On Oct. 10, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. For many experienced readers of Munro, this accolade represented a long-awaited acknowledgement of the writer’s immense talent, which, over a career spanning nearly five decades, has resulted in 14 remarkable collections.
In English Professor Julie Rivkin’s course “Alice Munro and the Short Story,” however, the news of Munro’s achievement was met with a slightly different form of excitement. Rather than alleviating years of anticipation, the Nobel committee’s sudden recognition of Munro provided students enrolled in the course with a vaguely surreal backdrop; for many of these individuals, even those already familiar with Munro’s work, Rivkin’s class served as an introduction to this brilliant but difficult author. Most of the writers on whom English courses at this college focus (from Milton to Austen to Joyce) have their legacies firmly set. For Rivkin’s students, studying an author’s work while watching them go through the process of building a legacy is indeed a unique experience.
“It just felt so happy,” Professor Rivkin mused while reflecting on the mood of her classes immediately following Munro’s achievement. “It was like we were in on the secret before the world discovered it or something.” Based on my conversations with a number of students, the Nobel Prize award does indeed seem to have encouraged a feeling of communality among members of this course. That being said, it also appears as if the potency of Munro’s writing alone was, in the case of these students, enough to produce a very special academic experience.
Professor Rivkin was quick to say that her students are not only “remarkable readers…[whose] reading of Munro’s work would make her happy,” but also dedicated scholars. Although the prospect of teaching a course on one author always carries the risk of wearing students down, Rivkin maintained that “it really doesn’t feel like people are getting tired out, or that they’ve exhausted their sense of discovery.” In less than two months, her students have become deeply immersed in Munro’s writing, both in terms of its innovations and its impacts.
When asked to describe those elements of the class material covered that most impress him, Bo Clay ’15 was forced to choose from a long list of impressive techniques. He explained, “Munro has an amazing talent to switch between perspectives and narrative voices. She can seamlessly switch from first to third person. The way she structures her stories…it’s almost like recalling a memory.”
Zander Asplundh-Smith ’14 said that Professor Rivkin’s course has enabled him to understand the manner in which “Munro has impacted the short story. That genre has gained a lot prestige over the past half-century, much of which can be traced back to her writing.” Certainly, to understand a writer’s style not only as it functions within specific texts – but also as it pushes an entire genre forward – is no small task, but Munro’s writing, which Professor Rivkin describes as having “opened out” over the course of her career, seems particularly conducive to this objective.
According to Rivkin, Munro’s more recent works have become longer, “much more open-ended, much less certain and less linear,” and have even taken on “enormous scopes of time…cover[ing] the lifetime of a character…mov[ing] backward and forward.” Such invention (which, drawing from my own limited experience with Munro’s prose, is enacted seamlessly) has undeniably influenced other short story writers to experiment heavily with narrative voice and structure.
Judging from the outlooks of class members such as Asplundh-Smith and Clay, whose respect for Munro was well formed before her Nobel Prize award and therefore changed little following this honor, the endurance and tenacity which Rivkin sees in her students seems more motivated by Munro’s prose than by her newly increased fame. Thus, the significance of the Nobel Prize victory, as it relates to an improved classroom experience, remains in question.
That Munro’s award facilitated a uniquely upbeat environment in English 362 is undeniable. Unfortunately, this scenario is impossible to replicate, and if any lessons are to be taken from it, they are almost certainly to be found by asking why, exactly, the student response to Munro’s award was so positive. I would propose that Munro’s writing, while never tedious, has now acquired an exciting sense of relevance to the concerns and values of literature in today’s world – a sense certainly not lost on Professor Rivkin or her students.
There is certainly something to be said for reading a writer whose prose is in direct dialogue with contemporary issues, concerning both literature and beyond. Professor Rivkin was very open in stating, “I love teaching contemporary fiction… I like the sense that you can open up the book review and discover the thing that you want to teach next…that new great literature is being written all around us.” This sentiment was echoed by Asplundh-Smith, who asserted, “contemporary fiction is extremely interesting to students, and particularly relevant to students looking to become writers…I would love to see more contemporary fiction courses.”It seems that by locating writers in contemporary discourses, students may be more inclined to identify with a tradition of literary brilliance which, as Munro’s writing demonstrates, is still going strong. •
