A Jamesonian Reading of Joyce Carol Oates’ Selected Short Stories

Document Type : case study

Authors

1 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, Islamic Azad University, Arak Branch, Iran

2 member of faculty at Islamic Azad University of Arak IRAN

3 Assistant Professor, Department of English. Islamic Azad University, Arak Branch, Iran

10.22098/jpc.2024.11777.1139

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the concept of culture in the collection of short stories entitled as Lovely,Deep, Dark and I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates through Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodern culture.The portraits of women,men,and children show Oates's compassion for the human life in the modern society.According to Jameson,postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense,as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture,death, and terror.Lovely,Deep,Dark and I Am No One You Know represent the spot of postmodern man’s struggle with his background and real culture.The stories are associated with an avant-garde movement in which nature is gone and this feature can be seen in all collections of the stories.They create a deconstructed condition in which there is no direct relation between social beings.The setting of the stories reminds the postmodern society which is the metaphor for the current American society with a revolutionized culture.The place that the authors have created in the stories is devoid of natural life and happiness.It is a fabricated place in which the people are programmed like robots.Throughout the stories,the authors represent technological pessimism which refers to the sense of disappointment,anxiety,and menace in subjects due to technological issues.The researcher contributes to identify the main cause of Oates’s attack to her characters in these collections.The main purpose of research paper finds the cause of Oates’s message in postmodern world

Keywords

Preventive Counseling
Volume 5, Issue 1
February 2024
Pages 108-123

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