Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Fiction In Fact And Fact In Fiction In The Writing Of Joyce Carol Oates, Tanya L. Tromble

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Joyce Carol Oates draws extensively on news stories, as well as on elements of her own family’s past, to find inspiration for her works of fiction. She has written about the Chappaquiddick incident involving Ted Kennedy and the JonBenet Ramsay murder case. She has worked the Niagara Falls Love Canal environmental scandal into the framework of The Falls and taken inspiration from sordid events from her own family’s past in the beginning of The Gravedigger’s Daughter. However, in none of these examples does Oates purport to relate the precise real-life “facts” of the historical events. Indeed, for an author …

Review Of The Sacrifice, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Review of Joyce Carol Oates's novel The Sacrifice focusing on how racial politics in America can transform individuals into symbols, erasing their human complexity.

Distaste: Joyce Carol Oates And Food, David Rutledge

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Distaste: Joyce Carol Oates and Food

Abstract

In many of her short stories and novels, Joyce Carol Oates depicts an unhealthy relationship with food. The range of these unhealthy relationships is wide, from overeating to the point of suicide, in Expensive People, to starving oneself in an attempt to deny one’s physical nature, in “Orange” and them. Overindulgence is a means for attempting to fill that space where the soul should be; undereating is often an attempt to deny one’s place in the social world. The eating disorders she portrays are rooted in both personal and social causes. …

Review Of Lovely, Dark, Deep, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Review of Joyce Carol Oates’s book of short stories Lovely, Dark, Deep considering themes of tumultuous love affairs, Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, and representations of writers.

Briefly Noted [Reviews Of Paul Theroux, Alice Munro, Beth Harvor, Charles Bukowski], Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond J. Smith

Ontario Review

JOYCE CAROL OATES has recently published a collection of satiric academic stories, The Hungry Ghosts (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), and a collection of critical essays, New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (Vanguard Press, 1974).

RAYMOND J. SMITH has published essays and reviews in The Southern Review, Bucknell Review, Modern Poetry Studies, and elsewhere. He teaches English at the University of Windsor.

Reading Nostalgia, Anger, And The Home In Joyce Carol Oates’S Foxfire, Heather A. Hillsburg

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

This article draws from Svetlana Boym’s concept of reflective nostalgia to explore the intersections between violence, memory, and the home in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Foxfire. Through reflective nostalgia, Maddy is able to link the abuse she and her friends endure to various iterations of the home. Reflective nostalgia also allows Maddy to draw connections between anger and the domestic realm, and to write the members of FOXFIRE back into dominant narratives that largely exclude their lived experiences. Ultimately, this paper argues that because nostalgia often centers on the home, it is ideally suited to foreground the untenable nature …

Review Of Marya: A Life, Eric K. Anderson

Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies

Review of Joyce Carol Oates' novel Marya: A Life considering the autobiographical content and exploration of self in the narrative.

Melding Literature And Technology To Showcase And American Classic, Randy Souther

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

As a reference technology librarian in Gleeson Library and Geschke Learning Resource Center, he maintains one of the University's most accessed websites, and teaches students, faculty, and staff, the art of research amid the shelves and stacks, on the internet, and through scores of databases.

After work hours, Randy Souther sheds the librarian role, assumes the identity of bibliophile and abets thousands of Joyce Carol Oates fans by updating the definitive website on one of America's most prolific authors. Oates, a recent Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist, has acknowledged his work on her behalf. Here, Souther takes issue with …

Joyce Carol Oates' Dark Love Story Of Affection And Abuse, Randy Souther

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

Review of Joyce Carol Oates's 1996 novella First Love: A Gothic Tale, emphasizing the psychological underpinnings of the dual gothic and realistic elements in the story. Originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, August 4, 1996.