Joyce Carol Oates
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| - | "The protracted onstage torture of [[Shakespeare]]'s Gloucester in ''[[King Lear]]'' is the very height of the theatrical [[grotesque]], but so is in less graphic terms, the fate of [[Samuel Beckett]]'s hapless heroes and heroines-the female mouth of Mouth, for instance. From [[Nikolai Gogol]]'s "[[The Nose (Gogol short story)|The Nose]]" to [[Paul Bowles]]'s "[[A Distant Episode]]," from images of demonic flesh of [[Max Klinger]], [[Edvard Munch]], [[Gustav Klimt]] and [[Egon Schiele]] to [[Francis Bacon]], [[Eric Fischl]], [[Robert Gober]]; from [[Jeremias Gotthelf]] ("[[The Black Spider]]," [[1842]]) to postmodern fantasists [[Angela Carter]], [[Thomas Ligotti]], [[Clive Barker]], [[Lisa Tuttle]] and mainstream best-sellers [[Stephen King]], [[Peter Straub]], [[Anne Rice]] - we recognize the bold strokes of the grotesque, however widely styles vary. (Is a ghost story inevitably of the genre of the grotesque? - no. Victorian ghost stories, on the whole, are too "nice"-too ladylike, whatever the sex of the writer. Much of [[Henry James]]'s ghostly fiction, like that of his contemporaries [[Edith Wharton]] and [[Gertrude Atherton]], though elegantly written, is too genteel to qualify.) The grotesque is the hideous animal-men of [[H. G. Wells]]'s ''[[The Island of Dr. Moreau]]'', or the taboo-images of the most inspired filmmaker of the grotesque of our time, [[David Cronenberg]] (''The Fly, The Brood, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch'') - that is, the grotesque always possesses a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological [[exegesis]] can exorcise. One might define it, in fact, as the very antithesis of "[[nice]]."--''[[Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque]]'' (1994) by Joyce Carol Oates | + | "The [[grotesque]] always possesses a blunt [[physicality]] that no amount of [[epistemological]] [[exegesis]] can exorcise. One might define it, in fact, as the very antithesis of "[[nice]]."--''[[Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque]]'' (1994) by Joyce Carol Oates |
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"The grotesque always possesses a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise. One might define it, in fact, as the very antithesis of "nice."--Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) by Joyce Carol Oates |
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Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16 1938) is an American author. She writes in the tradition of gothic fiction, in such novels as Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance and short story collections such as Night-Side. Sexual violence is a central theme in Oates's work, noted in works such as Rape: A Love Story. When once asked why her writing is so violent, Oates remarked that the question is always sexist. "The serious writer, after all, bears witness." She is a connoisseur of the grotesque. In Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994) she defined that sensibility as the antithesis of "nice."
