Papers by Tanya L Tromble
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2016
From the very beginning of her professional writing career, 1 Joyce Carol Oates has been fascinat... more From the very beginning of her professional writing career, 1 Joyce Carol Oates has been fascinated with the enigma of human life, placing "the mystery of human emotions" at the heart of her fiction. 2 In the words of Oates critic and biographer Greg Johnson, she scrutinizes "with dogged thoroughness the moral conditions of an unstable American reality" (1). A preoccupation with metaphysical inquiry is not only present in Oates's fiction but manifests itself in her essay and journal writing as well. The very first entry in her published journal, on January 1, 1973, gets right to the point: "Query: Does the individual exist?" (2). Various comments scattered throughout the work indicate that the mystery of what constitutes the individual and how one perceives and understands the world outside oneself are never far from her mind. 3 Given this predilection for all that is mysterious about human experience, it should come as no surprise to find a reflection on the attraction of myth among those elements of the unexplainable, enigmatic "unstable American reality" she explores, especially in light of Pierre Brunel's statement that "mythical explanation is different from scientific explanation in that it seeks to explain the unexplainable. [...] It insolently, some might say innocently, suggests itself when reason fails" (8, my translation). Similarly, this predilection also explains her career-long commitment to the short-story form which she has written about in the following way: For me the short story is an absolutely undecipherable fact. [...] The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery. (Oates, "The Short Story" 213-14) Gavin Cologne-Brookes concludes his 2005 study of Oates's novels with a discussion of a group of novels he considers to be a trilogy "dealing in particular with the role of myth AUTHORS TANYA TROMBLE Tanya Tromble is an associate member of the CIRPaLL research group at the Université d'Angers. She defended a doctoral dissertation entitled "Interminable Enigma: Joyce Carol Oates's Reimagining of Detective Fiction" and has published articles in English and French on various aspects of Oates's fiction including crime fiction, the epistolary form, violence, the gothic, religion, and 9/11. She is a member of the editorial board for the journal Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. She has recently co-edited a volume of essays on Oates and her work for the Cahiers de l'Herne series.
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, 2016
e story was selected as co-winner of the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition 1 and printed ... more e story was selected as co-winner of the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition 1 and printed in the August 1959 issue. It was reprinted in Oates's first collection, By the North Gate.
Babel, 2015
Cet article etudie la facon dont Joyce Carol Oates, dans les romans Les Maudits et Carthage, cree... more Cet article etudie la facon dont Joyce Carol Oates, dans les romans Les Maudits et Carthage, cree des personnages de « gentleman » deplaces ou en marge, en ayant recours a des stereotypes. Oates decrit deux personnages qui evoluent a l’ecart de leurs communautes respectives ; pour eux, etre un « gentleman » releve du masque, d’une identite cultivee avec plus ou moins de succes. Les Maudits deconstruit le mythe d’un exceptionnalisme regional en montrant un homme du Sud et un homme du Nord en proie aux memes faiblesses morales. Dans Carthage, la capacite de l’Enqueteur d’evoquer le « gentleman » surligne l’artificialite de ce personnage mythique du Sud.
Depuis le debut de sa carriere il y a cinquante ans, les ecrits de Joyce Carol Oates - ses recits... more Depuis le debut de sa carriere il y a cinquante ans, les ecrits de Joyce Carol Oates - ses recits de fiction tout autant que ses recits non-fictionnels - n'ont cesse d'explorer de manieres diverses les mysteres de la vie. Etudier ce qui constitue l'individu, ce qui le caracterise dans sa relation avec le monde, les problemes qu'il peut avoir pour interpreter ses experiences et sa facon de comprendre la difference entre reve et realite ssont des thematiques que l'on retrouve dans toute sa fiction. En ce qui concerne la forme qu'elle adopte pour vehiculer ces notions thematiques, ses oeuvres ont toujours manifeste une certaine hybridite et on arrive difficilement a les classer dans une categorie particuliere. De plus en plus, les romans d'Oates rappellent la fiction policiere mais l'ecrivaine prefere parler d'histoires de "mystere et suspense" plutot que d'employer le libelle "roman policier". Elle a peut-etre raison car bien que faisant penser au roman policier, les oeuvres etudiees - "Rape : a Love Story", "The Tattooed Girl", "Beasts", et "The Falls" - ne correspondent que partiellement aux conventions du genre. Cette these a pour but d'examiner la facon dont Oates reecrit le policier pour le plier a sa vision enigmatique du monde, le rendant ainsi plus humain et plus pertinent aux lecteurs contemporains.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
A growing number of Joyce Carol Oates's novels are a peculiar sort of "whydunit." In Oates's The ... more A growing number of Joyce Carol Oates's novels are a peculiar sort of "whydunit." In Oates's The Falls (2004), her detectives occupy a middle ground between the Golden Age detective and the hard-boiled hero-one example of the metaphysical detective story in her fiction that resists even this wide-ranging designation. Tanya Tromble defended her doctoral dissertation "Interminable Enigma: Joyce Carol Oates's Reimagining of Detective Fiction" at the University of Provence in 2010. She has studied various aspects of Oates's fiction, including crime fiction, the epistolary form, violence, the gothic, religion, and 9/11. She is a member of the editorial boards of Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, Résonances, and Journal of the Short Story in English.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Oct 7, 2022
Joyce Carol Oates's fictional project, which considers literature to be both a realm for the expl... more Joyce Carol Oates's fictional project, which considers literature to be both a realm for the exploration of unconscious impulses and a crucial element of lived experience, has led her to focus on stories that deal with the aftereffects of violent crime. However, Oates has specifically stated that she does not write detective fiction: she is a writer of what she calls "psychological mystery and suspense" fiction. Rather than the resolution of enigma, it is the act of detectingthe quest itself-which is the most important element of her stories. Oates's stories therefore often expose, but offer no answers to, the mysteries of life. They use textual strategies full of gaps to recreate unconscious processes, and they introduce crime plots that are not fully resolved. Indeed, this is the aspect-the inherently active questioning state of being in suspense-emphasized by the subtitles to so many of her recent story collections which are variations on "Tales of Suspense." In other contexts, Oates has referred to herself as a "psychological realist" and to her work as "psychological realism." This article will use a close reading of Oates's micro-fiction story "Slow" to illustrate Oates's particular form of psychological realism and show how she integrates elements of detective fiction into her writing to great effect. Joyce Carol Oates écrit souvent des oeuvres de fiction qui racontent les effets de crimes violentes sur les vies de ses personnages. Cependant, elle a déclaré qu'elle n'écrit pas de la fiction policière. Elle préfère dire qu'elle écrit des récits de suspens comprenant des énigmes psychologiques. Dans les histoires de Oates, la quête prend l'importance sur la résolution de l'énigme. De ce fait, ses histoires identifient les mystères de la vie sans souvent proposer de solutions. Elle a recours à des techniques elliptiques afin d'évoquer l'état de l'inconscient. Elle introduit des mystères qu'elle ne résout souvent pas complètement. En effet, c'est cet état de questionnement permanent qui est le propre du suspens qu'évoquent beaucoup des sous-titres de ses recueils récents où l'on trouve des variations sur la formulation « histoires de suspens ». A d'autres moments, Oates se définit comme étant un « psychological realist » qui écrit des oeuvres de « psychological realism ». Cet article examine de près la mini nouvelle « Slow » afin de montrer comment Oates incorpore des éléments de la fiction policière et du réalisme psychologique dans ses écrits.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018
As a young author, Joyce Carol Oates elaborated an understanding of short fiction that she has la... more As a young author, Joyce Carol Oates elaborated an understanding of short fiction that she has largely maintained throughout her career. In a 1966 essay, she writes that "quality stories usually refine action onto a psychological level. There is 'action'−movement−but it takes place in a person's mind or in a conversation" (12). In 1971, The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery. (214) This conception of the short story as fiction that conveys the psychological realm and speaks to the unconscious has resulted in a body of stories that illustrate the existence of a fluctuating liminal realm between unconscious and conscious experiences. This interest in differing mental realities is paralleled by a similar pendulum-like swing in subject matter which the author explains as follows: My interest swings between a realism which is actually very exciting if you are writing about a dense realistic political social world. That's actually very engrossing and then the world that's more dream-like and surreal and you kind of go back and cross between the two.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Feb 3, 2020
International audienc
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020
Elizabeth Spencer's three-page short story "Owl" is structured around an owl sighting that the pr... more Elizabeth Spencer's three-page short story "Owl" is structured around an owl sighting that the protagonist, Ginia, understands in terms of a legend she has heard from childhood that "[o]wl calls meant death" (458). This idea haunts her throughout the following three days during which she constantly expects trouble to turn to tragedy. By the end of the story, no such tragedy has manifested itself; however, the melancholy tone cast over Ginia's final plea to her nighttime visitor leaves the reader feeling that Ginia may have been right when earlier, "she thought: Maybe it meant me" (459). This article will show how the Gothic mode allows Spencer to build psychological tension in a story in which little action takes place, making it an exemplary model of the technique outlined by Joyce Carol Oates-who, incidentally, first published the story 1in her early essay "Building Tension in the Short Story." Spencer's technique will be highlighted through comparison to other fictional works that also use the legend of the owl's call as structuring trope. Owl Calls as Ominous Portents 2 Elizabeth Spencer's story of gothic haunting is titled by an equally short three-letter word: "Owl." The cryptic title gives no indication of whether the word designates a specific owl or the general notion. The opening of the story continues to nurture this hesitation. The story opens in medias res on the female protagonist who mysteriously finds herself at the window in the middle of the night, wondering what she is doing there. The initial question is followed by a four-line paragraph that provides a modicum of a response. She has heard a noise, identified initially only through the pronoun "it," used twice. When the meaning behind the pronoun is finally revealed in the last word of the paragraph, "owl," it is with the same equivocal meaning as present
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2020
Joyce Carol Oates weaves the mysteries of life into every level of her texts, be it thematic, str... more Joyce Carol Oates weaves the mysteries of life into every level of her texts, be it thematic, structural, lexical, typographical, etc. This article analyses three of Oates's fictional works-The Falls, Beasts and The Tattooed Girl-in order to explore certain textual strategies used by this self-named "formalist" writer to communicate the unconscious realm of her characters. Oates's use of italics, repetition, dashes and ellipses are discussed in depth to show how Oates uses them to evoke the psychological reality of her characters and oppose the notion of appearance to that of psychological experience. These typographical, organizational and punctuation tools allow Oates to underline the communication difficulties, emotions and obsessions they gradually reveal and contribute to evoking Oates's mysterious, frightening fictional realm of characters constantly, yet ineffectually, grasping at meaning. Dans ses textes, Joyce Carol Oates tisse les mystères de la vie à tous les niveaux thématiques, structurels, lexicaux, typographiques, etc. Cet article analyse trois de ses oeuvres (The Falls, Beasts et The Tattooed Girl) afin d'explorer certaines stratégies textuelles utilisées par cette écrivaine, "formaliste" autoproclamée, pour dépeindre le domaine inconscient de ses personnages. L'utilisation par Oates des italiques, de la répétition, des tirets et des ellipses, est étudiée en profondeur pour montrer comment Oates les met en oeuvre pour évoquer la réalité psychologique de ses personnages et opposer la notion d'apparence à celle d'expérience psychologique. Ces outils typographiques, d'organisation et de ponctuation permettent à l'écrivaine d'insister sur les difficultés de communication, les émotions et les obsessions qu'ils révèlent progressivement, et contribuent à évoquer le mystérieux et effrayant royaume fictif de personnages qui tentent constamment, mais sans véritable succès, de saisir le sens. 1 2 3 My translation of: "On n'est pas écrivain pour avoir choisi de dire certaines choses mais pour avoir choisi de les dire d'une certaine façon. Et le style, bien sûr, fait la valeur de la prose." The following abbreviations will be used for in-text citations of these three works: TF for The Falls, B for Beasts and TTG for The Tattooed Girl. Samuel Chase Coale has remarked about Missing Mom (2005), painting out that "the reader is left with a devastating 'why,' the word repeated one-hundred-and-twenty-two times" (438).
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, 2015
3 Abbreviated as JJCO for in-text citations. 4 Abbreviated as WS for in-text citations. 5 Nearly ... more 3 Abbreviated as JJCO for in-text citations. 4 Abbreviated as WS for in-text citations. 5 Nearly twenty years later Oates is still dwelling on this same idea, as demonstrated by the following passage in her "Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque": "I take as the most profound mystery of our human experience the fact that, though we each exist subjectively, and know the world only through the prism of self, this 'subjectivity' is inaccessible, thus unreal, and mysterious, 2
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, Jun 1, 2014
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
International audienc
Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2020
La nouvelle “Owl” d’Elizabeth Spencer prend comme point de depart le mythe largement accepte de l... more La nouvelle “Owl” d’Elizabeth Spencer prend comme point de depart le mythe largement accepte de la nature inquietante de l’appel du hibou puis construit habilement la tension, non pas par le biais de l’action, mais par le recours a l’allusion, a la juxtaposition et a des references au domaine emotionnel du personnage. Pour comparer ce qui est culturel a ce qui est original dans l’œuvre de Spencer, cet article lit la nouvelle en la comparant a trois autres œuvres : I Heard the Owl Call My Name de Margaret Craven, “The Corpse Bird” de Ron Rash et “Owl Eyes” de Joyce Carol Oates. Chacun de ces textes associe la notion de mort au cri du hibou qui se produit par sequences de trois. Parmi les quatre œuvres en question, Spencer realise le plus grand effet gothique de la maniere la plus economique, en appliquant apparemment a la lettre les conseils enonces par Oates dans son essai “Building Tension in the Short Story”. Spencer utilise divers artifices pour evoquer la presence obsedante du r...
E-rea, 2016
Though no Oates story exclusively uses New Orleans as setting, the city does play an important ro... more Though no Oates story exclusively uses New Orleans as setting, the city does play an important role in the short story “Aiding and Abetting” (collected in I Am No One You Know, 2004). Steven and Holly’s idyllic home life with their two young children in urban northern New Jersey is interrupted by frequent disturbing evening phone calls from Holly’s mentally unstable brother, Owen. In this context, the mention of “deplorable conditions in the New Orleans Parish Prison,” which Steven hears in an NBC news report while he is on the phone with Owen, serves as a metaphor for feelings of victimization and imprisonment on the part of each of the characters, as well as a metaphor for Steven’s own mistreatment of his mentally scarred brother-in-law whose fragility he takes advantage of by suggesting he commit suicide. The mention of the prison also somehow encourages Steven in his transgressive act. This article explores the role played in the story by the New Orleans Parish Prison and examines the implications of the use of this ultra-marginal space in the fiction of a traditionally northern writer.
Babel, 2015
Cet article etudie la facon dont Joyce Carol Oates, dans les romans Les Maudits et Carthage, cree... more Cet article etudie la facon dont Joyce Carol Oates, dans les romans Les Maudits et Carthage, cree des personnages de « gentleman » deplaces ou en marge, en ayant recours a des stereotypes. Oates decrit deux personnages qui evoluent a l’ecart de leurs communautes respectives ; pour eux, etre un « gentleman » releve du masque, d’une identite cultivee avec plus ou moins de succes. Les Maudits deconstruit le mythe d’un exceptionnalisme regional en montrant un homme du Sud et un homme du Nord en proie aux memes faiblesses morales. Dans Carthage, la capacite de l’Enqueteur d’evoquer le « gentleman » surligne l’artificialite de ce personnage mythique du Sud.
Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies, 2015
3 Abbreviated as JJCO for in-text citations. 4 Abbreviated as WS for in-text citations. 5 Nearly ... more 3 Abbreviated as JJCO for in-text citations. 4 Abbreviated as WS for in-text citations. 5 Nearly twenty years later Oates is still dwelling on this same idea, as demonstrated by the following passage in her "Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque": "I take as the most profound mystery of our human experience the fact that, though we each exist subjectively, and know the world only through the prism of self, this 'subjectivity' is inaccessible, thus unreal, and mysterious, 2
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Papers by Tanya L Tromble