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OCR
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO... twins.” Nicklas and Lindner continue: “Particularly cultural appropriation implies a move towards the new version rather than a move away from the ‘original’. The process of adaptation as appropriation, thus, tends to be characterized in this context as the creation of new cultural capital.” This statement is also valid for the adaptation of literary characters. None of the characters in the two Munro’s short stories are firmly anchored in any fixed cultural circle; they are all characters in a constant state of change. Munro has provided each character with basic features acquired through cultural appropriation and then exposed them to continuous assimilation, thus creating a newly derived cultural reality. This can clearly be seen in the fact that Maria in “Five Points” assimilates to Canadian culture at a much faster pace than her parents, but she largely remains governed by their traditionalist laws, and in the fact that Charlotte in “The Albanian Virgin” becomes assimilated into Albanian society but never entirely denounces her Canadianess, while her husband Gjurdhi becomes assimilated to the Canadian culture but never entirely denounces his Albanian identity which means that all three characters become representatives of a new and hybrid ‘culture in between’. Hence, cultural appropriation in literature is largely a matter of quality writing, common sense and good taste. Furthermore, appropriation in literature mostly means re-interpretation, which is very important for literature and especially so for modern literature, and, finally, it is closely related to literary adaptation and, as such, indivisible from most of literary practice. Benign Cultural Romanticism Ina similar way to Ziff and Rao, James O. Young differentiates between cultural appropriation in the arts as theft (of usually physical objects of culture), and cultural appropriation as a profoundly offensive conduct of the artist or the offensive nature of an artistic product. He continues by stating that “other [than theft] acts of cultural appropriation are morally benign. Some works of art are aesthetic failures precisely because an artist has appropriated content in a clumsy and ineffective manner.”'* This claim verbalizes one of the starting points of my analyses. While Munro’s cultural appropriation in the two analyzed short stories is surely a product of a benign artistic process, the effectiveness of her cultural re-interpretation is certainly open to discussion. Pascal Nicklas — Oliver Lindner, Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation: Literature, Film and the Arts, Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2012, 4. 7 Ibid. 6. Young, Cultural Appropriation, 28. + 77 +
