joyce carol oates against nature essay

In a literary tradition populated by many figures known for a single play or a handful of painstakingly wrought novels, Oates is notable first for her consistently prodigious output. Hundreds of stories and poems, printed and anthologized in a wide variety of publications, and dozens of novels, novellas, plays, essays, prefaces, and reviews have come from her pen, with an equally wide variety of settings, themes, genres, and styles. This productivity has even been a source of some criticism, inspiring suspicions that Oates works too fast and carelessly, that she lacks the basic self-censorship necessary to a writer. Oates, unaffected by criticism, has never slowed her pace. While some of her novels seem more felt than planned, and some of her stories inevitably overlap, Oates is a writer whose meanings can be appreciated cumulatively and whose craft and imagination are beyond question. A more serious criticism is that her writing, especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s, is too violent, too dark, too obsessed with blood and death. (In 1981, in an essay in The New York Times Book Review titled “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?,” Oates branded such criticism blatantly sexist and asserted the female novelist’s right to depict nature as she sees it.) A typical Oates novel may feature mass murder, rape, suicide, arson, an automobile crash, or an autopsy, portrayed with detachment and graphic detail. Such violence is less a literal portrayal of the author’s experience of life (though her great grandfather committed suicide in a rage after trying to kill his wife, Oates’s own life has been relatively sedate) than an expression of the violence she sees beneath the surface of American life. One of Oates’s primary concerns is the shape of American identity in the twentieth century. Her novels often trace the lives of prototypical Americans and can be seen as paradigms of their.
Seeing Nature :: 4 Works Cited Length: 1955 words (5.6 double-spaced pages) Rating: Red (FREE)   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Seeing Nature In the economical market, competition is harsh. There are a myriad of companies that have one common purpose: to sell to the public their products, commoditites or services. Attracting the largest number of customers is their common goal. Advertisements are extensively used as a persuasive means of making their products appeal to a targeted population of consumers. Effective techniques are therefore employed in the creation of these advertisements. Such a technique, one might argue, is the use of nature, of a connection between the products and natural elements. These advertisements draw on our attitudes about nature, attitudes that are largely shaped by the history and culture we are a part of. Such an advertisement, in which nature is used to elicit feelings and past experiences within people that would lead them to desire to consume a specific product, is the Milano one. Through this advertisement, the Milano company wishes to sell wheel hubcaps for automobiles. In the picture, the shiny hubcap reflects a beautiful scenery of an Italian countryside. The reference domain includes the presentation of nature as beautiful, sunny, healthy, productive, comforting, relaxing, uplifting, clean, accessible to man, passive, and welcoming. The absent elements are pain, mud, clouds, wilderness, potential of harm, danger. The offer that is held out to the reader if they purchase the product is to be taken to a quiet, peaceful place in the countryside, away from the hectic urban life their company name (Milano) implies, a place where they can live in harmony with nature. The link between the reference domain and the offer is visible. The hubcap represents a window to nature, through which we can observe.
Against Nature An essay by Joyce Carol Oates I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation. Interview with the Chicago Tribune, book world editor. Opening | Text | Interpretation | Word use | Organizing our approach | Her view | Her question | Argument | Structure | Use of other authors Oates uses Thoreau's passage here to argue her point: She excites an expectation that she cannot satisfy. Henry David Thoreau, 1854 It eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all. line 10 The entire article is here. See Nature by Oates019.pdf Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument Interpretation In Against Nature, author Joyce Carol Oates takes us on an inward journey to encounter the exterior quality of all our lives and as she moves us through the grotesque and smarmy[1] imagery of nature writing Ðeven in references to excellent literature [2] Ð to challenge our prejudices. “Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.” Joyce Carol Oates  J. M. W. Turner's Frosty Morning, oil on canvass, 1813. [3] She allows us to take nothing for granted, as she examines our biases so that we are stripped of any reasonable emotional defense when she turns the argument upside down; leaving us with little in the way to rationally challenge her conclusion. lines 33-34, ¦ 22- p. 843. Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument | source Discovering the complexity of motive when writing: Joyce Carol Oates, The subject is there only by the grace of the author's language, Oates, Against Nature; Anthology. page 843, line 31-32. If that is true, then.
Rick Gresham English 101 CRP Oates 30 July 2013 A Critical Response to Joyce Carol Oates “Against Nature”               In her essay “Against Nature,” by Joyce Carol Oates, Oates starts out telling about herself lying on the ground while her heart undergoes a short but intense bout of turbo-beating. She has to admit, while lying there, that there is a presence which “nothing to be said about it expresses it, nothing touches it, it's an absolute against which nothing human can be measured (Pg. 59).” She obviously feels something, but is clearly wary of falling into the nature glorification trap. In order to keep her somewhat cheeky, sharp-witted approach, she delves into several short anecdotes about rotting dogs self-devouring raccoons. These rancid gems clearly negate any notion that she will fall into glitzy, fluffy descriptions of the beauty of dew drops forming on her rose bushes.               Still, the next time that she shares a story that describes what we might call a “highly spiritual” near death experience, deeply moving notions of the lack of self and existing as rays of light that people generally only experience after years of meditation or after ingesting certain botanical and fungal wonders. There may be something to this, but nature itself is not what is so amazing to her. She is not sold on the nature-as-spirit conviction, and has no problem systematically destroying an innocent line of black ants at the end of the passage.               Joyce Carol Oates is against nature.  She feels that as a writer nature offers her nothing.  She seems to think that the inspiration from nature is very limited as it only can offer a few theme, that it has no language, laughter, irony or other such ideas that most people find entertainment and enjoyment in. When she recalls her memories about nature she talks about times when there were leeches on her, or when she.