JOYCE CAROL OATES

(1938-)

BACKGROUND

  • Lockport, New York
    • small town
    • rural
    • Depression-struck
  • working-class family
  • one-room schoolhouse
  • grandparents’ farm
    • grandmother got her her 1st typewriter
    • JCO wrote novels & short stories in high school
  • 1st novel at 15
  • Syracuse University
    • won scholarship
    • valedictorian
  • U. of Wisconsin (graduate studies)
  • 1962:  married Raymond Smith
  • 1961-67:  teacher, U. of Detroit
    • Detroit in the 1960s = social turmoil
  • 1968-78:  U. of Windsor
    • teacher
    • publishing house & literary magazine (Ontario Review)

BACKGROUND

  • teacher, Princeton
    • Distinguished Professor of Humanities
  • prolific writer
    • 80+ books
      • novels (@50)
      • collections of short stories, poetry (@30)
      • plays
      • literary criticism
      • essays
  • writes in longhand in a notebook, types on a typewriter

 

THEMES

  • “I am a chronicler of the American experience.”
  • “the moral and social conditions of my generation”
  • "The Dark Lady of American Letters"
  • examines the relationship between love & violence in American society
  • love & sexual power
  • violence and victimization
  • feminist
    • not woman writer
    • but a woman who writes
  • self-discovery
    • selfhood, identity
    • the high cost of autonomy
  • psychology
    • "third force" psychology
    • humanist psychology
    • Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers
    • themes = self, self-actualization, health, creativity, intrinsic nature, being, becoming, individuality, and meaning
    • communion (not mastery)
  • philosophy
  • history

THEMES

GENRES:

  • poetry
  • short story
  • drama
  • fiction:
    • novels
    • Gothic novels
      • (neo-Gothic: ghosts, mansions, mysteriousness – based on actual events)
      • (see Shirley Jackson. Flannery O'Connor)
      • themes: crimes against women, children, poor; family shapes destiny
    • horror
    • courtroom drama
    • mystery novels
    • suspense novels
  • non-fiction:
    • sports philosophy
    • critical essays
      • literature
      • politics
      • sports
      • life

STYLE

PROTAGONIST:

  • female protagonist
  • struggling w/her adolescence
  • finds herself in danger

*20TH CENTURY AMERICAN GOTHIC:

  • exaggerated horror
  • gloomy
  • violence
  • dark side of human nature:
    • violence, crime
    • psychological disorder, perversion
    • attempts to break destructive cycles of violence, poverty
    • rebirth through violence
  • ordinary infused with terror
    • ordinary people,
    • possible dangers in everyday life
    • (see Shirley Jackson)
  • like Edgar Allan Poe:
    • Gothic conventions
    • +
    • contemporary social/political concerns
    • dark humor
  • *based on actual events*:
    • “real history to imaginary lives”
    • --> adds depth to stories

COMPARISONS:

  • Flannery O'Connor
  • Shirley Jackson
  • Stephen King
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Eudora Welty
  • William Faulkner
  • John Steinbeck

 STYLE

  • *love & violence
  • sex & power (politics)
  • possible dangers in everyday life
  • ordinary people dealing with American life
    • (see Tobias Wolff)
  • characters’ struggles, frustrations, disparities
    • = emblems of US society
  • probing social analysis
  • realistic:
    • psychological portrayals
    • ordinary people
    • descriptive, vivid
    • minute detail
  • extended dialogue
  • minute detail
  • violent action
  • perversion, mental derangement
    • (her fascination with psychological & social disorder)
  • semi-autobiographical (upper-New York, Michigan)

SETTINGS:

  • Eden County
    • (fictionalized Erie County)
    • (see her biography)
  • Detroit
    • (see her biography)
  • suburbia

CHARACTERIZATION:

  • psychological backgrounding
  • search/struggle for personal identity
  • ordinary people, in contemporary American society
  • various social classes, American subgroups

NOTES

NOTES

LINKS LINKS