Joyce Carol Oates

This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments in which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits and planetary damage. These moments build on a longer literary history of epiphany in modern fiction, a history that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, and the mundane, but these short stories also adapt epiphany to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Smith’s “The Lazy River” (2017), and Oates’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019), I show how these stories’ ecological epiphanies invite the reader to emotionally confront the urgency of the climate crisis and to take action. While important arguments by Amitav Ghosh and Rob Nixon argue that literature must make planetary crisis visible, Smith’s and Oates’s short stories suggest that some contemporary writers now face a different issue, not a need to heighten the visibility of the damage, but rather a need to psychologically confront its terrible obviousness.

In the beginning of the seventies Joyce Carol Oates published a pseudo translation from the Portuguese of Portugal called The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories From the Portuguese (1975) which was composed during the writing of her novel Wonderland (1971). Various critics have written about this Oates’ reverie, raising problems and questions. We will explore the two most important of its stories not only to understand the reason of the appearance of this book, but also to look at Oates besiegement and use of a pseudonym, to draw a parallel with Fernando Pessoa. This article aims to highlight the book most important issues taking into account the relationship between Portugal and the United States and the way they draw attention to new problems and questions, thus hoping to contribute to new research in Anglo-Portuguese studies.

Joyce Carol Oates has been recognized as a postmodernist writer. In her literary texts, there is a great deal of difference and heterogeneous space in postmodern writing techniques. This paper explores Oates' relevant texts through Foucault's theory of Heterotopia by examining the main forms and representational meanings of her heterotopia writing to understand Oates' social critique of established space and power more deeply. In this paper, the concept of Heterotopia and its characteristics are introduced and applied to an analysis of Oates's work. It argues that Oates' literary works contain numerous postmodern writing techniques in the space of difference and heterogeneity. Oates's ideas and works traverse the real and the imaginary, the moderate and the edgy, in a manner that intersects time and space, history and the future. Almost every significant scene in Oates's work conforms to the six characteristics of Heterotopia. In Oates's writing, American society is a heterotopia of power; it is a heterotopia of special operation; it is a juxtaposition space of functional superposition; it has multiple non-immediate connections with time, producing a heterotemporal space; it is inclusive and exclusive; it is a heterotopia of illusion and compensation. It concludes that Oates' Heterotopias reflect religious repression, racial discrimination, and sexual violence. By analyzing the construction of Heterotopia, this paper provides a glimpse of Oates' plot of power and violence, her innovative and pioneering writing, and her expectation of female struggle for survival space and pursuit of self-worth.

The object of this study is All the Bright Places (2015), a young adult fiction novel which tells a story about two teenagers and their problems related to their mental illness. The interesting topic which became the main discussion in this study is how the female character of this novel, Violet Markey, using denial as her defence mechanism to cope grief on her sister and boyfriend’s death. To examine this topic, the researchers used descriptive qualitative method. This study found that in order to cope with Markey’s sister death, Markey used self-protective function of denial, while to cope with Finch’s death, her form of denial is by refusing to acknowledge his death.

The object of this study is All the Bright Places (2015), a young adult fiction novel which tells a story about two teenagers and their problems related to their mental illness. The interesting topic which became the main discussion in this study is how the female character of this novel, Violet Markey, using denial as her defence mechanism to cope grief on her sister and boyfriend’s death. To examine this topic, the researchers used descriptive qualitative method. This study found that in order to cope with Markey’s sister death, Markey used self-protective function of denial, while to cope with Finch’s death, her form of denial is by refusing to acknowledge his death.

Este artigo propõe uma leitura do ensaio literário Against Nature, da escritora estadunidense Joyce Carol Oates, que apresenta um discurso de resistência ao gênero literário conhecido por nature writing. Para compreendermos melhor o protesto de Oates, delineamos uma fundamentação teórica que disserta acerca de aspectos estéticos e históricos da escrita do nature essay, com base, principalmente, nos escritos de Snyder (2005), Weik Von Mossner (2017) e Schröder (2019). É possível perceber, a partir disso, que o ensaio de Oates direciona um olhar crítico para um gênero literário que trabalha com questões éticas e se propõe a agir a favor do mundo natural.

The article proposes a sociological reading of the novel I’ll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates. Though the book can be classified as an initiation novel, it also constitutes an accusation of the very procedure of initiation as forcing individuals to agree and adapt to unfair social mechanisms. The context of the protagonist’s struggles is provided by the social structure of the early-1960s United States, with its inherent misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism and classism. All these factors shape her destiny in accordance with the logic of social reproduction. A destiny of overwhelming power of allocation, which the heroine is trying to resist. As an academic novel, I’ll Take You There is also an insightful deconstruction of the universalism preached within the Western academic world, and especially philosophy.

En este trabajo nos ocupamos de la que puede ser considerada la única nouvelle de Roberto Fontanarrosa, uno de los autores emblemáticos del campo del humor argentino y latinoamericano, recientemente reivindicado por la crítica académica como parte de la gran literatura argentina. Este dato no debe ocultar, sin embargo, que fue en el campo discursivo del humor donde Fontanarrosa realizó sus operaciones creativas más interesantes. Las obras completas de Fontanarrosa pueden leerse en su totalidad como un proyecto de apropiación y discusión de diferentes territorios de la cultura a través de una serie de procedimientos entre los cuales destaca la transposición paródica de cuentos, novelas, historietas, películas y géneros. El relato que aquí analizamos inaugura este proyecto parodiando a la novela negra (más específicamente Yo, el jurado de Mickey Spillane) para desnudar algunos de sus procedimientos más característicos.In this paper, we discuss the only nouvelle written by Roberto Font...

Feminism, originating in late 19th century, is a cover term for a series of movements which seek to define, establish and defend equal rights for women. It focuses on the women's issues and their problems in the society and aims at overcoming their problems. In the three main waves of feminism, many feminists such as Virginia Wolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Kate Millet aired their views in their popular and famous books. This article deals with the application of feminist criticism to The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, considering Simone de Beauvoir's ideas based on her Second Sex. Many sentences and phrases are quoted through the article to illustrate the women's weakness and the men's power, the notion usually called "men's control of the dominant discourse" in Beauvoir's words. There are some keys in the story showing that women are not satisfied with their ways of lives and try to change their current situation.

This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s hybridism in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, as a powerful means of self-assertion and self-reconstruction. It suggests that to write about her painful experience of bereavement Oates resorts to hybridism—generic, narrative and typographic in particular—as it is both a characteristic of her fiction and a means of dramatizing her experience. This hybridism helps her not only express her emotional “derangement” but also recover her identity as a writer. Thus her narrative manifests confusion and continuity, chaos and control, inconsolability and consolation at one and the same time.

This research is an autoethnographic investigation of this distinctive national variety of fiction that is predominantly romantic in nature and offers insights into the fascinating reading culture of the country. Previous scholarship on women’s digests in Pakistan has been limited to questions of female emancipation, patriarchy, and regional politics, overlooking the multilayered digest fiction. Throughout this article, the term "kitchen literature" stands for multi-layered Urdu fiction published in the digests, which explores myriad social, psychological, and domestic themes including child abuse, domestic violence, trauma, feminism and romance. I selected this term for two major reasons: first, because the kitchen is a space strongly associated with Pakistani digests and their readers, and second because of the frequent use of the kitchen as a setting in digest fiction, regardless of its theme. This article analyzes the diegetic and extra-diegetic roles of the kitchen, a...

In her short story “The Possibility of Evil”, Shirley Jackson deconstructs the gendered play for power in 1950s America through the gothicization of prescriptive roles of femininity, one of which is the spinster. As the last descendant of the family that settled the town during the American Revolution, the story’s (anti)heroine is both privileged by and cheated of her
illustrious ancestry. American history is a construct edited and enacted by men, in which masculinity is defined along the lines of rebellion and violence; it is passed on from father to son. Thus, due to her gender, the protagonist is indeed of “strange worth” as she cannot overtly assert her power over the townspeople that she believes are, in a sense, her subjects. Male and female power, asserting themselves in different ways, compete in the story as the protagonist aims to compensate for women’s erasure from the official records of the making of American history by taking a “grass root approach” and affecting the lives of ordinary people instead. Thus, the sexual politics are reversed through a character that switches the dynamics from “victim-of-patriarchy-turned-monster” as “monster-which-empowers-itself-through-the-mimicry-of-male-power”. In a story whose foundational origins can be traced to Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown, one of the first texts to critique the belief in American exceptionalism, Jackson explodes the fantasy of small town America as the keeper of traditional values, emphasizing the idea that the seed of all evil is the fixation on American exceptionalism and American purity – just like in the case of Hawthorne’s protagonist, sin is in the eye of the beholder.

Keywords: American literature; gender; gothic; American exceptionalism;
Puritanism

Women's domestic work is largely deemed to be a ‘labour of love’ and lacking any value outside the private family. This reflects an ‘ideology of domesticity’, whereby women's natural place is deemed to be in an imagined private sphere. In this paper, I examine the status of housework in the context of asserting property rights in the home upon relationship breakdown. Using Valverde's legal chronotope as a lens, I argue that the ideology of domesticity is not merely present in legal discourse, but also takes on material form through the spatiotemporal ordering of the home. Housework is spatially and temporally concealed behind the powerful veneer of the imagined ideal family home, with corresponding invisibility in the law. For domestic work to be acknowledged, the individual often has to demonstrate that her work transgresses boundaries between private and public. However, as I argue, this transgression is particularly difficult for women, who remain spatiotemporally anc...

Oates works have been analyzed in the light of violent literature all around the world; however, they are not scruntizied on account of Žižek’s outstanding ideas. Carrying out extensive research, the researcher highlights the positive outcome of  Žižek’s “subjective violence”, “objective violence”, and “systemic violence” (Violence 2) in Oates’ Blonde, Black Water and Rape: A love story.This article argues that the common meaning of violence which according to Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is “actions or words are intended to hurt people” is not holistically true about the violence portrayed by Oates in her fiction. She depicts that the violence can save one’s life. The reserach presents the idea that outcome of violence can be a means of success in Oates’ stories. Oates’ optimistic view toward violence and positive effects of violence in the life oppressed characters are presented in this article. The writer of this article has made an attempt to attest positive aftermath...

The American feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, in her canonical work Feminine Mystique (1963), vocalizes the discontentment and estrangement of mid-century American women. After World War II, many women with small children had to leave their jobs due to the drastic decline in both wages and wartime, government-supported childcare facilities. These women were asked to give up the image of Rosie the Riveter and be “gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home” (Friedan, 1963). Almost two decades before Frieden, housewife‐mother‐writer Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) protested this celebration of domestic idealism by depicting the specifically female experience of white middle‐class women in mid‐century America. In between bearing and raising four children, Jackson wrote six novels, two memoirs about childrearing, four children’s books, and dozens of short stories. Both her Gothic novels and domestic stories encompass the feelings of guilt and fear that permeate the lives of all women in a society of domesticity. Whether married or unmarried, all women clearly suffered from the “problem that had no name” (Friedan, 1963): the silent discontent mirrored in Jackson’s domestic fiction and bubbling just beneath the surface of placid peacetime American society. We will
explore this protest against the often cruel and violent, post-war American patriarchy, in two of Jackson’s stories: “The Renegade” and “Flower Garden.”

MONTEIRO, George, "Imaginary poets in a real world (an unpublished lecture, 1996)" (2016). Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, No. 9, Spring, pp. 298-309. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SJ1HSM

Is Part of:

Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, Issue 9

A (im)possível unidade em Fernando Pessoa
[The (im)possible unity in Fernando Pessoa]

https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0SJ1HSM

ABSTRACT

Delivered on Feb. 8, 1996, at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, this lecture was scheduled in conjunction with a Portuguese-government sponsored exhibition titled "Azulejo: Five Centuries of Portuguese Ceramic Tile." It served as an introduction for a general audience of non-specialists interested in learning about Fernando Pessoa's life and work. It surveys the basic facts of the poet's life: as a young student in English-language schools; his life in Lisbon; his theories and practices of heteronymism, including his account of the advent of those major heteronyms and their poems on March 8, 1914; his unsuccessful attempts to be recognized as a poet in the English tradition by having English-language poems printed in Lisbon but circulated only in the British isles. His peculiar triumph was that of a writer who, because he was bi-lingual and bi-cultural, was able to become a great Portuguese poet. As one critic, who is himself fluent in the English language and conversant with England's literary traditions, has put it, "[Pessoa] even \u2018reinvented' the Portuguese language, because he knew English."

RESUMO

Apresentada a 8 de Fevereiro de 1996, na Rhode Island School of Design (Escola de Desenho Gráfico de Rhode Island) em Providence, Rhode Island, EUA, esta palestra ocorreu em conjunto com a exposição "Azulejo: Five Centuries of Portuguese Ceramic Tile" (Azulejo: Cinco Séculos de Cerâmica Portuguesa), um evento patrocinado pelo governo português. A palestra serviu de introdução à vida e à obra de Fernando Pessoa, dirigindo-se a um público não-especializado. Abrangeram-se os aspectos principais da vida do poeta: seus tempos de jovem estudante em escolas de língua inglesa; sua vida em Lisboa; suas teorias e práticas de heteronimismo, inclusive seu testemunho da gênese dos principais heterónimos e seus poemas a 8 de Março de 1914; suas sucessivas tentativas frustradas em ser reconhecido como poeta de tradição inglesa, tendo seus poemas ingleses publicados em Lisboa mas distribuídos apenas nas ilhas britânicas. Seu triunfo peculiar foi o de um autor que, sendo bilíngue e bicultural, foi capaz de tornar-se um grande poeta português. Como escreveu um crítico, também fluente na língua inglesa e familiarizado com suas tradições literárias: "[Pessoa] chegou a 'reinventar' a língua portuguesa, porque conhecia o inglês".

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This paper focuses on the global political aspects of the "pro-life" vs "pro-choice" ideologies with an accent on the American social, political and religious living visa -vis their reflection, implication and repercussions on everyday life, as well as their correlation to a contemporary psychological novel A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates. This complex issue is expressed through the acts of severe violence and suffering, manifested through homicide, profound moral erosion, and the deep psychological trauma the entire "pro-life problem" has brought into the lives of many American families. Furthermore, the research analyzes not only the literary analogy of the consequences of this (already) escalated problem as well as its aftermath and its impact on the people's lives, underlying the abandonment, loss, and the dysfunctional relations as a result of it, but also, it further dives into the statistical analysis of the existing problem in real life, in terms of the current abortion numbers and statistics on a broader scale, worldwide and in the United States at present, thus sketching a portrait of multiple perspectives of the violent responses to the imposed restrictions on the freedom of choice, as well as further explaining its medical, philosophical and cultural implications which lead to a current, modern-day general revolt related to the hash obstruction and restriction of the female rights to free and safe abortion.

The two novels by Joyce Carol Oates analyzed in this paper, Black Water (1993) and Mudwoman (2012), were written in two different moments of the author's career. The first one is based on the infamous Chappaquiddick Incident (1969), where a woman drowned in a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy; the second is the story of Meredith Neukirchen, a Professor and president of an Ivy League College, who was thrown in a river by her mother as a child. These novels share a relationship of intertextuality deriving from several elements such as the common setting (the water where the protagonist lose/risk losing their lives), the idea of storytelling and the attempt to silence this ability and an ideal dialogue between the two texts on the idea of death and responsibility. The paper analyzes these common features and the reasons that brought Oates to writing, twenty years after the first, what can be defined as the novel of survival: the one where the protagonist lives to tell her story. KEYWORDS: Chappaquiddick Incident; storytelling; fact and fiction; power relations; American history. RESUMO: Os dois romances de Joyce Carol Oates analisados neste artigo, Black Water (1993) e Mudwoman (2012), foram escritos em dois momentos diferentes da carreira da autora. O primeiro é baseado no infame Incidente de Chappaquiddick (1969), onde uma mulher se afogou em um carro dirigido pelo senador Edward Kennedy; A segunda é a história de Meredith Neukirchen, professora e presidente de uma Ivy League College, que foi jogada em um rio por sua mãe quando criança. Estes romances compartilham uma relação de intertextualidade derivada de diversos elementos, como o cenário comum (a água onde o protagonista perde/corre o risco de perder suas vidas), a ideia de contar histórias e a tentativa de silenciar essa habilidade, e um diálogo ideal entre os dois textos sobre a ideia de morte e responsabilidade. O artigo analisa essas características comuns e as razões que levaram Oates à escrita, vinte anos após a primeira, do que pode ser definido como um romance de sobrevivência: aquele em que a protagonista vive para contar sua história. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Incidente de Chappaquiddick; contar histórias; fato e ficção; relações de poder; História americana.

Este artigo é uma tentativa de leitura do conto EDickinson RepliLuxe (2010), de Joyce Carol Oates, em busca de uma significação contemporânea em tempos de "queda do céu". No conto, a poeta Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) sobrevive em meados do século XXI como uma replicante de presença espectral na casa da família Krim. De maneira geral, o conto reforça a ideia de que as narrativas ficcionais, assim como os poemas de Dickinson, contribuem com a própria continuidade da vida.

This thesis analyzes the ways in which four American Gothic novels written by Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) and Joyce Carol Oates (1938) explore the perception of normality in American society. The chosen novels were published between the late 1950s and the mid1990s. In The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), Expensive People (1968), and Zombie (1995) Jackson and Oates reflect on contemporary social norms through characters and situations that test the limits of these norms.

The critical approach used in the first and second chapter of this MA thesis to analyze Jackson’s novels is broadly sociological. In the first chapter, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is approached through sociological research on the Cold War era. Central
texts for my analysis of Hill House are Wini Breines’s Young, White, and Miserable (1992) on the plight of young women in postwar American society and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1990) on middle-class families
and family values during the postwar era.
The second chapter explores the conditions that led to the 1960s counterculture in America and the background that affected the novel’s production, since We Have Always Lived in the Castle was published in the beginning of the 1960s. Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) and research on the mainstream cultural products addressed to teenagers during the 1950s and early 1960s are employed to form the connection.

Herbert Marcuse’s critical thought provides the theoretical framework for the analysis of Oates’s Expensive People and Zombie discussed in the third and fourth chapter respectively. Marcuse challenged the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis and made a compelling contribution to the intellectual foundation of the 1960s counterculture. One-Dimensional Man (1964) and a selection of his lectures provide
the theoretical framework for the examination of the new subject in late capitalism.

This thesis will show that in the work of Jackson and Oates the normality dictated by
the domestic ideology of the postwar era left no space for opposition. The novels’
protagonists have to deal with a system that excludes them. Jackson and Oates do not follow the premise that their characters have a fundamental flaw; rather they target their critique on the institutions that lead to their characters’ isolation. In that way, they show the need for the social reform of institutions. Norms are shown to be ideologically constructed and thus relative. The consensus is not solely based on objective evaluation, as it also includes the generation of exclusions; these exclusions are telling about the society that generates them.