A Rhetorical Analysis Of Landfill

Joyce Carol Oates has an incredible amount of skill when is comes to writing, and her short story Landfill encapsulates her knowledge of story-telling. The first sentences grabs the attention of the reader and id not set free until the end of the piece. The way in which Oates transports the reader through the events, going back and forth from making them seem like a current event or those of the past, is entertaining to read and masterfully executed in the writing. The inclusion of what feel like really testimonies of events and quotations of those grieving feel authentic. There is however, one problem; these portions of text feel authentic but distant. There is no sympathy or empathy from the writer for her own work. The characters and writing

The reader should feel like this as well, being both in the story and away from it at the same time. From the first sentence this is made obvious, as Oates writes "Tioga County landfill is where Hector, Jr., is found. Or his ‘remains’—battered and badly decomposed, his mouth filled with trash." The specific use of quotations around the word remains should be called into question in this instance as well. By doing that, it is almost as if Oates is misidentifying the remains. It can become clear when you picture this in a court of law, with the speaker directly saying “the so called remains” with the sarcastic quotation hand gestures around that last

When those questions addressed at the start are examined again, they often come into play when a writer is writing a fictitious story based on a true event. Most of the problems created by the need to ask these questions comes from the reader, how they interpret the story, and their own morals and thoughts. That’s what it always boils down to - the reader and how they respond to a particular text. Of the ways in which Tyson examines Reader Response criticism, the most applicable point to extract would be instead of focusing only on the values embedded in the text, this particular type of criticism studies the values embedded in the