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"As If She Had No Secrets": Approach, Recognition, And Coming Of Age In Alice Munro's Lives Of Girls And Women, Catherine Laura Sweeney

Honors Papers

Munro's fiction contains these two elements at odds, in tension with one another, but they are, for her characters, part of the same process of reckoning with the world. Munro's protagonists, once inside the deep cave, find the familiar linoleum--and the cave itself becomes more mysterious because of this paradoxical discovery. Meanwhile, Munro herself seems to go through a similar process in the act of writing. Her likening of art to a pattern of approach and recognition is applicable to her work, and perhaps, to the work of many writers. Writers go into secret places, hoping to come out with …