A critical analysis of selected works of Joyce Carol Oates.

• Main Author: Coutts, Marisa Anne.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 1983
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/1755
• Institution: De La Salle University

Abstract. This account of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction has revealed--in ways that were unpredictable when the task was assumed--that she is able to articulate and evoke some vitality important aspects of contemporary American experience. Appalled by the emotional and spiritual determinism of our age, Oates has felt it to be the writer's calling to point his readers towards such an awareness, and to call forth his creativity to respond to it. An appropriate inference is that Oates is able to look into and beyond the human psyche and thus, in her writing, she makes her readers acutely aware of the tensions than manifest themselves in erupting passions and violence, and she perceives amidst this the barely recognizable desire of the ego to transcend its obsesseions. Her characters, described with such intense realism, become a pyschic landscape where they participate in the creation of their reality. What American now has is materialism nearing its furtherest expression and it is in Joyce Carol Oate's service as a writer, that she shows how the human spirit is being damaged by the world as we know it, while at the same time affording us intense involvement in that spirit.