Reviewing Elizabeth Hardwick’s American Views, Joyce Carol Oates observes — and this is meant as a supreme compliment — that "it’s rare to laugh aloud when reading literary criticism." That is inarguable, but Oates’s humor in the critical portions of Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going contains surpassing amusing gems as well as probing criticisms. "F. Scott Fitzgerald Revisited" embodies humor with a twist of probity that has not been approached by eminent Fitzgerald critic, Matthew Bruccoli. Oates begins this perceptive essay with the comment, "Rarely is a literary figure so seemingly exemplary in the most terrible tragi-pathetic of ways." She then illustrates that piercing evaluation by deconstructing the often-antagonistic [on Hemingway’s part] friendship between the two writers. Examining the relative truth of biography — often hagiography, which Oates dubs "pathography" — of famous writers, she quotes, "Each sad, sordid demeaning tale has been recounted dozens of times: ‘There is a surprising amount of evidence about Fitzgerald’s sexual organ and sexual performance,’ the most recent biography by Jeffrey Meyers, notes deadpan." It is Oates’s deadpan commentary that is humorous, rather than Meyers’s. With her mission to investigate the works themselves rather than the sometimes-sordid lives of the authors, Oates indicates the stupidity of lingering, for example, on the drinking bouts of Jean Stafford. She does not explicitly ally herself with the school of New Criticism, popularized in the 1940s by John Crowe Ransom and his colleagues at Kenyon College, which states that the writer’s biography is not important in understanding the text. Nor is she enthralled with the Foucault/Derrida/ Barthes theory that "there is no center or integrated core from which we can say a piece of literature issues." Rather, Oates draws her own crystalline conclusions about the piece at hand, prefacing her comments with the insightful, "All writers — all artists — may be classified as romantics, for in the very act of creating, and of caring passionately enough to create, is a romantic gesture … But the origins of the impulse [to create] remain tantalizingly mysterious, and we no more understand them, for all our exegesis and our science, than we understand our dreams."

Clearly, Oates possesses an admirable understanding of literature — and of art, as well as boxing! Among her subjects are a revisionist reading of Christina Rossetti’s "Goblin Market"; the hilarious "In Olden Times, When Wishing Was Having," an analysis of Classical and Contemporary Fairy Tales; and the somber, but not without levity, "Literature of Serial Killers." Her conclusions are deeply-brewed, rather than a flashy fix: "Religion is organized power in the seemingly benevolent guise of the ‘sacred,’ and power is, as we know, chiefly concerned with its own preservation. Religion’s structures, its elaborate rituals and customs and scriptures and commandments and ethics, its very nature, objectify human experience, insisting that what is out there in the world is of unquestionably greater significance than what is in here in the human spirit. Despair, surely the least aggressive of sins, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense inwardness, thus independence. The despairing soul is a rebel." The clarity with which she employs language to elucidate and to tease out meaning is striking, her vocabulary impressive but never ostentatious.