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Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the
representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's
writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories
powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary
studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies,
disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays
offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon
reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated
in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder,
instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and
ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's
fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative
identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and
rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics,
ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays
make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of
everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical
encounters we engage again and again.
Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the
representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's
writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories
powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary
studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies,
disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays
offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon
reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated
in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder,
instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and
ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's
fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative
identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and
rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics,
ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays
make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of
everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical
encounters we engage again and again.
Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' -
the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that
address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately
vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human
relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy
shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence
on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making
it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin
in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative
fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their
imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing
for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied,
embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care
between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones,
nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits
of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate
posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of
care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend
beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich,
Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn
Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and
Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios
in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede
human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine
ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents
and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman
Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining
the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized
scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving
posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious
Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care
that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies,
behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain
life in more-than-human worlds.
Imagining Care brings literature and philosophy into dialogue by
examining caregiving in literature by contemporary Canadian writers
alongside ethics of care philosophy. Through close readings of
fiction and memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael
Ignatieff, Ian Brown, and David Chariandy, Amelia DeFalco argues
that these narratives expose the tangled particularities of
relations of care, dependency, and responsibility, as well as
issues of marginalisation on the basis of gender, race, and class.
DeFalco complicates the myth of Canada as an unwaveringly caring
nation that is characterized by equality and compassion. Caregiving
is unpredictable: one person's altruism can be another's
narcissism; one's compassion, another's condescension or even
cruelty. In a country that conceives of itself as a caring society,
these texts depict in stark terms the ethical dilemmas that arise
from our attempts to respond to the needs of others.
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