BARD TO PRESENT LECTURE BY AUTHOR JOYCE CAROL OATES WITH WORLD PREMIERE OF NEW ONE-ACT PLAY Bard's Innovative Fiction Class Commissions Dr. Magic, A New Play to be Staged by Bard College Students
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. - On Monday, November 18, Bard College will host a lecture by renowned author Joyce Carol Oates that will include the world premiere of her new play, Dr. Magic. This one-act play, commissioned for the event, will be directed and staged by Bard students. The program, organized by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow as part of the College's Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, will begin at 4:00 p.m. in Olin Hall and is free and open to the public.
"It's always valuable to hear an author of Joyce Carol Oates's stature speak about her work," said Morrow of her upcoming visit to Bard. "But to have her also write a new play for the occasion, and to not only give our students an opportunity to direct and perform it but also discuss her writing process, is a rare privilege." One of America's most gifted and prolific writers, Oates has written numerous plays that have been produced nationwide and has published five collections of dramatic works.
Morrow describes the play as involves a metaphysical magician who invites a couple from the audience to the stage. What ensues, he says, is a story that "with typical Oatesean Gothic flair, explores the fragility of human relationships and the darker side of the human psyche that lies just beneath the surface of every ordinary person." He adds that this is "a very provocative and funny" play, and that "one of the things Oates does particularly well is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary."
Following the performance, the author will be available to take questions from the audience. For further information, call 845-758-1539.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Yet she has also admitted that the rural, rough-and-tumble surroundings of her early years involved "a daily scramble for existence." Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before she learned how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age 14, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college.
Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, them, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. "Detroit, my 'great' subject," she has written, "made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am-for better of worse."
Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit River. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her 30s, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States. Asked repeatedly how she managed to produce so much excellent work in a wide variety of genres, she gave variations of the same basic answer, telling the New York Times in 1975 that "I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time." When a reporter labeled her a "workaholic," she replied, "I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word."
In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach in Princeton University's creative writing program; she and her husband also operate a small press and publish a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing Bellefleur, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history. Published in the early 1980s, these novels marked a departure from the psychological realism of her earlier work. But Oates returned powerfully to the realistic mode with ambitious family chronicles (You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart), novels of female experience (Solstice, Marya: A Life), and even a series of pseudonymous suspense novels (published under the name "Rosamond Smith") that again represented a playful experiment with literary genre. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
The dramatic trajectory of Oates's career, especially her amazing rise from an economically straitened childhood to her current position as one of the world's most eminent authors, suggests a feminist, literary version of the mythic pursuit and achievement of the American dream. Yet for all her success and fame, Oates's daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast. Not surprisingly, a quotation from that other prolific American writer, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and writing: "We work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
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11.5.02