Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Oates, Joyce Carol - Monica Loeb (essay date autumn 2000)

Oates, Joyce Carol - Monica Loeb (essay date autumn 2000)

Monica Loeb (essay date autumn 2000)

SOURCE: Loeb, Monica. “La spirale: Joyce Carol Oates's French Connection.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 35 (autumn 2000): 85-98.

[In the following essay, Loeb compares Oates's “The Spiral” to Gustave Flaubert's outline for an unpublished novel, La]

“Pour vivre, je ne dis pas heureux …, mais tranquille, il faut se créer dehors de l'éxistence visible … une autre existence interne et inaccessible.”

Gustave Flaubert

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded off with a sleep.”

William Shakespeare

“The Spiral,” a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, was first published in the 1969 winter issue of Shenandoah. With its focus on a man in crisis, it easily fits in with her series of reimagined stories where men and women find themselves facing various...

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