Literary Marriages
Monica Loeb
A series of intertextual short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 1972, constitutes the subject-matter of the present work. Having entered into ‘literary marriages' with beloved masters, such as Kafka, Joyce, Thoreau, Flaubert, James and Chekhov, Oates has ‘re-imagined' their classic masterpieces. This study aims at finding out whether Oates remains ‘faithful' to the original versions. What elements besides the titles are retained, or added ? Why does a young American woman writer undertake a dialogue with deceased authors and their texts ? Why the short story genre ? What is Oates's relationship to intertextuality, literary tradition, or the very aesthetics of her own art ? Grounded in theories of intertextuality, comparative analyses show that Oates remains ‘faithful' in some of her spiritual unions, while committing ‘infidelities' in others. For a woman writer in the 1970s transgression was a necessity for survival ; these stories thus belong to the revisionary movement. While assimilating and engendering a strongly Eurocentred male literary tradition, Oates manages to unlock energy from the original stories transforming them into expressions of her very own distinct literary voice.
01/12/2001
198
pages
64,20
€
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