Escaping flimsy formal cages : Alice Munro's Too much happiness as fictionalised biography

Vol.37,No.2(2011)

Éva Zsizsmann

https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2011-2-15

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/118150

• Abstract
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Abstract

This paper travels along the border of different value systems, reading the title story of Munro's latest short story collection Too Much Happiness (2009) as a text about travelling and trading knowledge in 19th-century Europe. It aims to examine the discourse of displacement, the clash of different value systems and the way in which travel implies both gains and losses. The narrator of Too Much Happiness, Sophia Kovalevsky, a 19th-century Russian mathematician, goes to Sweden, at that time the only country willing to hire a female professor for their new university. The text is an elliptical historical fiction and a spiritual travelogue. My paper discusses the ways in which Munro's text relates to tropes of home and mobility and deals with the role of silence and gaps, the discourse of absence. It also focuses on a characteristic feature of Munro's storytelling: crossing the borders between history, personal memoir and fiction.

Keywords:
Alice Munro; travel; displacement; fictionalised biography; 19th-century Europe; place and memory

Pages:
201–210

References

Caplan, Nina (2009) ' The Truth of a Life' (Rev. Of Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro). New Statesman. 31 August 2009. < http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/08/munro-story-life-women-fiction>.

Enright, Anne (2009) ' Come to Read Alice, Not to Praise Her'. The Globe and Mail. 28 August 2009. < http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/too-much-happiness-by-alice-munro/article1268202/>.

Gorra, Michael (2009) ' Mortal Fear. Love and Death, History and Destiny: The Late Mastery of Alice Munro'. The Times Literary Supplement, 21–28 August 2009. 3–4.

Hiscock, Andrew (1997) ' "Longing for a Human Climate": Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth and the Culture of Loss'. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32(2), 17–34. | DOI 10.1177/002198949703200203

McGill, Robert (2002) ' Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro's Open Houses'. Mosaic 35(4), 103–119.

McIntyre Tim (2009) ' The Way the Stars Really Do Come Out at Night: The Trick of Representation in Alice Munro's The Moons of Jupiter'. Canadian Literature 200, 73–88.

Munro, Alice (2009) Too Much Happiness. London: Chatto & Windus.

Oates, Joyce Carol (2009) ' Who Do You Think You Are?' The New York Review of Books. 3 December 2009. 42–44.

Phillips, Anne (2007) Multiculturalism without Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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