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Review What's "Material"?: The Progress ofMunro Criticism, Part 2 INTRODUCING AllCEMUNRO'S UVES OF GIRLSAND WOMEN. Neil K. Besner. Toronto: ECW, 1990. 124 pp. THE OTHER COUNTRY: PATTERNS IN THE WRITING OF ALICE MUNRO. James Carscallen. Toronto: ECW, 1993. 58l+xpp. THE TUMBLE OF REASON: ALICE MUNRO'S DISCOURSE OF ABSENCE. Ajay Heble. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994. 210 +xii pp. SOME OTHER REALITY: ALICE MUNRO'S SOMETHING I'VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU. Louis K. MacKendrick. Toronto: ECW, 1993. 112pp. MOTHERS AND OTHER CLOWNS: THE STORIES OFALICEMUNRO. Magdalene Redekop. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 252 + xvii. ALICE MUNRO: A DOUBLE LIFE. Catherine Sheldrick Ross. Toronto: ECW, 1992. 97 pp. FIGURING GRIEF: GALLANT, MUNRO, AND THE POETICS OFELEGY. Karen E. Smythe. Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen 's UP, 1992. 213 + x pp. In one of the holograph drafts of Alice Munro's "Dulse" (1980), the narrator meets a "Mr. Middleton from Boston," Mr Stanley in the finished story, the man fixated on Willa Cather's writing, her person and the refuge that was hers there on Grand Manan Island. Hearing that Middleton has spent his life working on newspapers, she writes: "I was surprised, I had taken him for a university man, a professor of literature, 196 Vol. 33, No. 2 (Ete 1998 Summer) I had thought that no otherjob in the world would allow him his pedantic preening [,] his serene absorption" (Papers 38.8.19.fl, 3). In what looks a subsequent typescript where the narrative has been shifted to third person, the now-named Lydia notes "the fact" of this man's "admiration, his adoration , of the chosen writer. It was not faked. It was true, fervent, engrossing. She thought he could not be a teacher, such worship being too far out of style, too unlikely even in his day" (Papers 38.8.20.13). Also among the papers held at the University of Calgary is an autobiographic3.l note in which Munro recounts the first time she heard from John Metcalf regarding her work; his letter buoyed her up because. Munro was "reeling " from "a painful session with a man [at the University ofVictoria] who told me that my work reminded him ofthe kind of thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned with the first glimmerings of maturity." This view, she writes, "was. damaging only because I had a most exaggerated respect, then, for academic opinion ..." (6.6). Beginning here, speaking for myself, this is the second time I have taken up a group of critical books focussed on Munro's writing. In the first review, I ended by citing a phrase_ from E.D. Blodgett's Alice Munro (1988) that asserts that Munro's '"unassailable moral integrity' is borne out in the fiction by the various shifts, doubts, and re-explanations she repeatedly offers, but always with an eye to discovering 'what is real,' and how can one really know, ever?" Concluding, I offered one of Munro's own doubts from her uncollected story, "Home" (1974): "/ want to do this with lwnour, ifI possibly can" and left readers with the perhaps wry, though still apt, invocation: "Go ask Alice" ("Go" 166). Embarking on this second assay at Munro criticism, I am thinking about these threads: the compelling mass of Munro's oeuvre, emphatically including the still largely unstudied intricacies of the Munro archive in Calgary; "the preening absorption " of academics; the commonplace and not at all abandoned "adoration" many ofus bring to "thechosen writer," Munro; and her author's own scepticism towards academics Revue d'itudes canadiennes generally and literary critics in particular. She wrote, after all, the two scathing paragraphs that begin "Material" (1973) as well as - and here I am again reminding those of us who do this for a living- this notable trio of sentences from "Goodness and Mercy" (1989): '"Also, professors are dumb. They are dumber than ordinary. I could be nice and say they know about things we don't, but as far as I'mconCemed they don't know shit"' (Friend 158). I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can. Of Criticai and "Munrovian" Contexts One of the reviewers...

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