| This thesis is not a thematic study of Alice Munro's short fiction. The thesis discusses the major features of Alice Munro's writing and simultaneously illustrates some of the possibilities of a specifically semiotic approach to the practice of short story analysis. Nine types of ambiguity have been selected in Alice Munro's work with a view to presenting a metonymic discussion of her writing through analysis of a few stories. The stories analysed are: "Dance of the Happy Shades", "Thanks for the Ride", "The Flats Road", "Day of the Butterfly", "Memorial", "Half a Grapefruit", "Dulse", "Walking on Water", Mrs Cross and Mrs Kidd." Each analysis concentrates on one particular aspect of her writing now rhetorical with such tropes as oxymoron, contradiction, and inversion, now archetypal with such figures as Jonah and the ogress. The variety of the angles of vision adopted by the author on the one hand and of Alice Munro's writing devices on the other impose the same conclusion: the unifying structure of all the short stories is the purposeful absence of any form of stability or logic or coherence. The hypogram of Alice Munro's writing is fluidity and the fusion of incompatibilities. She reconciles opposites so as to create the harmony of "discordia concors". Her work is a felicitous illustration of Eco's "open work" which refuses the limitations of meaning in order to liberate meaning. |
