Alice Munro and Canadian Literature: An Interview with Professor Robert Thacker

Abstract

Robert Thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. He has published extensively on Alice Munro, Willa Cather, and Canada-U.S. literary and cultural comparisons. As former president of the Western Literature Association, he is editor of The American Review of Canadian Studies, and many books in this field, as well as author of books including The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination (1989) and Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005, 2011). Zhou Yi interviewed Professor Thacker on behalf of Foreign Literature Studies in 2012. In this interview, Professor Thacker, starting with a discussion about his much-acclaimed biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, provides a profound analysis of Mtmro's narrative techniques, her leitmotif of place and artistic aesthetics: Based on the discussion of Munro's writing, Professor Thacker also answers questions about the Ontario tradition of Canadian literature, and its sense of history. He is especially wary of the ideological tendency that tries to pigeonhole Canadian literature into national literature framework. Talking about the relationship between Canadian literature and American literature, he dismisses the radical nationalist standpoint by emphasizing the fact that the two countries share a single North American physiographic region.