Preface
Abbreviations

ONE A theory of art
TWO A vision of violence
THREE The tragic loss of community in the city
FOUR The language of tragedy and violence
FIVE The tragic vision

Notes
Bibliography
Appendix
Index

Excerpt

In a literary era which variously proclaims the death of the novel, a reversion to fantasy and romance, and the evolution of prose narrative to the nonfiction novel, Joyce Carol Oates maintains a posture of defiance, insisting that the novel is not dead and that art, specifically prose fiction, can and does help to give some shaping order to our reality. The pages of her novels are filled with the inchoate, the "fantastically real"—murder, suicide, riot, rape, loss of identity, loss of community—yet out of this violence a tragic affirmation struggles to emerge, the hope of a hope. "Writing fiction today," she attests in her speech accepting the National Book Award for her novel them, "sometimes seems an exercise in stubborness and an anachronistic gesture that goes against the shrill demands of the age—that only the present has meaning, that the contemplative life is irrelevant, that only the life of purest sensation is divine, and that the act of giving shape to sensation, of giving permanence to the present, is somehow an inversion of the life principle itself."' Oates refuses to side with those writers who insist that the novel has lost its power to interpret life; on the contrary, she firmly believes in the "power of narrative fiction to give coherence to jumbled experience and to bring about a change of heart." This is not to say she writes simplistic or moralistic fables, nor that she seeks to superimpose order on the disordered world of which she writes. Her fiction, infused with her vision of the "tragically diminished urban world," nudges the reader toward a new consciousness.