Woman Writer

by Joyce Carol Oates

Twenty-seven essays touch upon everything from Moby Dick to Boxing, cover literati from Emily Dickinson to Kafka, and take up the fiery debate over differences and similarities between male and female writers

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism

401 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Deborah Siddoway · Rating 5 out of 5]

The usual disclaimer, that this is not an academic review.

With an eclectic mix of essays moving from thoughts on writing, writing process, nineteenth-century literary themes, and popular culture, this was an enjoyable and engaging read. I predominantly purchased this for the essays exploring Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, both of which provided an interesting analysis of the texts, and form the basis for the rest of this review.

Oates begins by delving into the philosophical undertones of Shelley's horror story, 'in which ideas are given ponderous but occasionally quite moving dramatic utterance' and then looks at the allegorical purposive intent of the demon and his creator. As she reaches the end of her insightful and well-reasoned essay on Shelley, she looks to Shelley's precarious personal life to contextualise the creation of the novel itself, a personal life dominated by the loss of her infant children, and a non-marriage to a man already married to another.

In her essay on Jane Eyre, Oates seeks to identify the commonality of concerns that can be seen between Shelley and Brontë, both of which had a pre-occupation with the Edenic story depicted in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Underlying her essays is Oates's concern with female agency and the constraints that operated on it. I will be referencing this book in my forthcoming PhD thesis, but in the meantime, I recommend this as read if you have any interest at all in women's writing. It is a powerful testament to the process, the resilience, and the work it takes for the woman to become the writer.

[Janice (JG) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of articles, written by Joyce Carol Oates and published in diverse magazines and journals over a span of several years, is a gem. The pieces cover subjects ranging from Kafka, Winslow Homer, Gorbachev, Mike Tyson, Ferraris, Emily Dickinson, Detroit, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and etc. She quotes dozens of writers from Virginia Woolf to Norman Mailer to Jorges Luis Gorges to Poe, and more. It is a great way to get to know this talented and prolific writer, she is smart, funny, wise, edgy, compassionate, and humble.

And she loves reading, "It might be argued that reading constitutes the keenest, because most secret, sort of pleasure. And that it's a pleasure best savored by night: by way of an ideal insomnia. At such times, lamplight illuminating the page but not much else, the world is writ small, deliciously small, and words, another's voice, come forward. What I love about wakefulness, the insomniac says, is being alone, and reading."

[twrctdrv]

it's always fun for me to read these long essay compilations by jco. they aren't specifically good or even much interesting (she's a killer writer of fiction, but very conventional wrt this stuff), but that's almost what i love about them. how else can you get such a perfect little cross section of another time. jco's ideas themselves may not be conventional (any twitter lurker knows she's a very interesting thinker, often stunningly right), but the audience she assumes, least in this collection, certainly are imagined as in hte middle of the road. so she writes to a person you can imagine, a person from a different time, before you're born. and idk, i like that, even if overall there's little of much interest otherwise

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 3 out of 5]

À lire surtout pour l'essai qui donne son titre au recueil, magnifique résumé des contingences historiques et sociales qui "inventent" la (Femme) dans l'écrivaine. Le reste est inégal et ressasse des idées qu'on a souvent lu ailleurs, chez Oates et chez d'autres.

Mention spéciale, tout de même, aux trois articles sur Mike Tyson au sommet de sa gloire à la fin des années 1980. Du non-fiction comme on l'aime, qui se questionne à la fois sur l'art populaire et sur la construction des mythes américains de la violence et de la virilité.

[Rae]

Literary criticism. Mike Tyson. Classics. Essays. Dated but still relevant.

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