CfP: Physical, Social, Psychic, and Imagined Spaces in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates

Physical, Social, Psychic, and Imagined Spaces in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates
Session organizer:  Betina Entzminger (Bloomsburg University)
Joyce Carol Oates is one of America’s most prolific and celebrated living writers. Her short fiction and novels frequently explore spaces and the borders surrounding them: for example, the physical spaces of the home in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” or a car sinking in Black Water, the border between reality and the imagined in Blonde, the psychic and ideological spaces that separate individuals in A Book of American Martyrs. What forces create and maintain these spaces? What are the costs and benefits of blurring or crossing these borders? How do these different types of spaces--physical, social, psychic, and imaginary—constrain or intensify one another? This panel will include essays that explore these questions in Oates’s fictional works, along with the larger question of how Oates’s oeuvre records and analyzes the complex physical, social, imagined, and psychic space of American life.