Abstract

This article reads Alice Munro’s “Material” as a staging of the failure of its narrator’s voice and understanding. Her failure exposes the limits of the mind to understand and language to represent, but it does so within a complex aesthetic structure that obliquely asserts the value of literature. This aesthetically realist story displays a deconstructive ethics that shows Munro working toward a literature free from phallogocentrism and pushing at the limits of logos itself. “Material” exposes the ethical risk and the power of writing, as well as the significance of that which lies beyond its ability to express.

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