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- Title
"Not a puzzle so arbitrarily solved" Queer Aesthetics in Alice Munro's Early Short Fiction.
- Authors
BRANDT, STEFAN L.
- Abstract
In this essay, I will argue that the short fiction of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro is permeated by what can be termed 'queer aesthetics' or 'queer sensibility.' By this, I mean a narrative awareness of identity and behavioral options that deviate from the norm. Recognizable in the composition of Munro's short stories, this sentience pinpoints what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning." The same fascination with ambiguity - and with the diversity of human behavior in general - can be found in some of Munro's most memorable protagonists, for example, the farm worker Herb Abbott in "The Turkey Season," who is described as being "kinder and more patient than most women." The complex constellation of desires and ambiguities in this story leads to the construction of what Munro herself has called "a queer bright moment" which, according to her, every short story needs. As Munro illustrates in "A Queer Streak," this kind of 'queerness' is not necessarily to be equated with homosexuality, although it may well include it. As I show in this essay, Munro uses the concept 'queer' as an allegory for the absurdities, oddities, and idiosyncrasies in life. The 'Other' in Munro's short fiction is thus often imbued with an enigma that marks the 'deviant' as the secret center of the story and, moreover, as a model of individual self-fashioning.
- Subjects
TURKEY Season, The (Short story); QUEER Streak, A (Short story); FRIEND of My Youth (Short story); MUNRO, Alice, 1931-2024; HOMOSEXUALITY in literature; OTHER (Philosophy) in literature; LGBTQ+ people in literature; CANADIAN fiction; 20TH century fiction
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien, 2016, Vol 36, Issue 1, p28
- ISSN
0944-7008
- Publication type
Literary Criticism