edited by Pilar Somacarrera, de Gruyter, Berlin 2013, pp. 129-144, p. 143, ISBN 978-83-7656-017-5
  25. ↑ The earliest recorded dissertation on Munro's work is from 1972. See JR (Tim) Struthers, Some Highly Subversive Activities: A Brief Polemic and a Checklist of Works on Alice Munro , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 06, Number 1 (1981).
  26. ↑ See List of short stories by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia
  27. ↑ About Read 18 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro Free Online, October 10th, 2013 , openculture.com . (There are two more stories listed in this source that require free registration; they are omitted here.)
  28. ^ "Boys and Girls" (1968)
  29. ^ "Queenie" (1998) The book version has a new ending.
  30. ^ "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999, even if "2013" is indicated), a less elaborated version compared to the 2001 collection
  31. ^ "Runaway" (2003)
  32. ↑ "Passion" (2004)
  33. ^ "The View from Castle Rock" (2005)
  34. ^ "Wenlock Edge" (2005)
  35. ↑ "Home" (2006)
  36. ↑ "Dimension" (2006)
  37. ↑ "Face" (2008)
  38. ↑ "Free Radicals" (2008)
  39. ^ "Deep Holes" (2008)
  40. ↑ "Wood" (1980? / 2009?) ( Memento from November 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  41. ^ "Corrie" (2010)
  42. ↑ "Dear Life" (2011)
  43. ↑ "Gravel" (2011)
  44. ↑ "Train" (2012)
  45. ↑ "Amundsen" (2012)
  46. ↑ See the listing of all short stories List of short stories by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia .
  47. ↑ It doesn't always have to be rat poison - Early Tales by Canadian Master Alice Munro. Review, in: nzz.ch , May 22, 2012, accessed on June 9, 2012.
  48. ↑ 1980 came this volume under the title The Beggar Maid. Stories of Flo & Rose on the shortlist for the Booker Prize for Fiction ; a big exception because it wasn't a novel but short stories.
  49. ↑ Manuela Reichart: Canadian stories: "The Jupiter moons" by Alice Munro. With skin and hair , review, in: zeit.de , August 14, 1987.
  50. ↑ Gabriele Killert: Stories about people in a state of emergency , review, in: dradio.de , November 2, 2011.
  51. ↑ Alan Cheuse, Dear Life , in: npr.org , November 19, 2012, accessed November 20, 2012.
  52. ↑ Among other things with the four stories from Finale , according to karl-heinz.lampert, "Moments that change everything", in: Darmstädter Echo , December 11, 2013.
  53. ↑ Honorary Members: Alice Munro. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 16, 2019 .
Works by Alice Munro


Volumes
(chronological)

Dance of the blessed spirits (1968, German 2010) • Small prospects (1971, German 1983) • What I've always wanted to tell you (1974, German 2012) • The beggar girl. Stories by Flo and Rose (1978, German 1981) • The moons of Jupiter (1982, German 1986) • The moon over the ice rink (1986, German 1989) • Do you think it was love? (1990, German 1991) • Open Secrets (1994, German 1996) • The Love of a Woman (1998, German 2000) • Heaven and Hell (2001, German 2004) • Tricks (2004, German 2006) • Why do you want to know that? (2006, German 2008) • Too much luck (2009, German 2011) • Liebes Leben (2012, German 2013)

Individual works
selection (alphabetical)

Farewell to Maverly • Age of Faith • Amundsen • Runaways • Carried Away • Corrie • Cortes Island • Home • The Eye • The Office • The Bear Climbed Over the Mountain • The Wenlock Ridge • The Albanian Virgin • Differently • The Lives of Girls and women • The Valley of Ottawa • The Peace of Utrecht • The Walker Brothers cowboy • The view from the castle rock • The moons of Jupiter • A woman's love • Dimensions • An outpost in the wilderness • Only the reapers • Tales • Free radicals • Girlfriend from my youth • Hates me, likes me, loves me, wedding • homestead • reach Japan • Jakarta • boys and girls • gravel • passion • love life • some women • meneseteung • Miles City, Montana • with lake view • night • Oh, What Avails • Oranges and Apples • Pictures of the Ice • Posts and Planks • Queenie • Simon's Luck • Voices • Butterfly Day • The Children's Stay • The Progress of Love • The Turkey Season • Deep Holes • Van dalen • What I always wanted to tell you • What will stay in your memory • White waste • Why do you want to know that? • Train

The titles of the works are given in English if the work is not available in German or the title has not yet been found.
personal data
SURNAME Munro, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Laidlaw, Alice Ann (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Wingham , Ontario , Canada