Spring Break
Much more than a "woman writer"
by Andrea Fineman
Managing Editor
Arts | 5/22/07
Posted online at 1:42 AM EST on 5/22/07
/ Last updated at 10:21 AM EST on 5/22/07
As a professor at Princeton, Oates mentored one of literature's more successful and well-known young novelists: Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the 2003 novel Everything is Illuminated. About her contact with Foer, Oates said: "I have been interviewed a great deal about Jonathan Safran Foer, certainly one of my most brilliant, imaginative and industrious former students. Yet it seems safe to say that, if Jonathan had not ever taken any writing workshop, he would be as original a writer; from the first, in my fiction workshop, it was clear that he would be outstanding. (I even wrote a letter to his parents-something I'd never done before and have not done subsequently.)"
When asked what she looks for or respects in literature, with regard to style and content, Oates said, "Originality, sincerity, passion, intensity of language, unusual and informative subjects." She continued, "I enjoy social comedy, but rarely write it (except perhaps in a novel like Middle Age: A Romance), but my predilection is probably more toward the surreal, the 'gothic' so long as it is melded with psychological realism." Indeed, the combination of the supernatural along with the treatment of psychological matters is a recurring theme in Oates' fictional works, and is something that piques the interest of readers and critics.
When asked what she looks for or respects in literature, with regard to style and content, Oates said, "Originality, sincerity, passion, intensity of language, unusual and informative subjects." She continued, "I enjoy social comedy, but rarely write it (except perhaps in a novel like Middle Age: A Romance), but my predilection is probably more toward the surreal, the 'gothic' so long as it is melded with psychological realism." Indeed, the combination of the supernatural along with the treatment of psychological matters is a recurring theme in Oates' fictional works, and is something that piques the interest of readers and critics.
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Gavarappan Baskaran
posted 8/07/07 @ 7:15 AM EST
I understand the the contribution of Oates to gothic writing is enormous and she creats a very rich traditon in it. Way back from her first novel, she has been tracing the hoorror in the mind of her characters and the themes. (Continued…)
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