Small prospects

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

Small prospects. A Novel by Girls and Women (originally Lives of Girls and Women , 1971) is Alice Munro's second collection of short stories. A German translation by Hildegard Petry was first published in 1983 by Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart. In the most recent edition of the Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag 2006, the collection has a total of 362 pages.

The main character Del Jordan consists of narrative struggles and repeated crises. Initially inclined to see two separate worlds, it turns out in the course of the collection that the boundaries are fluid and a decision for one of the two sides is neither possible nor sensible, according to Rae McCarthy MacDonald (1978) in an analysis the collection that says the volume is in the form of a novel . Jeremy Lalonde (2004) describes the volume as a “short story sequence”.

Works included

• The Flats Road

How the storyteller and father's collaborator, Uncle Benny, ate lunch in the family of the teenage narrator, got a wife, and couldn't find her daughter. "But what was crystal clear to my mother was obviously hazy and terrifying to Uncle Benny." "So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling distorting reflection, the same but never at all the same."

• Heirs of the Living Body

Two aunts of the young first-person narrator change after the brother they look after dies, who had an office and whose funeral does not go well. Like the impersonal way in which the uncle had expressed his judgments about her, allowing her freedom, and how she later came to understand that freedom is not as easy to attain as it seemed to her from her bite into a cousin's forearm was. How close together there can be politeness and quick-witted malice, and remorse and immaculate contentment.

• Princess Ida (Princess Ida)

The self-employed mother in the field during the war rents a house in town and has to deal with comments from the sisters and the youngest brother, who unexpectedly drives over from Ohio with his new young wife, which turns out to be a farewell visit. What observations the young first-person narrator makes on the relationship between the sexes. In her article on this work (2010), Jennifer Murray quotes a passage from an interview with Munro in 1994 in which Munro says, as she realized while writing this story, that it would not be a novel but a series of narratives.

• Age of Faith

The young first-person narrator tries to find out what is true of the Christian faith through conversations, small tests and logical experiments and is amazed: “I couldn't get it straight.” The mother's statement “God was made by man! Not the other way around! ”Puts it to the test and on a Good Friday goes in search of a true believer,“ a true believer, on whom I could rest my doubts ”. She has already decided to leave out the pastor : "I preferred to believe his grasp was good, and not try it out". She finds paradoxes and cannot help wondering: "But why - I could not stop this thinking though I knew it could bring me no happiness - why would God hate anything that He had made? If He was going to hate it, why make it? " One day the family's old dog unexpectedly starts to kill sheep at the neighbour's house and is said to be shot. She tests what her little brother, who does not want his dog to be killed, thinks of praying : "I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life." She watches him pray and comes to the conclusion: " Seeing somebody have faith, close up, is no easier than seeing someone chop a finger off. "

• Changes and Ceremonies
• Lives of Girls and Women
• Baptism
• [missing in German] (Ally and Lizzy)
• Epilogue: The Photographer

Research literature

• Sharmila Kulkarni, Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women . A Devitation from Conventional Canadian Short Story , in: Indian Streams Research Journal , Vol II, Iss XII, Pp 1763 (January 2013)
• Jennifer Murray, “Like the Downflash of a Wing or Knife”: Repression, Sublimation, and the Return of the Repressed in Alice Munro's Princess Ida , in: Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , n ° 55 (Autumn 2010).
• Lee Garner and Jennifer Murray, From Participant to Observer: Theatricality as Distantiation in “Royal Beatings” and “Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Munro , in: Journal of the Short Story in English , 51 (Autumn 2008).
• Jennifer Murray, “Aux difformes et aux légèrement dérangés”: la figure du grotesque comme moyen d'accès au désordre du refoulé dans trois nouvelles d'Alice Munro , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 33, Number 1 (2008).
• Andrew Lesk, Playing the Parts: The 'corps morcelé' in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 32, Number 1 (2007).
• Magdalene Redekop, Alice Munro and the Scottish Nostalgic Grotesque , in: The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , pp. 21-43.
• Katherine J. Mayberry, Narrative Strategies of Liberation in Alice Munro , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 19, Number 2 (1994).
• Rae McCarthy Macdonald: Structure and detail in Lives of girls and women. In: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne , Vol. 3, 1978.
• Heliane Daziron, Alice Munro's The Flats Road , in: Canadian Woman Studies / Les Cahiers de la Femme , 1984 Fall; 6 (1): 103-104.
• Lorraine M. York, "The Other Side of Dailiness": The Paradox of Photography in Alice Munro's Fiction , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 08, Number 1 (1983).
• WR Martin, The Strange and the Familiar in Alice Munro , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 07, Number 2 (1982).
• Helen Hoy, "Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable": Paradox and Double Vision In Alice Munro's Fiction , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 05, Number 1 (1980).
• Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Calling Back the Ghost of the Old-time Heroine: Duncan, Montgomery, Atwood, Laurence, and Munro , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 04, Number 1 (1979 ).
• Monaghan, David, Confinement and escape in Alice Munro's The Flats Road , in: Studies in Short Fiction (14) 1977, 165-168.

Web links

• Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women , mookseandgripes.com . A series of readings on the works in the volume Lives of Girls and Women , in English, which has been running since September 11, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See also the information in the table of the detailed list of short stories by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia
2. ^ Rae McCarthy Macdonald: Structure and detail in Lives of girls and women. In: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne , Volume 3, 1978. Allan B. Weiss (1988) writes “Alice Munro - Because she calls it a novel I have omitted Lives of Girls and Women , which could easily be classified a short story collection ", in: A comprehensive bibliography of English-Canadian short stories, 1950–1983 , ISBN 0-920763-67-7 , p. 72.
3. ↑ Jeremy Lalonde, Narrative Community in Edna Alford's A Sleep Full of Dreams , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 29, Number 2 (2004).
4. ↑ See also: Alice Munro: “The Flats Road” , mookseandgripes.com , September 18, 2013
5. ↑ See also: Alice Munro: “Heirs of the Living Body” , mookseandgripes.com , October 8, 2013
6. ^ "Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form", quoted by Jennifer Murray, "Like the Downflash of a Wing or Knife": Repression, Sublimation, and the Return of the Repressed in Alice Munro's Princess Ida , in: Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , n ° 55 (Autumn 2010), paragraph 2.
7. ↑ See also Alice Munro: “Princess Ida” , mookseandgripes.com , November 29, 2013
8. ↑ See also Alice Munro: "Age of Faith" , mookseandgripes.com , January 16, 2014
9. ↑ The work Ally and Lizzy is missing in later English-language editions.