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"I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation."
Interview with the Chicago Tribune, book world editor.
Against Nature
See http://2010yeagleyenglish.pbworks.com/f/Against Nature by Oates019.pdf
"She excites an expectation that she cannot satisfy."
Henry David Thoreau, 1854
"It eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all."
line 10
Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument
In Against Nature, author Joyce Carol Oates takes us on an inward journey to encounter the exterior quality of all our lives and as she moves us through the grotesque and smarmy[1] imagery of nature writingÐeven in references to excellent literature [2] Ðto challenge our prejudices.
J. M. W. Turner's
"Frosty Morning," oil on canvass, 1813.
[3]
She allows us to take nothing for granted, as she examines our biases so that we are stripped of any reasonable emotional defense when she turns the argument upside down; leaving us with little in the way to rationally challenge her conclusion.
lines 33-34, ¦ 22- p. 843.
Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument
Discovering the complexity of motive when writing:
"The subject is there only by the grace of the author's language,"
Oates, Against Nature; Anthology. page 843, line 31-32.
If that is true, then the structure of the essay reveals a deliberate attempt to frame and then reveal in the frames a set of opposites, though starting in a deeply personal and ending an a personal manner of expressing a complex story.
What
An essay
"all around me nature thrummed with life..."
When
She experienced an attack of Paroxysmal tachycardia.
Where
Along the Delaware and Raritan Canal, a trail.
"The earth seems to shift forward as a presence, hard, emphatic, not mere surface but a genuine force."
Tie this to:
"And it pleases our senses, in any case, as the physicists' chill universe of numbers certainly does not."
line 30
See http://web65.rollins.edu/~jsiry/Visual Learning.html - question
Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument
an inward journey "completely oblivious to [her] the predicament"
p.59.
all our lives and The color of the sky "a mere optical illusion"
p.
59.
through the grotesque and smarmy
paragraphs; ¦s,
17-18-19-20, p. 60.
"In any case where is nature? one might (skeptically) inquire. Who has looked upon her / its face and survived?"
paragraph ¦, 21.
"Nature is mouths, or maybe a single mouth. Why glamorize it, romanticize it . . . . Nature is more than a mouthÐit's a dazzling variety of mouths. And it pleases the senses, in any case, as the physicists' chill universe of numbers certainly does not."
"An event to rethink all the acceptable cliches that reinforce our narrow perspectives."
Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument
Oates in the essay does the following:
Structure:
- Poem "The writer's resistance to Nature"
- Personal encounter (near death; hence: out of control) {setting}
- A complete brief sketch of the argument: dimensions, illusions, infinity & necessity.
- references to authors:
- Wallace Stevens - metaphor of the Jar
- Emily Dickinson - alludes to the buzzing of a fly
- Henry David Thoreau, "yet another, and ingenious form of storytelling"
- Shakespeare's King Lear
- Robert Frost allusion
- Herman Melville
- Oscar Wilde
- Castigating Thoreau's transcendentalism
- Friedrich Neitszche
- William Butler Yeats' poem
- returns to Wallace Stevens for support "The writer's resistance to Nature"
- "Early Nature memories. . . ." Childhood memories, the grotesque
- "My resistance to Nature writing" -- her personal perspective revealed
- Inference, an attack on Platonism "anything other than . . . is - ness."
- A classical allusion to the story of Diana and Actaeon
- She questions her own expression, at least rhetorically "isn't this all exaggeration?"
- Nature as a layered manuscript
- Using Thoreau's duality of seeing Nature as both experience and oversoul
- Melville's "a blankness ten times blank."
- Oscar Wilde is used to reveal her thesis clearly.
- Poem Byzantium, by Yeats
- Her voice in the revelation (hyper-reality) conveys the climax of the piece.
- The personal story (in control) of the ants in search of her poem.
Title | her point | discovering motives | basic format | uses of evidence | authority | structure | means | argument
Oates deliberately uses many other writers to draw on for pushing her argument.
"She is our creation" says Oscar Wilde "It is in our brains that she quickens to life."
p. 62.
The goal is to unmask our pretensions and challenge our biased, hobbling prejudices.
"our fiercely romantic expectations."
p. 62.
"Why glamorize it,
romanticize it..."
She quotes recognized literature whose authors are an easily appreciated literary or critical authority:
"A palimpsest of sorts you choose to read, layer by layer, always with care, always cautiously, in proportion to your psychological strength."
She skillfully other authors as leverage to her point
Oscar Wilde
William B. Yeats
Wallace Stevens
"In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."
Her voice:
"In any case, without the 'I'. . . the microscopic life-particles would die with it...."
