Meneseteung

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

Meneseteung is a short story by Alice Munro from 1988 and 1990, which is considered the best known and most widely analyzed work of the author. The different versions of the story aroused interest and the title itself is ambiguous: it is presented in the story itself as the name of a legendary event at the mouth of the river in the area, but later directly associated with female menstruation as a "sign of hope".

Meneseteung is one of the author's most published works. In the volume Alice Munro's Best , the story in English has a length of 21 pages. Six sections of the story are labeled "I" - "VI" and each begin with a few lines of poetry, the seventh and last begins with "I looked for Almeda Roth in the graveyard". With only two sides, the last section is the shortest.

action

The story is about a fictional poet and outsider who lived and worked in the second half of the 19th century, Almeda Joynt Roth. By quoting from her poems and local newspaper reports and naming further possible clues, the first-person narrator, whose gender remains unclear, comments on the social conditions of the time and the living conditions of the poet, as he reconstructs and imagines her biography. The end of the story brings a self-critical turn and is open in retrospect and outlook. The story repeatedly breaks through levels of narrative and thus levels of meaning.

Interpretations

For the title, the subject and the name of the main character, Sabrina Francesconi suggests the following possible combinations: "Meneset (e) ung, Menace, Med (e) a" and she discusses some aspects in general, as well as on the topic of naming. The end of the story, according to Robert Thacker, leaves a hopeful signal in the version published in The New Yorker in 1988 . On the other hand, with the new conclusion of the 1990 version, essential elements are called into question. The effect of the new last section is greater than the importance of the content reference to details of the story in the story.

Editions and versions

"Meneseteung" was first published on January 11, 1988 in The New Yorker . In a more elaborated second version, the story is contained in: Friend of My Youth , 1990. It was also included in Selected Stories (1996), No Love Lost (2003) and Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories (2006). In German, the story is part of the collection Do you think it was love? Translated by Karen Nölle-Fischer, first published by Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart, 1991.

The two main differences between the first version from 1988 and the version from 1990 are that firstly two sentences have been added at the end of the sixth section. These comment on the content and style of the local newspaper, from which the news of Almeda Roth's death and, shortly thereafter, that of Jarvis Poulter, her neighbor, were quoted. Secondly, the new end of the second version has been developed in terms of content from a deleted half-sentence, which in the penultimate sentence of the first last section made up the second part: "They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken ", ( the text marked in this way has been deleted). The new ending follows the one in the first version and consists of five short sentences: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don't know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don't know if she ever made grape jelly. "

Secondary literature

Historic Menesetung Bridge

• Dennis Duffy, Too Little Geography; Too Much History: Writing the Balance in Meneseteung , in: (Eds.) Andrea Cabajsky, Brett Grubisic Josef, National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada , Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 197-213.
• Sabrina Francesconi, Negotiation of Naming in Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , ISSN  0294-0442 , n ° 55 (Autumn 2010).
• Tracy Ware, 'And They May Get It Wrong, After All': Reading Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: (Eds.) Andrea Cabajsky, Brett Grubisic Josef, National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada , Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010, pp. 67-79.
• Klaus P. Stich, Letting Go with the Mind: Dionysus and Medusa in Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: Canadian Literature , 2001 Summer; 169: 106-25.
• Gianfranca Balestra, Alice Munro as Historian and Geographer: A Reading of Meneseteung , in: (Eds.) Liana Nissim, Carlo Pagetti, Intersections: La narrativa canadese tra storia e geografia , Milan, Italy: Cisalpino, 1999, pp. 119–36 .
• Deborah Heller, Getting Loose: Women and Narration in Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth, in: Thacker, Robert (ed. And introd.), The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro . Toronto, ON: ECW, 1999, pp. 60-80. (From p. 70 on Meneseteung )
• Kathleen Wall, Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood's Giving Birth and Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: Canadian Literature , 1997 Autumn; 154: 74-90.
• Dermot McCarthy, The Woman out Back: Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , 1994; 19 (1): 1-19.
• Pam Houston: A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Munro's Meneseteung ' , in: The Kenyon Review (New Series) , Vol. 14, No. 4: 79-92 (1992).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles E. May, "About this Volume," 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 , p. X.
2. ↑ "Some stories by Alice Munro have been included in English-language collections more than three times, including" The Moons of Jupiter "(1977/1978)," The Progress of Love "(1985/1986)," Meneseteung "(1988/1990 ), "Differently" (1989/1990), "Carried Away" (1991/1994), "A Wilderness Station" (1992/1994), "The Albanian Virgin" (1994), "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" ( 1999/2001) and "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" (2001). "
3. ↑ Alice Munro: Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories. With an introduction by Margaret Atwood , XVIII, 509 pp., McClelland & Stewart, Toronto 2006, ISBN 978-0-7710-6520-0 , pp. 165-186.
4. ↑ "I went to look for Almeda Roth in the cemetery."
5. ↑ Sabrina Francesconi, Negotiation of Naming in Alice Munro's Meneseteung , in: Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , ISSN  0294-0442 , n ° 55 (Autumn 2010).
6. ^ Robert Thacker, Introduction, 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. 1-20, pp. 2-3.
7. ↑ Ligia Doina Constantinescu, On Some Hypostases of the Self in the English-Speaking (Multicultural) World of the Canadian Short Stories ( Memento of the original from January 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Language and Literature. European Landmarks of Identity , Vol 1, Iss 10, Pp 77-85 (2012), p. 84.