Alice Munro: Rehabilitating the fugitive, the hidden, the disregarded, the marginal, the disjunctive

Journée d’Études
CREA Centre de recherche en études anglophones EA370

Alice Munro: Rehabilitating the fugitive, the hidden, the disregarded, the marginal, the disjunctive
11 April 2014

Language faculty University of Paris Ouest Nanterre

international symposium on Alice Munro

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said that Alice Munro, the 82-yearol Canadian short-story writer, was a “master of the contemporary short story.” Alice Munro published her first collection of short stories in 1968, she then published thirteen more collections. Her career has stretched over 45 years — when her latest collection Dear Life was published in 2012, she announced it would be her last. The Nobel committee noted that the Canadian author’s “texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.” Munro’s art rehabilitates the disregarded, the fugitive, the hidden, the marginal while she also recalls / invokes literary myths (Demeter), British or Greek authors, Nordic Sagas, constantly challenging visions of what and where writers find inspiration. A geomancer (McGill), Munro never simply describes the Canadian Landscape in any realistic way, rather she uses it to illustrate her poetics.

9h30
welcome address by Claire Bazin & Marie-Claude Perrin -Chenour (FAAAM research group directors)

*Chair: Corinne Bigot
10h-10h20 Héliane Ventura (U. de Toulouse le Mirail) :
Hired Girl, Maid, Domestic Help: Figures of the Subaltern in ‘Sunday Afternoon’ (Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968), ‘Hired Girl’, (The View from Castle Rock, 2006), and ‘The Eye’ (Dear Life , 2012)

-10h20-10h40 Claire Omhovère (Université Paul Valéry—Montpellier 3 / EMMA) :
Stories in the Landscape Mode: a Reading of ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ (Dance of The Happy Shades), ‘Lichen’ (The Progress of Love) and ‘Meneseteung’ (The Love of A Good Woman)

Questions & coffee break

*Chair Christine Berthin
11H10-Christine Lorre (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) :
Generation Gaps, Sexuality and Religion in ‘Walking on Water’ and ‘Marrakesh’ (Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, 1974)
11h30-Jennifer Murray (Université de Franche Comté) :
Love, Desire, and Jouissance in ‘Eskimo’(The Progress of Love, 1986)
Questions

AFTERNOON 2pm-5.30pm
*Chair: Marie-Claude Perrin Chenour
14h-Corinne Bigot (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre/ CREA) : Female Bodies, Old Houses, Forsaken Objects and the Squalor of Tragedy in Ordinary Life : Reading Dance of the Happy Shades with later stories.
-14h20 Lynn Blin (Université Paul Valery, Montpellier III) Cadence and Dissonance in Alice Munro: ‘The Progress of Love’ (The Progress of Love, 1986), ‘Friend of My Youth’ (Friend of My Youth, 1990) & ‘Free Radicals’ (Too Much Happiness, 2009)
Questions

* Chair Claire Bazin
-15h Lucille Rouet Bentley ( U. de Toulouse)
“ ‘I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power’: When Secrets Become Weapons in ‘Before The Change”( The Love of a Good Woman, 1998)
-15h20. Eleanora Rao (University of Salerno, Italy)
“ ‘Home’ and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos” (The View from Castle Rock, 2006)
Questions Coffee Break

*Chair Héliane Ventura
-16h10 Christine Berthin (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre/ CREA)
“Of Wounds, Cracks and Pits : a Reading of Dear Life (2012)”
16h30 Mira Buchholtz (Nicolas Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)
“Alice Munro and Legacy Writing : a Reading of the Autobiographical Essays in Dear Life (2012)”
-Final questions and round table. Concluding remarks