Assignment task: Explain and respond to the quote Joyce Carol Oates' piece "Plays As Literature." with at least 3-4 sentences of your own response. You can also pose questions and/or connect to an example.
Quotes 1: According to Joyce Carol Oates "Plays more closely resemble poetry than they do most prose fiction, because poetry is a compact language, a heightened and accelerated form of communication, and what is omitted is an integral part of its meaning, just as plays are "narratives" severely reduced to human voices and gesture" (P8).
Quote 2: According to Joyce Carol Oates "Yet the distinction between the art of the play and the art of prose fiction is considerable. The prose writer, coming to the theater, is likely to be stunned, if not dismayed, by the leaden nature of his best "writerly" work when it is presented by living actors on a blunt, exposed stag" (P9).
Quote 3: According to Joyce Carol Oates "All that you've learned, or believe you've learned, in one adventure, may be erased by the second, and yet again by the third. In theater, the playwright throws himself (or herself I suppose I am speaking most frankly and intimately of myself) into a kind of free-fall, surrendering control in the hope of achieving something higher: that realm of the purely and ineffably theatrical" (P11).