Symbolic Games in A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

This article will show that postmodern thoughts play an essential role in Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland Quartet. In its opening novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, I will also consider the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts that influenced Oates’ Quartet. Oates’ and Carroll’s texts share the depiction of decentralised permissiveness and rejection of all authority that I interpret through the aesthetic conception of postmodern games by Gilles Deleuze. By blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, the aspect of violence is repressed in Carroll’s texts. However, Oates aestheticises violence to maximise the diverse impact of postmodern sentiment on American cultural forms that emerged in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to Carroll’s Alice, who demands order to protect herself from the chaos, Clara in A Garden of Earthly Delights rejects conventions and fabricates chaos to alleviate her unprivileged condition.

Dismemberment of Kathleen’s Psyche in Joyce Carol Oates’s 'The Rise of Life on Earth'

Postmodern literary texts have been exploring characters that are whimsically strange. The tacit plots in the postmodern textual space enable the writers to construct and manifest the mental space of the characters in the textual world. The Rise of Life on Earth written by Joyce Carol Oates concocts the emotional estrangement of the protagonist, Kathleen Hennessy. Decrypting the text amplifies the unabating efforts of Kathleen to survive in a world that has been portrayed as a larger, repressive and pernicious family. Her masquerade to be a shy, passive and well-behaved girl hides the menacing vengeance that has culminated as a result of abuses and afflictions. Her mental spaces are constructed during the course of narration. This paper purports to scrutinize the fragmented psyche of Kathleen and the conceptual integration of mental space and textual space that replicates both social and individualistic reality and expands the understanding of Oates’ text.

The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>

The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic

<p>Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that explores the Gothic text, has developed substantially over the last twenty-five years. The field often frames the Gothic as a serious literature, involved in historic discourse, and having special psychological acuity; this thesis suggests that there are a number of problems with these argumentative strategies, and that the academy now makes claims for the Gothic that are discontinuous with how this popular genre is understood by most readers. While Gothic studies is the study of a genre, curiously, it has seldom engaged with theorisations of genre. Nevertheless, an understanding of what genre is, and how it alters reading practice, is crucial to understanding the Gothic text. This thesis attempts to reconcile and develop a number of disparate approaches to genre through Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. It argues that genre is not a set of textual conventions but a group of procedures that facilitate and modify both writing and reading practices. Consequently, genres like the Gothic should be seen as discrete historicised phenomena, which retain a cohesive practical sense of how they ought to be performed before they hold discursive properties. Rather than arguing for the literary value of the Gothic, this thesis understands the genre as a popular practice. The consequences of this theorisation of the Gothic are explored in case studies of particular moments in three separate Gothic fields. Firstly, the American Gothic of the mid-nineteen-eighties, particularly Stephen King's It, Joyce Carol Oates' Mysteries of Winterthurn, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, facilitates a discussion of the relationship between Gothic and literary practices. The Gothic text has its origins in 'lowbrow' popular culture, even as it sometimes aspires to 'highbrow' literary performances. Secondly, the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties is used to stage a discussion of both the way that readers become involved and immersed in the Gothic text, creating a distinct subjunctive 'world', and of the way that Gothics define themselves in relation to each other. The discussion refers to Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out, which heavily influenced the field, as demonstrated in works by Susan Howatch, Kingsley Amis, Robert Aickman and Mervyn Peake. Wheatley's depiction of the black mass became a key Gothic procedure, and can be read as this particular field's metaphor of its own practice. Thirdly, New Zealand's underdeveloped Gothic field provides a venue to explore the Gothic's relationship with nation and national literature, and how the practice is involved in landscape. Frank Sargeson's stories and his novella The Hangover, together with Janet Frame's A State of Siege are texts authored by canonical New Zealand writers that participate in a local Gothic, although their participation in popular genre has been little recognised. This thesis argues that the Gothic is a commonsense cultural practice, facilitated through the canniness of habitus.</p>

Degrowth in American Ecofictions

E doktori disszertáció kutatásának tárgyai amerikai ökofikciók. A degrowth reprezentációk logikájának megfelelően három amerikai ökofikciót választottam elemzésem tárgyául: Joyce Carol Oates The Falls (2005), Donald Richard Don DeLillo White Noise (1986), és Edward Abbey The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) című munkáit. Mivel a növekedés, fejlődés és az ezeknek megfelelő ideológia az uralkodó világszerte, s mert különféle gazdasági rendszerekben és kultúrákban éltek és vissza is éltek vele, a fejlődés és a növekedés kérdése globális, nemzetállami határokon átívelő probléma. Kínában, a világ többi részéhez hasonlóan, a termeléssel kapcsolatos megszállotság ideológái és a fejlődés bálványozása szintén a helyi ökológiát fenyegeti és számos társadalmi probléma eredője. Jóllehet Kína szocialista ország, de jelenleg produktivista fázisban tart. Ugyanakkor a világpolitika szereplőjeként nem kerülheti el a nemzetiközi diszkurzusokat uraló más, fejlett kapitalista országok gazdasági, politikai és kulturális befolyását. Ezek az vetítik előre, hogy Kína – más, kapitalista országokhoz hasonlóan – még hosszú ideig a produktivizmus ideológiájának hatása alatt fog állni. Ezen felül a szocializmus bizonyos mértékig egyfajta nemzeti kapitalizmus, ami szintén megkívánja a felhalmozást és nagyra értékeli a GDP növekedést, amire pedig a fejlődés és haladás mutatójaként tekintenek. E fenti megfontolás alapján kínaiként a vizsgálati korpuszt és annak ökokritikai elemzését egy híres kínai ökofikcióval kívánom bővíteni, Jiang Rong Wolf Totem (2004) című munkájával, melyet az amerikai tudós, Howard Goldblatt fordított angolra, és 2008-ban adták ki az USA-ban. Ezáltal inkább a disszertáció által vizsgált probléma transznacionális dimenziójára akarok rávilágítani, mintsem az amerikai és kínai ökofikciók összehasonlító elemzését elvégezni, vagy az amerikai irodalom degrowth szempotú feltárásának kultúraközi kibővítését végrehajtani.

Nostalgia of Time and Return of Space: An Analysis of the Artistic Dimensions of Oates' Early Novels

Joyce Carol Oates’ early novel art is represented by the tetralogy of Wonderland. As a representative writer of “psychological realism”, she dissolves the character consciousness with dialogue characteristics into time and space. Oates constructed a nostalgic time and homecoming space, which showing the cultural landscape of the 1960s’ in the United States.