Reading in Alice Munro's Archives

Beverly Rasporich is a professor in the Faculty of Communication and
Culture at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

For the student of CanLit, this book is worth buying, if only to read
the author’s preface, in which she details the controversy that the
book has caused. McCaig begins, “This is not the book I wanted to
publish. This is not the book I originally wrote.” The book was
designed to be a study of the Alice Munro literary archive housed at the
University of Calgary but it ran into publication difficulties when
Munro apparently refused permission to quote from her unpublished
letters—leading McCaig to consider copyright issues and the real value
of literary archives that ultimately do not offer full access.

Nonetheless, McCaig has published a summary version of a rather
unorthodox study, one that sets out to determine how literary culture is
constructed. Relying on the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdeau,
McCaig embarks on a cultural analysis of the narrative of Munro’s
career as it unfolded in her correspondence. In it, she argues that the
“author function” has been produced by Canada and the United States
and their respective “cultural fields”; by “cultural bankers”
such as Munro’s literary mentor, Robert Weaver, and her literary
agent, Virginia Barber; and by the patriarchy, the academy, and the
exigencies of the marketplace. Munro as authorial producer is herself a
product of engagement with the above.

McCaig writes with a clear and arresting style and covers a variety of
topics, including the cultural issues surrounding the short-story genre
and the impact of gender, nationality, and class on authorship. This is
not a book that will illuminate Alice Munro’s literary art. Nor does
it promote the genius of the authorial imagination. Rather, the author
situates Munro in the business of culture and its power relationships.