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This paper explores the intersection of colonialism, masculinity, and queerness in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Through a decolonial lens, it examines how Díaz critiques the lingering effects of colonialism and dictatorship on Dominican identity, particularly through the ‘fukú’ curse—a symbol of intergenerational trauma. The paper argues that the queering of heterosexuality in the novel challenges rigid gender norms, where Oscar’s nonconformity and Yunior’s conflicted hypermasculinity expose the limitations of Dominican masculinity shaped by colonial rule. Set against the backdrop of the Dominican Republic’s tropical landscapes and violent history, Oscar’s and Yunior’s narratives highlight the broader struggle between individual authenticity and societal conformity. Díaz’s use of magical realism and transcultural storytelling amplifies this decolonial critique, revealing how colonial legacies continue to shape gender and identity in the post-colonial world. By analyzing the characters’ resistance to heteronormative pressures and their individual journeys, the paper situates The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a significant exploration of queering as a form of decolonial resistance, reconsidering the lasting impact of colonial oppression on cultural and gender identities.

This article explores the possibilities and limitations of the sociolinguistic notion of code-switching for the analysis of multilingual texts, in particular those belonging to literature as it is commonly understood (prose fiction, drama and poetry). In such (con)texts, I argue, code-switching is 'staged': produced rather than reproduced. Even when texts stage bilingual conversations with the aim of imitating real-life speech events, mimesis is mediated by the shift from spoken to written mode, which contrasts with the presence and proximity typical of (spoken) verbal interaction. While this mediation limits the applicability of sociolinguistic notions when discussing literary corpora, several examples from both North America (Junot Díaz, Gloria Anzaldúa and Ana Lydia Vega) and Europe (Lydie Salvayre, Ágota Kristóf, Franz Kafka and Leo Tolstoy) show how literary texts 'stage' code-switching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political dimension of Junot Díaz's work, focusing on the figure of the dictator as depicted in the footnotes to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in an attempt to analyze his view of the "dangers of dictatorship" in both literature and politics and to prove that the political attitudes of writers influence the way their literature "does" politics. Thus, a thorough analysis of the footnotes exposes The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a story about a nerd in New Jersey "dictated" by the narrator, which is challenged by the story of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo who "dictated" the recent history of the Dominican Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El prefacio de La maravillosa vida breve de Óscar Wao (2007) de Junot Díaz presenta a Galactus, llamado el “devorador de mundos” en Marvel, como pista de lectura inquietante. Su presencia impulsa a este artículo a leer las dinámicas coloniales, sociales y narrativas dentro de la obra desde los actos de devorar y ser devorado; centrales a las tradiciones caníbales artísticas e históricas del Caribe. Estos apetitos narrativos permitirán rescatar y contrastar imaginarios de resistencia literaria creados por Óscar Wao, así como aquellos de devoración deshumanizante heredados por la colonización, el trujillato y el narrador mismo de la obra.

This short essay was written in the days after white supremacists and neo-Nazis invaded the campus of the University of Virginia and downtown Charlottesville, many of them heavily armed and dressed for combat. After offering a brief reflection on how Latino/a/x studies shaped her scholarly trajectory as someone not trained in this field as a graduate student, the author asks how the field can help reimagine this particular political moment. The essay reads Junot Díaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao forward in time--as an anticipatory history illuminating the last US presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Perífrasis. Revista de Literatura, Teoría y Crítica is the property of Universidad de los Andes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Anthologizing stories from linked short story collections gives rise to a troubling tension. To select and curate a story in an anthology elevates it to paradigmatic status. Yet, linked collections are anti-paradigmatic: interweaving fragments, rejecting representative conventions and monolithic narratives, and producing a surplus of feeling and knowledge beyond individual stories. These qualities become obscure when reading a single story contextualized in an anthology. This tension is particularly evident with anthologization of authors like Junot Díaz, whose works are suspicious of neoliberal multiculturalism’s totalizing embrace, but whose inclusion as an ethnic, national, or world writer in different anthologies results in varied thematic framings specific to each. Juxtaposing the linked story in two settings, anthology and linked collection, expands scholarly conversations around emergent forms of transnational American literature. This article argues that linked collections preempt, primarily through formal means, the flattening and functionalizing of their stories into unified exemplars of multicultural diversity or universal experience. Examining stories from Díaz’s Drown and This is How You Lose Her alongside these same tales as framed in three Norton anthologies illustrates this possibility. Díaz develops a paradigm of surplus through stories connected by a sense of displacement. This surplus is a literary strategy that anticipates and addresses anthology curation’s effects and expectations. Rather than recuperating identity or loss to construct more unified notions of ethnicity, nation, or world, linked stories give shape to assembled fragments. They point toward a transnationalism invested in how narrative fragments of displacement and diaspora constitute an irreducible surplus.

This paper proposes a pragmatic reading of Junot Díaz’s short story “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” by making use of Cultural Quotient (CQ, a/k/a Cultural Intelligence) a new branch of academics that draws from the fields of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and international business to make one more culturally aware. Additionally, the paper gives focus to CQ Strategy, the metacognitive step of the CQ process, and uses the cognitive psychological concept Theory of Mind (ToM) to explain how human consciousness has evolved to read and anticipate the mental states of others. Both CQ and ToM depend on metacognition in order to navigate from one cultural context to another. The article attempts to explain how metacognition enables Díaz’s Dominican protagonist, Yunior, to become culturally intelligent as well as anticipate the emotions of the various American girls he dates and hopes to seduce. Finally, the article will propose what learners of a second language can gain from reading works by Díaz, and thus other cross-cultural fictions, by using a pragmatic approach to literature.

Based on Junot Díaz and Daniel Alarcón’s narrative, I problematize the relationship between translating into Spanish authors of Hispanic origin who write exclusively in English and the publishing market, their reception as well as the notion of “untranslatability” in the background.

El artículo propone una relectura de The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), novela premiada del escritor dominicano-estadounidense Junot Díaz, a partir de la selección de un corpus de poéticas de los Caribes. El propósito es demostrar que estas pueden seguir engarzando un marco analítico de utilidad para estudiar las producciones literarias contemporáneas producidas por la diáspora caribeña en los Estados Unidos. La tesis principal del artículo es que en The Brief… es posible dilucidar procedimientos de transculturación en los mitos y las identidades que llevarían al autor a desarrollar una suerte de contrapunteo entre dos metadiscursos predominantes, a saber, el del componente mítico-mágico (“premoderno”), estudiado tradicionalmente para las literaturas de los Caribes, y el de la cultura popular (blanca) anglosajona desarrollada en torno a las narrativas de género (ciencia ficción y fantasía épica). Concluye que la esencia de las categorías propuestas en las poéticas estudiadas sigue siendo fundamental para abordar una novela que vuelve sobre los tropismos de las literaturas de los Caribes para actualizar la función del mito y de la raza en el relato.

The aim of this essay is to address Dany Laferrière’s and Junot Díaz’s adherence to metamodernism, in the context of Caribbean literature and respectively through their two debut novels Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008). The last scope of this paper will be to signify the atopos – the place of metamodern aesthetics – as a place of non-recognition: the much sought-after space of the decolonization of hearts and minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Junot Díaz's short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), sound plays a crucial role in the representation of the experiences of the Dominican migrants in the United States who populate their pages. The collections show the liminal situations which the stories' characters face, emphasizing their shifting acoustic environments and the pressure to shape one's own sonic identity to meet the demands of the new language and culture. The experiences of these Dominican migrants – particularly how they are targeted by the Americans they encounter because of their accents – reflect the politics of a cultural neo-racism which differs from the discourse of colonial Otherness but which bears the same monocultural logic. As such, the stories' migrants become silenced rather than invisible. At the same time, a belief in the power of the Other's personal and culturally specific voice as a transformative element is emphasized in these collections with Díaz's use of Spanish and the narrator's persistent presence throughout all of the stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses zombie theory to flesh out common themes between Oswald de Andrade’s The Cannibalist Manifesto and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán. While both of these canonical Latin Americanist thinkers theorized literary and cultural cannibalism as a resistant act that could challenge the hegemony of Western cosmologies and aesthetics, very little scholarship has thought to reconcile—or even juxtapose—these men’s thought. The article asserts a shared camaraderie between Latin American people of color and the zombie’s of the region’s cultural production by emphasizing both entities’ association (fair or not) with cannibalism in the Western imaginary. When viewed through this framework, even the zombie apocalypse comes to signify an optimistic revolt of the oppressed against corrupt, imperial entities. The article references numerous cases of Latin American literary and cultural production both to highlight the discursive ties between the Latin Americanist zombie and people of African and indigenous descent and to signal strategies that these works propose for challenging Western (white) supremacy in the region.

El translenguaje es el uso bilingüe o multilingüe de repertorios lingüísticos, observable en la literatura, filmes y medios de comunicación. El autor dominicano-estadounidense Junot Díaz translenguajea en inglés y español en su novela The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Este artículo investiga las funciones del translenguaje y sus conexiones con el pensamiento decolonial, empleando el análisis de contenido para identificar patrones, temas y efectos. Los resultados precisan cuatro funciones recurrentes del translenguaje. Algunos aspectos del pensamiento decolonial permean estas funciones, en cuanto a la forma y contenido de la narrativa además de la promoción de pensamientos marginados. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a pragmatic reading of Junot Díaz's short story "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" by making use of Cultural Quotient (CQ, a/k/a Cultural Intelligence) a new branch of academics that draws from the fields of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and international business to make one more culturally aware. Additionally, the paper gives focus to CQ Strategy, the metacognitive step of the CQ process, and uses the cognitive psychological concept Theory of Mind (ToM) to explain how human consciousness has evolved to read and anticipate the mental states of others. Both CQ and ToM depend on metacognition in order to navigate from one cultural context to another. The article attempts to explain how metacognition enables Díaz's Dominican protagonist, Yunior, to become culturally intelligent as well as anticipate the emotions of the various American girls he dates and hopes to seduce. Finally, the article will propose what learners of a second language can gain from reading works by Díaz, and thus other cross-cultural fictions, by using a pragmatic approach to literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code-switching (CS) is a linguistic activity typical of bilingual speakers, and thus, a central feature characterising Latino/a literature. The present study reads Junot Díaz's "Invierno," a short story from This Is How You Lose Her (2012), with a focus on the oral code-switches that the bilingual Latino/a characters make from English--their second language (L2)--to Spanish--their first language (L1). More specifically, it explores the relationship between CS, language emotionality and identity. The Spanish code-switches are analysed in terms of the emotionality degree they elicit and, linguistically, according to frequency and type--intersentential CS, intrasentential CS and tag-switching. The results reveal a low percentage of Spanish vocabulary, which, nevertheless, fills the story with Latino-Dominican touches and transports the reader to the Caribbean lifestyle. This is probably due to the fact that most are emotionally charged words and expressions, which supports the idea that the frequency of CS to L1 increases when talking about emotional topics with known interlocutors. The findings suggest that the L1 and the L2 play different roles in the characters' lives: the former is preferred for cultural and emotional expressions and is the language the one they identify with more, while the latter is colder and more objective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code-switching or, as he calls it, “linguistic simultaneity” characterizes the prose of Junot Díaz. A fundamental trait of his literary project is the insertion of words and phrases in Spanish into texts written mainly in English, without highlighting them or providing translations for readers who do not know Spanish, thus creating tension between the two languages. The objective of this article is to analyze the extent to which that tension is maintained in the translations into other languages. The comparative analysis of translations into French and Portuguese and two Spanish translations of the story “Negocios”, included in Drown, reveals that the translations into French and Portuguese recreate that tension between languages much better than the Spanish versions.

This paper analyzes Junot Díaz's most recent works The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007. The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead) and This is How You Lose Her (2012. This is how you lose her. New York: Riverhead) by using Muysken's (2000. Bilingual speech. A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: CUP) typology of code-switching to illustrate the types of language mixing devices present in these two texts. I point out that Díaz's innovative use of radical bilingualism is not due to the quantity of sentences including Spanish, rather to the quality of mixing and switching in his works. Further, I elaborate on Casielles-Suárez, Eugenia. (2013. Radical code-switching in the Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90. 475–487) study using Torres' (2007. In the contact zone: Code-switching strategies by Latino/a writers. MELUS 32(1). 75–96) categorization of code-switching strategies utilized by U.S. Hispanic authors. I find that instead of Díaz's texts gratifying the bilingual reader (Torres. 2007. In the contact zone: Code-switching strategies by Latino/a writers. MELUS 32(1). 75–96) or creating radical hybridism (Casielles-Suárez. 2013. Radical code-switching in the Brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90. 475–487), that these two works illustrate radical bilingualism. In contrast to the majority of U.S. Spanish-English bilingual texts, which incorporate Spanish by using simple insertions, translations, bold font and italics, Díaz creates radically bilingual works by using a variety of Spanish and English varieties, the indirect influence of Spanish in monolingual English sentences, intra-word insertions, a diversity of insertion types and hybrid noun-phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant changes occurred from the 1870s onwards, which laid the foundations for today's highly uneven, globalized world-food-system. It is in this context that Dominican and Dominican-American literary aesthetics are particularly revealing, as they register the impact of the rapid integration of the Dominican Republic into the world market through the sugar industry. As I argue, while the political ecology fuelling the foundational romance Enriquillo by Manuel de Jesús Galván (1882) is consciously repressed in the service of producing a national fantasy, the "critical irrealist" aesthetics of Ramón Marrero Arristy's Over (1939) possess at least some disruptive potential. It is in this context that Junot Díaz's insistent focus on style, genre and aesthetics take on their full significance, placing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) at the vanguard of thinking around the "worlding" of literary studies as well as about the role of cultural production in what Jason W. Moore calls the capitalist "world-ecology." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En 1999, la revista The New Yorker publicó un número dedicado a jóvenes promesas literarias, entre las que se encontraban autores como Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Junot Díaz y Jonathan Franzen. Este reconocimiento situó a Díaz en un lugar destacado de las letras estadounidenses y latinoamericanas, lo cual nos lleva a inferir que la producción de traducciones cuidadas constituyó un objetivo primordial para la promoción de sus textos en el ámbito internacional a partir de ese momento. En el presente capítulo abordamos los retos que presenta la traducción de la novela The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) al español en tanto que texto híbrido en a nivel lingüístico, identitario y literario. Nuestro análisis tiene en cuenta la traducción del cambio de código como reto para el traductor. En concreto, el posicionamiento político del autor y la voluntad heteroglóssica del texto fuente constituyen aspectos a tener en cuenta en el análisis que ofrecemos en este capítulo.

Anthologizing stories from linked short story collections gives rise to a troubling tension. To select and curate a story in an anthology elevates it to paradigmatic status. Yet, linked collections are anti-paradigmatic: interweaving fragments, rejecting representative conventions and monolithic narratives, and producing a surplus of feeling and knowledge beyond individual stories. These qualities become obscure when reading a single story contextualized in an anthology. This tension is particularly evident with anthologization of authors like Junot Díaz, whose works are suspicious of neoliberal multiculturalism’s totalizing embrace, but whose inclusion as an ethnic, national, or world writer in different anthologies results in varied thematic framings specific to each. Juxtaposing the linked story in two settings, anthology and linked collection, expands scholarly conversations around emergent forms of transnational American literature. This article argues that linked collections preempt, primarily through formal means, the flattening and functionalizing of their stories into unified exemplars of multicultural diversity or universal experience. Examining stories from Díaz’s Drown and This is How You Lose Her alongside these same tales as framed in three Norton anthologies illustrates this possibility. Díaz develops a paradigm of surplus through stories connected by a sense of displacement. This surplus is a literary strategy that anticipates and addresses anthology curation’s effects and expectations. Rather than recuperating identity or loss to construct more unified notions of ethnicity, nation, or world, linked stories give shape to assembled fragments. They point toward a transnationalism invested in how narrative fragments of displacement and diaspora constitute an irreducible surplus.

A partir de la distinción de Glissant entre territorio y lugar se propone leer la novela de Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) como una ficcionalización de la idea de lugar. Los espacios resultan ámbitos donde se descodifican los referentes claves que “fijan” los territorios. Dichos ámbitos implicarán un proceso de desenraizamiento de las categorías de identidad. Sin embargo, ello no entraña sus anulaciones absolutas. Los lugares responden a una práctica antropofágica en la que los diversos territorios (geográficos, raciales, económicos, lingüísticos, sexuales, temporales y estéticos) persisten, pero dislocados bajo una permanente tensión irresuelta. Tal fenómeno apuntaría a una nueva forma de antropofagia cultural acéntrica desde el loser. El loser sería aquel personaje expulsado de la lógica de la ganancia capitalista cuyos reciclajes simbólico-políticos no pretenden erigir territorios o reordenamientos binarios, sino hacerlos partícipes de los devenires de sus propios desarraigos. Abstract Based on the distinction proposed by Glissant between territory and place, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao proposes a fictionalization of the idea of place. The places become are as where the references that “set” territories are decoded and the process of rootlessness of identity categories occurs. However, the categories are not completely annulled. Places respond to an anthropophagic practice in which different territories (geographical, racial, economic, linguistic, sexual, temporal and aesthetic) persist, but recycled under a permanent unresolved tension. Such a phenomenon articulates a new form of cultural centerless anthropophagy in the loser character. Oscar is a loser that has been expelled from the logic of the capitalist profit. His symbolic-political recycling does not pretend to erect new territories or binaries rearrangements, but to transform through rootlessness his old territories into the new places.

In the early 1990s, most large American publishing houses adopted desktop publishing software, creating an entirely digital book design and layout process. And no one noticed. To this day, only a few scholars have mentioned this fact, and there has been no significant consideration of the effect that desktop publishing has had on literature. This article considers how desktop publishing was employed in three twenty-first century novels: Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2001), Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). These novels are very different and employ desktop publishing software in different ways, showing the expansion of possibility in the era of digital print. Yet, all three also show a tendency to use the expanded typographic possibilities of digital technology to reinforce narrative and textual meaning, rather than to disrupt the workings of language or book traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent political discourse, "cosmopolitanism" has become synonymous with elitism and disloyalty to national values. However, this discourse ignores the varied history of cosmopolitanism, both as an aesthetic and a worldview. Not all cosmopolitanism is rootless, as demonstrated by Kwame Anthony Appiah's Ethics of Identity (2005), which proposes identity based on "rooted cosmopolitanism." And as James Clifford (1997) points out, travel-and cosmopolitanism, along with it-is no longer, or perhaps never has been, reserved for wealthy elites. Clifford emphasizes that travel not only includes "Westerners" traveling to developing countries but also the reverse, and the second kind of traveler follows a different trajectory of cosmopolitanism. This article examines cosmopolitanism in the work of two contemporary Caribbean artists: Dominican-American author Junot Díaz and Puerto Rican musician René Juan Pérez Joglar. The protagonist of Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) lives the tensions inherent in nationalist and cosmopolitan impulses: like the author, the novel moves between the Dominican Republic and the United States. The title alludes to Irish writer and famed cosmopolitan, Oscar Wilde. Although criticism of the novel has not drawn any connection to Wilde beyond the title itself, this paper suggests that Díaz's work relates to Wilde on deeper levels related to cosmopolitanism, particularly as Wilde tied this notion to the struggle for individualism. Similar notions surface in Pérez Joglar's music and recent documentary film, Residente, presenting a rooted cosmopolitanism that, while acknowledging national history and culture, pushes the boundaries of identity across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao via its trope of ‘páginas en blanco’, in order to argue that its creolised language, stylistic devices, and structural organisation mimic the experience of reading narratives about or produced under conditions of censorship and repression. Positioning Oscar Wao as what Roland Barthes calls a ‘writerly’ text, it argues that the novel’s linguistic, typographic, and structural blanks demand an engaged, active readership that must translate, explain, and uncensor parts of the novel for themselves. The latter part of the article focuses on authorial paratexts in which Díaz responds parodically to readers’ desire for clarity and certainty. It demonstrates how Díaz appears to ‘fill in’ his novel’s textual blanks while also drawing attention to readers’ necessary participation in the ongoing construction of textual meaning. The partial erasures and rewritings that occur at different stages of this novel’s production and reception convey the way narratives, especially those produced about or under conditions of domination, will always contain certain unreadable blanks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Neither Here Nor There.” The Experience of Borderless Nation in Contemporary Dominican-American Literature Discussing migrant identities, critics very often focus on the state in-between, the state between the borders, or being neither here nor there, and a migrant group that seems to epitomize this in-between condition is the Dominican-Americans. Consequently, the article seeks to examine the experience of in-betweenness, of being suspended between the boundaries and borders of two countries in selected texts of contemporary Dominican-American writers: Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and a short story “Monstro,” and Angie Cruz’s Soledad. It aims to analyze how the texts discuss the experience of in-betweenness through hybridity (for instance intertextuality and magical realism) with the use of tools offered by the neo-baroque esthetics. „Ani tu, ani tam”. Doświadczenie narodu bez granic we współczesnej literaturze dominikańsko-amerykańskiej Analiza tożsamości imigrantów często skupia się na byciu pomiędzy, egzystowaniu między granicami, a także braku przynależności do żadnej z kultur. Grupa, która wydaje się uosabiać ten stan, to migranci z Republiki Dominikany w Stanach Zjednoczonych. Niniejszy artykuł podejmuje temat doświadczenia bycia pomiędzy, zawieszenia pomiędzy granicami i między dwoma krajami w wybranych tekstach współczesnych pisarzy dominikańsko-amerykańskich: powieści Krótki i niezwykły żywot Oscara Wao i opowiadania „Monstro” Junota Díaza oraz powieści Soledad Angie Cruz. Celem artykułu jest analiza doświadczenia bycia pomiędzy wyrażanego poprzez hybrydę, czemu służą narzędzia oferowane przez estetykę neobarokową, a także poprzez intertekstualność i realizm magiczny.

The connection between national and personal traumas is a key concern in two Dominican-American short-story cycles, Julia Alvarez's How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her (2012). Both texts link the inability to establish long-lasting romantic relationships to the violent collective past of the Dominican Republic, but they do so very differently. With its regressive chronological structure, Alvarez's narrative casts its characters as inescapable victims of a history destined to repeat itself. By contrast, Díaz eschews Alvarez's etiological quest, highlighting the question of personal responsibility. Only marginally successful in rejecting traditional models of national identity, the protagonist-narrator of Lose Her continues the reconceptualization of Dominicanness begun in Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code-switching or, as he calls it, “linguistic simultaneity" characterizes the prose of Junot Díaz. A fundamental trait of his literary project is the insertion of words and phrases in Spanish into texts written mainly in English, without highlighting them or providing translations for readers who do not know Spanish, thus creating tension between the two languages. The objective of this article is to analyze the extent to which that tension is maintained in the translations into other languages. The comparative analysis of translations into French and Portuguese and two Spanish translations of the story “Negocios", included in Drown, reveals that the translations into French and Portuguese recreate that tension between languages much better than the Spanish versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the immigrant experience of America in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz and analyses it with the use of the neobaroque esthetics. The paper seeks to present neobaroque elements present in the text, such as hybridity and the tension between the center and the peripheries to show that neobaroque poetics can be successfully employed to talk about the experience of exile, the migrant condition and the search for identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of their history as British colonies, the United States have taken in a large number of exiles, who have often used fiction to recount their diasporic experience and the subsequent search for roots by the descendants of those who migrated. We will analyze The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz, as a locus of tension between the country that forces into exile (the Dominican Republic) and the country who takes in (the United States), also reflected in the complex identity of the protagonists, split between two cultures. We will examine, as well, the connection between the main text and the abundant and long footnotes –something quite unusual in the novel as a genre–, and expound how this reflects the tension between the authorial voice and other voices which are banished into the margins, mirroring the tension between the dictator and exiled or disappeared dissidents in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillato.

Michael Leach in his article “The Politics of Masculinity: An Overview of Contemporary Theory” expresses that the same as with femininity, masculinity operates politically at two levels as a form of identity or as a form of ideology since it presents a set of cultural ideals that define appropriate roles, values and expectations for and of men. This paper proposes to explore the construction of the masculine identity of the characters of Drown (1996) and of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz. The male characters of both texts oscillate between the rejection and the appropriation of roles and expectations for the masculine subject both in the United States of America and in the Dominican Republic. This paper will analyze the discourse of culture in the construction of masculinity.

Copyright of Colloquia Humanistica is the property of Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Magical realism has been commonly theorized in terms of a postcolonial strategy of cultural renewal, according to which such fiction is understood as embodying a racialized epistemology allegedly inclusive of magic. The inherent exoticism of this idea has drawn criticism. Critics have recently begun to re-envision magical realism in terms of trauma theory. However, trauma readings of magical realism tend to unselfconsciously reinvigorate an authenticating rhetoric: magical realism is represented not as the organic expression of a precolonial or hybrid consciousness, but of colonial or other kinds of trauma. Through case studies of Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life o f Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright's The Swan Book, this essay intervenes in trauma studies readings of magical realist literature to emphasize the fundamentally ironic nature of the iconic narrative strategy of representing the ostentatiously fantastical as real. It also argues that these texts, while invested in representing the traumas of colonialism, are less interested in authenticating magic as part of a postcolonial or traumatic epistemology than in transforming fantasy into history and empowered futurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are several hints in The Brief Wondrous Life o f Oscar Wao (2007) that Junot Díaz has been more influenced by Irish modernist James Joyce than he declares. As a modernist, Joyce emphasized the importance of detachment and disobedience to the ethos of the modern artist. He felt it was significant for an artist to innovate his own language because doing so invites new aesthetic styles and engenders political resistance to the dominant culture. Joyce's 1916 novel A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man provides an exposition of how an aesthetic pursuit coincides with a political rebellion against British imperialism. This article argues that, for these reasons, Joyce is an important precursor to Díaz. I read Díaz's novel alongside Joyce's and offer textual sites that suggest Joyce's influence on Díaz. In doing so, I demonstrate that Díaz values and inherits Joyce's literary style while modifying some of his modes. Focusing on the link between Díaz and Joyce can expand our understanding of Díaz's work and place a new emphasis on his connection with the Irish modernist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reality and the idea of tradition, which emerged from the judicial field and slowly extended its significance, has now become an important human phenomenon consisting of "the transmission of abstract cultural treasures throughout time" in order to fulfill its goal of "uniting all generations and maintaining the continuity between past and present." Given that tradition has not only been preserved, but also has been questioned and criticized over the years, it has become a hermeneutic, philosophical, and scientific problem. Hence, Josef Pieper defines it as the transmission and assimilation of a vast heritage of past thoughts. Therefore, we plan to analyze tradition in-depth with the following contributions from five professors from the University of Dallas and five from the professors of the Academic Department of General Studies (itam): from the point of view of History, Art, Culture (Wilhelmsen and Díez), from Literature (Roper, Espericueta, and Orozco), Philosophy, Law, Culture (Cowan and zepeda), and finally, from Philosophy and Theology (Parens, zocco, and Gutiérrez). In this analysis, we will continuously showcase through various ways how tradition is a dynamic concept, open, creative, and how it helps us to relate to previous generations' thoughts and opens new ways to fulfillment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses, on the one hand, Díaz's search for cultural identity in his story cycles. The repetition of characters, especially that of Yunior, breaks with the 'aura' of singularity and uniqueness in order for the author to immerse himself in New York's Dominican community as the storyteller who tries to recover a lost but fragmentary cultural tradition. On the other hand, there is an exploration of the concepts of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and 'glocality,' that is, the local in the global, as well as the (in)hospitality of which Oscar Wao, the protagonist of the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is a victim in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, as a result of his cultural hybridity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'Aurora,' a short story published in his 1996 collection Drown, Junot Díaz transforms the mythical character into a contemporary woman. Aurora abandons the unspecified space of myth and is relocated to the barrio. She becomes a drug addict who, like the goddess who salutes the new day, is homeless. She has no permanent home in the barrio, aside from the apartments she and Lucero, the narrator, break into, the juvie [Juvenile Detention] and the Hacienda. In the midst of these non-places, Aurora can only authorize herself through her art, the small-scale dawns she leaves on the walls of the apartments she occupies, and the violent lines she scratches on Lucero. In downgrading and relocating the goddess, Díaz barrioizes high literature and carves this violent clash of cultures and languages on the parchment of American literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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