Hybridism and Self-Reconstruction in Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story
This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s hybridism in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, as a powerful means of self-assertion and self-reconstruction. It suggests that to write about her painful experience of bereavement Oates resorts to hybridism—generic, narrative and typographic in particular—as...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2015-09-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11092 |
| Summary: | This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s hybridism in her 2011 memoir, A Widow’s Story, as a powerful means of self-assertion and self-reconstruction. It suggests that to write about her painful experience of bereavement Oates resorts to hybridism—generic, narrative and typographic in particular—as it is both a characteristic of her fiction and a means of dramatizing her experience. This hybridism helps her not only express her emotional “derangement” but also recover her identity as a writer. Thus her narrative manifests confusion and continuity, chaos and control, inconsolability and consolation at one and the same time. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |