|
|
|
 Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Plume, 1999
386 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
Whether probing the psyche of serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, evaluating the championship mettle of Mike Tyson, or illuminating the work of Herman Melville, the art of Rene Magritte and Edward Hopper, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Joyce Carol Oates displays an astonishing breadth of knowledge and interests. In this collection of nearly fifty essays, articles, and reviews, one of our country's leading literary figures and social critics explores myriad facets of the American experience, in fiction and beyond, from Fitzgerald to Plath, Melville to Updike, Flannery O'Connor to Timothy McVeigh.
Oates makes incisive connections between Kerouac and Byron, Bowles and Poe, and brings a striking originality of view to Raymond Chandler's noir hero, Philip Marlowe, and the controversy over "victim art." Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s memoir, Colored People, is "a pleasure to read, and, in the deepest sense, inspiring," while The Middle Years of Henry James portrays "the terrifying aloneness to which the demands of his art have brought him. " She explores the sexual temptations of Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market, " and offers a masterful analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "whose unsparing tragic vision has a particular resonance for the twentieth century with its blood tide of history. "
Also included here is Oates on Oates—personal essays on her own works, such as Expensive People, Wonderland, and Foxfire. This diverse volume offers a privileged glimpse into the mind of one of our most unique and compelling writers.
Contents
Preface
I. Where Is an Author?
Where Is an Author?
"In Olden Times, When Wishing Was Having . . .": Classic and Contemporary Fairy Tales
The Aesthetics of Fear
Art and Ethics?—The F(U)tility of Art
The Romance of Art: Four Brief Pieces
 The Romance of Art
First Principles
Transformations of Play
The Artist as Perpetual Antagonist
"Zero at the Bone": Despair as Sin and Enlightenment
Art and "Victim Art"
On Fiction in Fact
II. "I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness": Reviews, Review-Essays, Journalism
F. Scott Fitzgerald Revisited
Raymond Chandler: Genre and "Art"
Rene Magritte: Art contra Art
After the Road: The Art of Jack Kerouac
Haunted Sylvia Plath
The Enigmatic Art of Paul Bowles
Jean Stafford: Biography as Pathography
To Bedlam: Anne Sexton
Bellow's Portraits
John Updike's Rabbit
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Colored People
John Edgar Wideman: Memoir and Fiction
Exile and Homeland: Brian Moore
Updike Toward the End of Time
Inside the Locked Room: P.D. James
A Dream of Justice: Dorothy L. Sayers
Lost in Boxing
The Miniaturist Art of Grace Paley
American Views: Elizabeth Hardwick
Three American Gothics
Jeffrey Dahmer, November 1994
Timothy James McVeigh, May 1995
Mike Tyson, July 1997
"I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness": The Literature of Serial Killers
III. "The Madness of Art": Essays and Introductions
"Then All Collapsed": Tragic Melville
The Essential Emily Dickinson
"The Madness of Art": Henry James's "The Middle Years"
The Riddle of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"
Rediscovering Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware
Tragic Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: A Celebration
Killer Kids
Workings of Grace: Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger"
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, 1942: Painting and Poem
The Artist Looks at Nature: Some Works of Charles Sheeler (1883-1965)
IV. Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Prefaces, Afterwords
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Selected Early Stories: Afterword
Expensive People: The Confessions of a "Minor Character"
Wonderland Revisited
"American, Abroad"
"Why Don't You Come Live with Me It's Time"
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
"You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home"
"Mark of Satan
Will You Always Love Me?
"Ghost Girls"
Acknowlegements
|
Epigraph
They who are to be judges must also be performers.
—Aristotle
Reviews
- Publishers Weekly, June 28, 1999, p68
- Booklist, July 1999, p1917
- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, August 1, 1999, p1, 6
- New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1999, p18
|
Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/essays/whereivebeen.html
|
|
Previous