Desire, “Narrative Hunger,” and Alterity: Framing Biography as Dialogic Encounter in Carol Shields’s Jane Austen and Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung”

novia inayah;

This essay examines the ways the biographer-narrators of Carol Shields’s Jane Austen (2001) and Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” (1991) exploit the dialogic richness inhabiting the borders between biographer and subject, where “two voices, two accents . . .
come together” to “fight it out on the territory of the utterance” (Bakhtin, “Discourse” 360). Both narrators probe the potentially “outrageous privilege” (Emerson xxxvii) of framing the subject in biography and provoke awareness about our “narrative hunger”
for the other. The style of each work innovatively suggests the interrogative nature of biographical enquiry; their attempts to unsettle conventional biographical narrative arcs allow readers to “rethink” what Sara Ahmed refers to as the “relation between
identification and desire” (127) in biography’s “affective economies” (8).