29 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Brenda Daly, “Sexual Politics in Two Collections of Joyce Carol Oates’s Short
Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction, 32, 1 (1995): 83–93.
Discusses the sexual politics in “My Warsaza” and violence against women in
Oates’s work.

D. F. Hurley, “Impure Realism: Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?’” Studies in Short Fiction, 28, 3 (1991): 371–375.
Examines the element of magical realism in the story.

Greg Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne,
1994).
Thorough discussion of theme and style in Oates’s short stories; includes bio-
graphical information.

Cathleen Schine, “People Who Hurt People,” review of High Lonesome: New &
Selected Stories, 1966–2004, New York Times Sunday Book Review, 30 April
2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30schine.html
[accessed 19 February 2010].
A review of the collection that describes the stories as a “coherent picture of her
work” while focusing on the theme of “disappearance” and the fatalism in Oates’s
fiction.

Elaine Showalter, ed., “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Women
Writers: Texts and Contexts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2002).
A useful “casebook” including a critical introduction by Showalter, a chronology
of Oates’s life, the Life article that inspired the story, essays examining important
themes, and a bibliography.

—Jake Helton and Linda Trinh Moser

h

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990)

Tim O’Brien was born on 1 October 1946 and grew up in a small town in Min-
nesota where his father was an insurance salesman and his mother an elementary-
school teacher. Both of his parents had served in World War II, his father in the
navy and his mother in the WAVES. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul,
where he majored in political science but also took courses in English and philoso-
phy. He speaks of his alma mater with affection, describing it as a place where he
learned to read eclectically and to broaden his sense of what he cared about, and
thus what he wanted to read about. In the summer of 1968, with plans to enter
the graduate program in political science at Harvard University, he received his
draft notice. In fiction such as “On the Rainy River” in The Things They Carried,
the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me up and Ship Me Home (1973), and