The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility in Alice Munro’s Fiction

Abstract

This chapter discusses how Munro’s stories evoke and complicate the “tricky,” to use Munrovian terminology, ethics and affects of writing, reading, and listening to stories. Her stories alert readers to the risks of affectivity, providing us with surrogates for embodied affects that titillate us with their proximity, at once intimate and removed. Readers are often aligned with ethically dubious narrators and characters who employ intimate knowledge for literary effects and readerly affects. The chapter goes on to examine the correlations between writing, storytelling, spying, reading, and gossip as potentially exploitative transactions that use affects as material for literary transactions and pleasures. It further considers the narratological consequences of such sensitivity to affective vulnerability, the metafictional self-awareness of narrators who deride affective exploitation while capitalizing on its powers.