For the next two weeks, we will be exploring
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.
Oscar Wao, published just this past year, is Diaz's first novel; he published his award-winning book of short stories, Drown, almost ten years ago. Since its recent publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer.
Oscar Wao introduces a number of questions we will focus on during this portion of the quarter. Most prominently, the novel asks us to think about the American novel outside of the continental United States. Diaz is Dominican-American and his novel moves smoothly between the Dominican Republic and the U.S., the past and the present. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation (something we will discuss in reference to Diaz, as well as to Edwidge Danticat, the next writer we'll read in class). It also asks us to think about the form of the novel--as we will do throughout class this quarter. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like many postmodern works, Diaz's book asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature, the links between social and representational shifts. In
Oscar Wao, Diaz provides us with a graphic and deeply politicized history of the Dominican Republic at the same time that he gives us a fable about a fat, nerdy Dominican boy in the U.S. who can't get a woman. How do these personal and collective narratives shape the novel? How do they point the way to a new future for the (transnational) American novel?
As mentioned in the email I sent you last week, Junot Diaz will be giving a reading at Miami University on Thursday, April 2nd. He is appearing as part of their Translating Cultures: Latina/o and Latin American Writers Festival.
