SOURCE: Dean, Sharon L. “Literature and Composition Theory: Joyce Carol Oates' Journal Stories.” Rhetoric Review 10, no. 2 (spring 1992): 311-20.

In the following essay, Dean examines several of Oates's stories written in the epistolary or journal form, asserting that these pieces provide insight into her interest in the relationship between literature and composition.

Joyce Carol Oates began her career as a teacher and a writer in the 1960s, a decade of tremendous ferment in theories of composition and the relationship between writing and thinking. Much of the groundwork for the published research of the 1970s was begun in the 1960s: Peter Elbow focused attention on writers rather than teachers; Janet Emig studied the composing processes of 12th graders; Young, Becker, and Pike popularized the tagmemic heuristic; colleges revised admissions policies with CUNY's open enrollment experiment that served as the focus for Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations in place by 1970; Ken...