SOURCE: Sepcic, Višnja. “Joyce Carol Oates's Remaking of Classic Stories.” Studia Romanica et Anglica 35 (1990): 29-37.

In the following essay, Sepcic considers three of Oates's short stories as imaginative reworkings of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, James Joyce's “The Dead,” and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) is a writer of prodigious creative energy. In her massive literary output she has written novels, short stories, poetry, plays and literary criticism, attaining a rare degree of excellence in all these genres. But the short story has remained in the focus of her creative interest all throughout her brilliant literary career. In fact, as many connoisseurs of her work agree, the short story is “a central concern in her work.”¹ She has proved a life-long devotion to this form, exploring its possibilities by a variety of techniques. As she herself said: “Radical experimentation, which might be ill-advised in...