Broken Words and Stolen Land in Alice Munro’s “White Dump”

Synchronizing the Personal, the Political, and the Mythical

Abstract

Through the elucidation of the numerous intertextual and intermedial references which are more or less clandestinely strewn throughout the story “White Dump”, this paper intends to show that Alice Munro proposes a politicized and indigenized version of an adultery in the middle-class in Canada in the 20th century as well as an anthropological and metaphysical reflection on the meaning of a dump which is ambiguously and subversively centred around the concepts of tinsel and treasure, treason and loyalty as well as salvaging, rehabilitating and transmitting.