Il ciclo di racconti nord-americano: serialità e variazioni nell'opera di Alice Munro

The short story cycle or short story sequence arises in the constellation of literary forms in an ambiguous way, occupying a space somewhere between the novel and the short story, between unity and fragmentation, extensive continuity and episodic narration. An attempt to offer a proposal of meaning is quite a complex operation since it is a hybrid form, in its structure, and it is a genre whose nomenclature is uncertain and disproportionate. The theoretical interest in a writer like Alice Munro is due to the fact that over her prolific career Munro has explored the potential of the short form, gradually unravelling the boundaries between genres, decomposing their perspectives and their possible outcomes both in the direction of the modernist novella (very much used, for instance, by Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty), and in creating cycles of stories or series of interconnected stories. In her fourteen collections of stories she has progressively reshaped the cycle of stories which, over time, has taken different forms and different values. According to the different types of linking devices, we can distinguish among two typologies of cycle: on one hand, there are the explicit sequences of interconnected stories, on the other, there are implicit narrative series, which horizontally cross all of her collections. Challenging brevity Munro’s writing reshapes categories, on one side by recovering the most traditional form of the cycle, and, on the other side, by building a net of intertextual and intra-textual references, based on the thematic variation.