Lesson 4 Nettles.ppt

Lesson 4 Nettles Preparation: Author: Alice Munro She was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada on 10 July 1931. Nearly all of Alice She began writing in her teens. She published her first story in 1950 while a student at Western Ontario University. While at school, she also worked as waitress, tobacco picker and a library clerk. Munro’s fiction is set in southwestern Ontario, but her reputation as a brilliant short-story writer goes far beyond the borders of her native Canada. Her accessible, moving stories offer immediate pleasures while simultaneously exploring human complexities in what appear to be effortless anecdotal re-creations of everyday life. In one novel and eight collections of stories she has established herself as a major voice among fiction writers. Alice Munro at Giller Prize ceremony of 2004. (CP file photo) 2. Cultural notes: 1. Uxbridge, Ontario Ontario Ontario is Canadas second largest province, covering more than one million square kilometers, an area larger than France and Spain combined. More than 12 million people live in Ontario. The province is bounded by Quebec on the east, Manitoba on the west, Hudson Bay and James Bay on the north, and the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes on the south. 4. About the story “ Nettles” The short story “ Nettles”, which first appeared in New Yorker in 2000, is included in this book. In this story, the author uses first person narration. The plot of story evolves around a middle-aged woman’s reunion with a childhood boy friend in 1979, but it moves back and forth between past and present. Like most other stories by Munro, the leading actor is a woman. The “I” in the story should not be taken as the author herself although the subject matter of Munro’s stories has often developed from her own experience. Munro has explained in various interviews that her stories are not autobiographical, but she does claim an “emotional reality” for her relatively poor provincial southwestern Ontario tow