This Sunday morning, Joyce Carol Oates returns to 92Y for a conversation with literary critic Elaine Showalter, her longtime friend and Princeton colleague. The subject of their discussion will be Professor Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, a comprehensive and pioneering history of American women writers from 1650 to the present.

Oates herself has called Jury “a work of astonishing vision, breadth, intelligence, and audacity. Elaine Showalter, long recognized as our preeminent feminist scholar-critic, whose prose shimmers with wickedly funny asides, has produced the most ambitious and brilliantly executed book of her career.” It’s a book to be read as a companion to Showalter’s earlier study, A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

A Jury of Her Peers includes sections on Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, Gwendolyn Brooks—as well as Oates herself. Here is what Showalter writes about her friend:

“In the late sixties, she published three remarkable novels, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), and them (1969). All were nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for them in 1970. . . . All three novels use male narrators, the male point of view, or masculine themes. Oates never used a masculine pseudonym, but she clearly identified with the passion, frustration, and energy of her heroes; we could even call the series ‘portraits of the woman artist as a young man.’ Like Flannery O’Connor, she wanted to be a great American writer, which in terms of the era meant also to be a male one. Her interests in the destiny of women, the creative freedom of the woman writer, and the function of art itself, were muted in the novels, but always breaking through into the main texts.”

Of course, since the publication of them, Oates has written numerous books on numerous themes—most recently A Fair Maiden, which came out last week. It’s a canon of works which fellow novelist Jane Smiley has called The Museum of Joyce Carol Oates—“a wonder of imagination and invention.”

Today’s featured recording is a conversation, from 2007, between Oates and Roger Rosenblatt.

In an ongoing effort to share with our readers some of the great literary moments which the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this blog has begun to feature regular postings of archival recordings by some of the best writers of our time—many of whom, like Joyce Carol Oates, are returning this season. For more information about the rest of the upcoming season, please click here. And for access to other recordings from the Poetry Center archive, please click here.

Unterberg Poetry Center webcasts and access to our archive are made possible in part by the generous support of the Sidney E. Frank Foundation.

You can also download the MP3. [35 MB]
[Right-click and select "Save Target As:" or equivalent to download.]

Subscribe with iTunes or add our podcast feed to your RSS news reader and have future 92nd Street Y podcasts delivered automatically.

» Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Join our eNews