Instances of Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Fiction
The aim of the present paper is to reappraise some short stories published by Joyce Carol Oates in the last decades of the twentieth century in order to identify a pattern of violence that pervaded, in the writer’s opinion, the American cultural landscape of the time, one marked and marred by consumerism, material saturation and void spiritual expectations, as well as to show that the writer’s obsessive recurrence to violence was, before the age of online communication, a genuine reflection of a society in which the individual’s desire for public visibility would easily become a substitute for fame and/or success.
Keywords: violence, American life, American Dream, home, displacement.
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