"Life" Writing Of Residential Space By Alice Munro

As one of the best short story writers in the world,Alice Munro has created forteen books of short stories,the last of which is Dear Life(2012).In 2013,Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature.In a telephone interview with the Nobel Prize,Munro expressed that this was an affirmation of short-form novels which have long been ignored.She hoped that this could change the world's prejudice against short stories.A short story does not have to be a novel,it has its own world.Munro's stories are not short in term of length throughout all her works.This may be because the novel does not present “the occurrence of things,but the way things happen"(Munro),and the way things happen is often associated with the hidden time and space which the characters experienced.Munro once compared story writing to a house,the house and the world seen from different angles changed.Her stories are also full of writing about residential space.The purpose of this article is to understand Munro's interpretation of the daily life of the ordinary people in Canada from her residence writing.And further to analyze through the "house" that how characters deal with their own relationship with the world and make their own life choices in the complicated daily life events.In Munro's writings,the residential space is not only a representation of a certain aspect of the character,but also a reveal of the existence of the human being.The residential space does not appear as a means in Munro's writings,but as a process,a metaphor for the state of occupant's life.Gaston Bachelard and Foucault's view of space complementing each other provide a basic theoretical perspective for this article: residential space open to the world with its direct material image,and it is also the gestation and asylum of human mind space.The space inside and outside has the nature of Foucault's "reproduce,oppose and flip".The dissertation consists of five parts.The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on some of the structures and components of the houses in the stories which are metaphorical to the reality,the idea,and the relationship between the two.This part analyses "kitchen and mirror","door and step","window and curtain".On the one hand,the mirrors in the kitchen and the kitchen reflect the immediate situation inside and outside the occupants,and on the other hand,they reduct the faith of life.Faith in Munro's stories is expressed as character's understanding of subversion to realitywhich is not necessarily identificated.The doors and steps in the stories not only mean the obstacles that life faces in reality,but also become the places which accept life,and the characters can breath there.Windows and curtains point to "visible" and "invisible",metaphorizing life's own cognition and imagination of self in the world.The reality and ideas of life flow and intertwined to form the truth of life and lead to the choice of life.The second chapter analyses the permanent and variation of life metaphorized by two houses located in different locations,“the house on the top of the mountain” and “the house in the field”."the house on the top of the mountain " shows that life still retains certain family genes and past's passwords in the variation;"the house in the field" implies that although life passed down from generation to generation,it is constantly changing.The third chapter summarizes the two attitudes of Munro's use of the houses when people face life.The events of destroying and burning houses in the stories show that people' firm rejection towards life and the strong desire of breaking their old selves which represents people's awareness of the "emptiness" of life.And the "house at the end of the road" often appears in the stories metaphorizes life which can't be completely positioned and constructed by the society but still have attachments and cherished feelings.That is the maze of love,the "dear life" that Munro said.