Narrative and the Tragic. Notes on Alice Munro's 'Runaway'

Introducing Alice Munro’s short story collection 'Runaway' (2004), Jonathan Franzen wrote that since 1996 Munro’s stories had come to resemble "classical tragedies in prose form." I will develop this suggestion into an analysis of the ways Munro reworks situations, themes, and formal structures of Greek tragedy into her narrative texts, focusing on “Chance” and “Passion” (both from Runaway). I will try to observe what happens as we pass from a dramatic representation to a narrative representation: can a narrative text accommodate the tragic as we know it from Greek tragedy? And what about reader response—what about pity and fear and catharsis, if we go back to Aristotle—, as we pass from spectators to readers?