Passage 5

Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.

Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate, in 1963, two years after she had received her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and became an instructor of English at the University of Detroit. Her productivity since then has been tremendous, accumulating in less than two decades up to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and literary criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from the University of Detroit to the University of Windsor in Ontario, and in 1978, to Princeton University. Reviewers have admired her enormous energy, but they also find such a large body of writing very amazing.

In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on depicting the world as it is. Hers is a world of violence, insanity, fractured love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears to come from her personal observations, her dreams and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock ear racing, though she had never seen a race. In Them (1964) she focused on Detroit from the Depression through the riots of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression made on her by the problems of one of her students. Whatever the source is and however shocking the events or the motivations are, her fictional world nonetheless remains strikingly related to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news, talk shows and the popular magazines of our day.

The passage is mainly an introduction to Oates’s ______.