Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories. By The Gate, in 1963, two years after
she had received her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin and become an instructor of English
at the University of Detroit. Her productivity since then has been prodigious, accumulating in less than two
decades to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and literary
(5) criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from the University of Detroit to
the University of Windsor, in Ontario, and, in 1978, to Princeton University. Reviewers have admired her
enormous energy, but find a productivity of such magnitude difficult to assess.
In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authors
such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates has seemed at time
(10) determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on the essentially mimetic quality of her fiction. Hers is
a world of violence, insanity, fractured love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears t
come from her own direct observations, her dreams, and her fears, much more is clearly from the
experiences of others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock car racing, though
she had never seen a race. In them (1969) she focused on Detroit from the Depression through the
(15) notes of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression made on her by the problem
of one of her students. Whatever the source and however shocking the events or the motivations
however, her fictive world remains strikingly akin to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, th
television news and talk shows, and the popular magazines of our day.
1. What is the main purpose of the passage?