The Nation, July 2nd, 1990
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. BECAUSE IT IS BITTER, AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART. By Joyce Carol Oates. E.P Dutton. 405 pp. $19.95.
"It seems to me," Joyce Carol Oates wrote in New Heaven New Earth, "that the great works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it, like the characters of Yeats who live through terrifying events but who cannot understand them." In this way, she insists, "history passes over most of us." Most, but not all. A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the ...
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