Because of her prodigious production of short stories, Oates says that "their role is virtually indistinguishable from my life! Most obviously the short story is a short run -- a single idea and mood, usually no more than two or three characters, an abbreviated space of time. The short story lends itself most gracefully to experimentation, too. If you think about it, the story cannot be defined, and hence is open, still in the making.... I like the freedom and promise of the form." Because the short story has been a constant in Oates's writing life, the stories and collections indicate the themes and approaches that continue to engage her. However, Oates insists that she collects "only a few stories in proportion to the number I publish," because of her need to make her collections of stories into "books, consciously organized" around "common concerns, common themes and obsessions, in a certain period of time."
Katherine Bastian's Joyce Carol Oates's Short Stories between Tradition and Innovation (1983) supports Oates's claims of experimentation and order. Yet Oates's experimental mode is not that of anarchistic postmodernism, which she frequently excoriates in her own criticism, but it proceeds from an evaluation and adaptation of the conventions and models inherited from literary culture.
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