Article #9

My ninth article just came out. This makes 4 in 2014. Quite a productive year. It's titled "L’Espace du Sud chez Joyce Carol Oates : Une Vision étrangère du religieux sudiste" and this is what it's about:

A native of upstate New York, Joyce Carol Oates’s fiction has often been compared to that of Southern writers such as Poe, Faulkner and O’Connor for the grotesque component of her artistic vision and raw treatment of violence. Though not a religious writer, Oates’s fiction often touches on religious aspects of her characters’ lives, where she typically shows the inability of religion to help with worldly problems. This article discusses Oates’s portrayal of religion in “Little Maggie – A Mystery,” a rare short story with an exclusively Southern setting. It analyzes the differences from other portrayals of religion in her more typical Northern settings with a view to discovering whether or not the use of the Southern scene incites the author to a different treatment of religion. Though the author’s condemnation of religion can still be felt, she illustrates the pervading Christ-haunted aspect of the South and shows her characters to be severely lacking in impartiality when it comes to the question of religious issues.

This publication is in French, but I originally gave the article as a paper in English. I'm planning on submitting the English version, which I like better (I always like my writing better in English), to the online Oates journal.