The American Edition
Year 11 Literature - Unit 1 Course Work
This collection of stories is our first text for the year. Follow the following steps in developing interpretation.
1. Read through the stories carefully. It's a good idea to record your thoghts and impressions after each one, which will help keep them separate in your mind. Getting a good reading journal for use during the year would be a positive start.
2. Read the brief interview with Alice Munro HERE What's the most significant thing from that interview for you?
3. You wil each be allocated a particular story from the collection to present to the class. This oral presentation will introduce the story to the class and will include a summary of the story and the main events as well as some discussion of your opinion of the story and perhaps how it compares or contrasts with other stories in the collection.
Further Research
New York Times - Featured Writer - Alice Munro
A good site that contains some detailed reviews of Munro's earlier stories *****
Brief biography and photo of Alice Munro. **
A Conversation with Alice Munro
Brief, but interesting ***
Longish essay on Munro, including good quotes from her and specific references to 'Dance of the Happy Shades'.
Alice Munro as literary tease? Surely not!. I liked this comment:
'One remarkable feature of her work is how she appears to break some of the cardinal rules of short-story writing, how she can appear to be "loose" and drop in what look like irrelevancies, irrelevancies that presented to an editor by a less-gifted author, only slightly weaker, fractionally less polished, might easily be rejected as uncontrolled, off-theme, even "messy".' Definitely worth a read.
A bit of an amateurish fan page, but you can LISTEN to Alice Munro read her stories.
A brand new interview from the "New Yorker' where she discusses autobiography and much more.
Jezzle's Response to Alice Munro
Jessica, one of the students in my class, created these pages in response to the work of Alice Munro.
| It is hard to think of any great literature which does not have as a theme the relationship between women and men. The subject emerges, as if by accident, in almost every memorable story told. And if women with men, women against men, men against women, men and women without each other and all the cruel, ecstatic, jitterbugging combinations in between constitute essential matter for literature, there is no contemporary writer to have shaped it better (in English, at least) than Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro. |