高级英语Nettles课后答案手划船
Unit 4
Nettles
(Excerpts)
Alice Munro
Additional Background Information想念一个人的话
(About the Author and her Short Story, “Nettles”)
Regarded by many critics as one of the greatest living writers of short fiction in English literature, Alice Munro has often been compared to Chekhov.
Born into a family of farmers in the small rural town of Wingham, Ontario, Munro began writing in her teens. She published her first story in 1950 when she was still a student at the
University of Western Ontario. Her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968. It received high acclaim and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, the most respected literary prize in Canada. Her next work was Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a collection of interlinked stories published as a novel, which won the Canadian Bookllers Association International Book Year Award. Her other books are all short story collections: Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974); Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, titled The Beggar Maid in English and American editions); The Moons of Jupiter (1982); The Progress of Love (1986); Friend of My Youth (1990); Open Secrets (1994); Selected Stories (1996); Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001); The View from Castle Rock (2006); Too Much Happiness (2009) and Dear Life (2012).
办公室主任竞聘演讲稿“Nettles”, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 2000, is included in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. In this story, the author us first-person narration. The plot of the story centers on a middle-aged woman’s 1979 reunion with a childhood male friend, but it moves back and forth between past and prent. Like most o
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ther stories by Munro, the protagonist is a woman. The “I”in the story should not be taken as the author herlf, although the subject matter of Munro’s stories is often developed from her own experiences. Munro has explained in various interviews that her stories are not autobiographical, but she does claim an “emotional reality”for her characters that is drawn from her own life.
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Munro’s life experiences of growing up in a relatively poor southwestern Ontario town during the depression, going through the rebelliousness and idealism of adolescence, discovering x, leaving home, falling in love, getting married, having children, getting divorced, and being involved in a variety of complicated relationships, all inform the fiction she creates. “Nettles”is no exception. Her fictional world ranges across the breadth of Canada, but the stories that take place in Ontario are rooted in her own formative past, reprent evocative ttings experienced in childhood, and are recollected by a perceptive adult memory. In Lives of Girls and Women, Munro explains through a character what she hopes to achieve in writing a work of fiction about small-town Ontario life. The character works hard to portray not only what is actually “real”about the town, bu
t what is meaningfully “true”. In order to do so, she must capture the dull and ordinary simplicity of her neighbors’daily lives. This character’s description of her efforts has often—and
rightly—been ud by critics to describe Munro’s own intentions as a writer: “What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.”In “Nettles”, we e evidence of Munro’s realistic technique: details that have been arranged and illuminated memorably. “Nettles”is an example of the penetrating stories that led to Munro being lauded as one of the finest of living North American writers. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013.
Although nearly all of Alice Munro’s fiction is t in southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a brilliant short-story writer goes far beyond the borders of her native Canada. Her accessible, moving stories offer immediate pleasure while simultaneously exploring the complexity and beauty of everyday life. This aspect of her writing is also demonstrated in “Nettles”.
Structure of the Text
Part I (Paras.1-2)
The beginning of the story tells us when and where the story takes place—in 1979, at the summer home of the narrator’s friend, Sunny, in Uxbridge, Ontario.
Part II (Paras. 3-26)
This ction rves as a prelude to the main story.
The first part is narrated as a flashback, devoted to the narrator’s childhood memories and her friendship with Mike. The tting of this part of the story is rural Ontario. (Paras. 3-15) The time and place shift to that of the first paragraph. In 1979, Sunny invites the narrator to spend a weekend with her family. (Paras. 16-18)
The narration moves back a few years to the time when the narrator and Sunny were friends in Vancouver. (Para. 19)
In Paragraph 20, the narration shifts back again to 1979. The narrator explains the different reasons that prompted both her and Sunny to leave Vancouver. The narrator’s marriage has turned out to be unsuccessful and she has problems with her children. This leads her to phone Sunny and obtain the invitation to spend the weekend. (Paras. 20-26)
Part III (Paras. 27-93)
勇气近义词The major part of the story takes place in this ction.em用法
At Sunny’s home, to her surpri, the narrator meets her childhood friend, Mike. She is filled with happiness by this chance reunion. (Paras. 27-38)
The narrator feels xual desire for Mike, but refrains from expressing her desire. (Paras. 39-49)美食照片
When everyone is invited to a brunch the next morning, the narrator decides to accompany Mike to a golf cour instead. (Paras. 50-68)
There is a fierce storm. After the storm, Mike tells the narrator about the death of his son and how it occurred, something he normally does not speak of. (Paras. 69-90)
Part IV (Paras. 91-95)
They return to Sunny’s home. At the end of the story, the narrator explains her new understanding
of the meaning of love.
Note: During the detailed study of the text, it might be uful to draw students’attention to the shifts in time mentioned above.
