Joyce Carol Oates’s “Slow”: Sudden Detective Fiction?
Joyce Carol Oates’s fictional project, which considers literature to be both a realm for the exploration of unconscious impulses and a crucial element of lived experience, has led her to focus on stories that deal with the aftereffects of violent crime. However, Oates has specifically stated that sh...
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| izdano v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Glavni avtor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
| Izdano: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| Online dostop: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Izvleček: | Joyce Carol Oates’s fictional project, which considers literature to be both a realm for the exploration of unconscious impulses and a crucial element of lived experience, has led her to focus on stories that deal with the aftereffects of violent crime. However, Oates has specifically stated that she does not write detective fiction: she is a writer of what she calls “psychological mystery and suspense” fiction. Rather than the resolution of enigma, it is the act of detecting—the quest itself—that is the most important element of her stories. Oates’s stories therefore often expose, but offer no answers to, the mysteries of life. They use textual strategies full of gaps to recreate unconscious processes, and they introduce crime plots that are not fully resolved. Indeed, this is the aspect—the inherently active questioning state of being in suspense—emphasized by the subtitles to so many of her recent story collections which are variations on “Tales of Suspense.” In other contexts, Oates has referred to herself as a “psychological realist” and to her work as “psychological realism.” This article will use a close reading of Oates’s micro-fiction story “Slow” to illustrate Oates’s particular form of psychological realism and show how she integrates elements of detective fiction into her writing to great effect. |
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