{"product_id":"9781442613065","title":"The Tumble Of Reason","description":"\u003cp\u003eMuch of the critical writing on the fiction of Alice Munro has explored and emphasized Munro's 'realism'. But her stories frequently turn on what has been left out; they are rife with unsent (unfinished) letters, with things people mean to, but do not, say or tell. Ajay Heble's study focuses on Munro's involvement with a 'discourse of absence' and suggests that our understanding of these texts often depends not only on what happens in the fiction, but also on what might have happened.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMunro's stories confer their meaning not simply by referring to an outer reality, but also by bestowing upon the reader a stimulating wealth of possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning. Characteristically, they articulate an unresolvable tension between variants on these positions: between, on the one hand, her delineation of a surface reality – a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true – and, on the other, her involvement with a discourse of absence that challenges the very conventions within which her fiction operates.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language and its relation to meaning, knowledge, and systems of power, and on theories of postmodernist fiction, Heble offers both a careful reading of Munro's stories and a theoretical framework for reading meanings in absence. His book extends recent revisionist analysis and makes a valuable and original contribution to the criticism on Munro.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Toronto Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47036768420080,"sku":"9781442613065","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781442613065_p0.jpg?v=1763809670","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781442613065","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}