Joyce Carol Oates

The theme of the story is the mixture of pain and love in the intergenerational conflict between mothers and daughters—and the difficulty, further, of truly knowing another person. The story is...

The theme of this sorrowful story is teenage sexuality, particularly alternate lifestyle sexuality. In a way, it might be said that the central character Barbara "Sunny" Burhman serves to focalize...

The poem "Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money" was published in a collection of the same name in 1978. The era in which it appeared is important to an understanding of the...

Reading Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Journey," one is reminded of Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Less Traveled": I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two...

The story "...& Answers" is a tale of psychology, trauma, healing, and repression. The unnamed protagonist in the story is dealing with the trauma of her father's death, and she begins...

Joyce Carol Oates's poem begins by alternating the lives of the women and the men. As the title suggests, the first theme is the importance of food in the life of the women: breaking eggs with...

I think that this question becomes the central issue in the work. For Oates, it seems to her articulation of the journey is one in which the protagonist is moving through it with a specific...

This is an interesting question and one not easily answered, I think. Oates structures her story so that Zachary's struggle is witnessed through an observer's experience while the narrator tells...

I don't see Oates' usage of violence as any different than other writers that attempt to construct settings in which the characterizations of their protagonists can be developed. Oates does not...

I have a collection of Joyce Carol Oates short stories that I bought a while back so I could have a hard copy of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" to annotate for my classroom. This...