House as Cosmos: on Tragedy in the Work of Alice Munro

This article proposes a comparative analysis of the work of Canadian writer Alice Munro (1931-2024), focusing on the recurrence of the tragic fictional mode in her short stories. The argument converges on a differentiation between eschatological tragedy, with a monotheistic reference, as it appears in the post-apocalyptic literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and that which, in our object of study, takes on cosmological contours, based on references to the Greco-Roman tradition and polytheistic cultures of antiquity, although remaining within a domestic and provincial context. Thus, by configuring tragedy in Munro’s work as a phenomenon closer to the classicist tradition than to the Judeo-Christian pathos, using correlations with the works of Anne Carson and Ursula K. Le Guin as well, it becomes possible, on the other hand, to point out the contemporary aspect of the historicity implied in the conception of time in her short stories.

Keywords:
Alice Munro; fiction; historicity