Memory Writing In Lives Of Girls And Women By Alice Munro

Alice Munro(1931-)is a famous contemporary Canadian short story writer.She has won virtually countless prizes like Canadian Governor-General's Awards,Commonwealth Writer's Prize and many other awards.In 2013,she won the Nobel Prize for Literature and became the first Canadian female writer to get it.Until now,Munro has altogether published fourteen short story collections.In her works,there are both autobiographical realistic recollections and imaginative serendipity,meanwhile,her works reveal the regional cognition and universal humanistic care.All of these features show Munro's unique charm in the creation of short story.The research on Munro's works mostly focuses on her feminist themes and narrative techniques.Relatively speaking,there has been less study on her memory writing.Memory theory has been documented rapidly since the late 1980 s and developed into a more consolidated and coherent system nowadays.Site of Memory proposed by French historian Pierre Nora,Collective Memory and Individual Memory by French historian and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs are three important concepts of memory theory.This thesis aims to explore the memory writing in Munro's short story collection Lives of Girl and Women(1971)with these concepts.The thesis intends to analyze eight short stories taken from this collection.It consists of five parts.The introduction examines the related information of Alice Munro and the collection Lives of Girls and Women,and then it gives a review of the scholarship abroad and at home on Alice Munro.This section ends with a brief introduction to the memory theory,which is the theoretical foundation of the whole study.Chapter One focuses on three layers of Sites of Memory in this book.The Flats Road and Wawanash River embody the material Site of Memory,the funeral ritual and religion faiths reflect the symbolic Site,and the encyclopedia and history manuscript are the functional Site.These three layers of Sites relate with each other and together reconstruct a marginalized Canadian town Jubilee in the memory.They provide a macroscopic background of this book.Chapter Two examines the Collective Memory of the females in Jubilee.Collective Memory,proposed by Halbwachs,is recalled by social groups with shared past according to their present knowledge and needs.Munro depicts different typical females in Jubilee who have the same life experiences.They construct the collective memory with the same theme--inequality and class consciousness.And meanwhile,their collective memory also consolidates their collective sense of belonging,thus their identity is also established.Chapter Three discusses the individual memory of protagonist Del and divides her memory into children memory and adult memory with the concept of individual memory.In the children memory,there are two parallel narration lines.The younger Del tells her imagination to the world and the older Del exposes the complexity of adult world.And her adult memory describes how this children world collapses gradually under the invasion of adults and how this invasion compels Del to grow up from a girl to be a woman.The last part is the Conclusion.With the aid of the three concepts of memory theory,this thesis tries to explore a further interpretation of Munro's Lives of Girls and Women.Through recollecting,Del has set up her identity as both a female and an artist,meanwhile,through the recollection of Jubilee,Canada's national identity is focused.It is a process of realization and self-realization in different stages of memory.By employing the memory theory,this thesis has broadened the research field of Munro's works and provided a new perspective to discuss identity problem in her works.