SOURCE: "'The Other Side of Dailiness': The Paradox of Photography in Alice Munro's Fiction," in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1983, pp. 49-60.

York is a Canadian educator and critic. In the following essay, she discusses the postmodernist elements of Munro's fiction and relates how her work incorporates several theories of photography.

         But o, photography! as no art is,
         Faithful and disappointing! that records
         Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
         And will not censor blemishes
         Like washing-lines and Hall's Distemper Boards …
 
                  —Philip Larkin, "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album"

In various writings and interviews, Alice Munro has often expressed interest in photography and photographic realism. In an "Open Letter" to a small Wingham, Ontario journal, Jubilee, Munro summarized her feeling about the emotional power of local detail by referring to an Edward Hopper painting. This canvas, entitled "The Barber Shop," is a fairly static...