Photographic (Over) Exposures in the Nuclear Age in Joyce Carol Oates’s You Must Remember This

Sonia Weiner

doi:10.15867/331917.5.1

Abstract

Photographic (Over) Exposures in the Nuclear Age in Joyce Carol Oates’s You Must Remember This

Highlights

Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.usfca.edu/jcostudies Part of the American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Photography Commons
T he title of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 novel, You Must Remember is, is a quote from the opening lines of the song As Time Goes By, featured in the popular film Casablanca (1942).1 is intertextual phrase embodies the suggestive themes of memory, time, and nostalgia, topics enhanced by Oates through verbal descriptions of photographic images
As Brenda Daly has noted, Oates often “borrow[s] techniques from photography” in her fiction for the purpose of challenging generic conventions that impinge on American democracy (“Art of Democracy,” 460)

Summary

Tel Aviv University

T he title of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1987 novel, You Must Remember is, is a quote from the opening lines of the song As Time Goes By, featured in the popular film Casablanca (1942). is intertextual phrase embodies the suggestive themes of memory, time, and nostalgia, topics enhanced by Oates through verbal descriptions of photographic images. Prose photos in Oates's text work to destabilize fixed points of view as a means to critique postwar America, a decisive era in American culture. Feminists have turned a critical eye to “the dominance of ‘patriarchal values’” during the Holocaust in order to underscore the devastating implications of patriarchal systems at large, making it possible for Oates to use the Holocaust as a tool to critique the victimization of women in postwar America. Her innovative use of prose photos enables Oates to tap into the horror without desecrating or trivializing its memory. It is possible to see Enid’s skeletal body in dialogue with another stereotype of postwar female sexuality, that of the “sex bomb.”

Sex Bomb

Works Cited