About the Author
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology

1. The Myth of the Isolated Artist
2. The Apprenticeship: A Lost Eden
3. TheTrilogy of Social Groups: The Quest for Violent Liberation
4. The Phantasmagoria of Personality: Liberation through Love
5. The Fragmented Self: The Quest for Oneness
6. The Short Stories: The Experimental Ground
7. The Achievement: Rhetoric and Reader

Notes and References
Selected Bibliography
Index

Excerpt

Nurtured by modern psychology and philosophy, Joyce Carol Oates's characterization is modernist in conception, but her dominant method has been traditional, almost anachronistic in form. A seemingly clinical report of the debilitating effects of familial and environmental limitations, much of her fiction falls within the tradition of American Naturalism, but its visionary perspective counters the determinism usually associated with Naturalism. These anomalies raise problems in interpretation, and sometimes prevent Oates's work from communicating effectively with an audience. As I stated at the outset of this study, I do not think that Joyce Carol Oates's work very often finds the participatory readership she desires, by that I mean that the "complex propositions about the nature of personality" which she puts forward through her fiction are not given serious consideration by many readers. Rather oddly, her fiction appears to appeal at an emotional level to one audience while being directed rhetorically to another. Using the term "rhetoric of fiction" in its broader sense, as Wayne C. Booth does in his book of that title, to mean the total effect of all the components of a work rather than in its narrower sense to refer to the overt, distinguishable voice of the author, I have to conclude, finally, that the rhetorical effect of Oates's work is sometimes impaired or blurred by an incomplete fusion of the components of her art. I suggest this after attempting to assess my own responses to her fiction along with those of my students, colleagues, and friends, and of reviewers and critics. The responses of a number of discerning readers point often to an apparent disharmony of subject and form and of emotional impact and thematic statement at the heart of some of Oates's works.