Joyce Carol Oates is one of the more prolific writers in the world but despite her academic credentials and prestigious placement at Princeton, is she really an author that will withstand the rigors of time and changes in public (let alone academic) opinion?
Is it possible that the amount of quality writing is somehow a finite commodity and no matter how hard they might try, authors generally cannot exceed their threshold? Let’s look at a few prolific authors and test that hypothesis. Here is my list, although you might want to consider other writers too:
- Georges Simenon
- Honoré de Balzac
- Alexander Dumas
- Stephen King
- Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Joyce Carol Oates.
Right off the top I see we can eliminate two authors, not because they disprove the conjecture, but because consideration of their works doesn’t require great thought or effort. First, Edgar Rice Burroughs and his ilk probably never approached the threshold of greatness, but rather should be measured on a different scale, one involving fun. Stephen King, however, is possibly a candidate for consideration but it is immediately obvious that he has never dipped a sentence in the pool of good writing so we can hardly expect to find anything worth saving, let alone reading, in his works.
Continue reading “What do we do with JCO?” →
I enjoy reading Joyce Carol Oates. JCO is very prolific, both in titles and in pages which sometimes makes it difficult to pick out a JCO novel to read. The other problem interfering with a consistent and detailed study of JCO’s writing is that despite being highly entertaining, it tends to lack any lasting substance.
A Celebration of Reading 