The Tumble Of Reason

Much Of The Critical Writing On The Fiction Of Alice Munro Has Explored And Emphasized Munro,s ,realism,But Her Stories Frequently Turn On What Has Been Left Out, They Are Rife With Unsent unfinished Letters, With Things People Mean To, But Do Not, Say Or TellAjay Heble,s Study Focuses On Munro,s Involvement With A,discourse Of Absence, And Suggests That Our Understanding Of These Texts Often Depends Not Only On What Happens In The Fiction, But Also On What Might Have HappenedMunro,s Stories Confer Their Meaning Not Simply By Referring To An Outer Reality, But Also By Bestowing Upon The Reader AStimulating Wealth Of Possibilities Taken From What We Might Call APotential Or Absent Level Of MeaningCharacteristically, They Articulate An Unresolvable Tension Between Variants On These Positions: Between, On The One Hand, Her Delineation Of ASurface Reality ?AWorld ,out There, Which We Are Invited To Recognize As Real And True ?And, On The Other, Her Involvement With ADiscourse Of Absence That Challenges The Very Conventions Within Which Her Fiction OperatesDrawing On Structuralist And Poststructuralist Theories Of Language And Its Relation To Meaning, Knowledge, And Systems Of Power, And On Theories Of Postmodernist Fiction, Heble Offers Both ACareful Reading Of Munro,s Stories And ATheoretical Framework For Reading Meanings In AbsenceHis Book Extends Recent Revisionist Analysis And Makes AValuable And Original Contribution To The Criticism On Munro.
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