Week 4.2: Junot Díaz, The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Reading:
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 264-complete

Preparatory Activity:

1. Make a photocopy of three passages from today's reading that you think are significant. You should have a passage from roughly the beginning, middle, and end of today's reading. Staple these passages together and write your name on it. Although I am not asking you to write anything for today, you should be prepared to discuss your passages for today. You can make copies for free at the ASG computer lab.  

Week 4.1: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Reading:
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 206-61

Study Question: 

1. Previously, we've discussed the role of genre and dictatorship plays in the novel. In today's section we learn of Cabral's family personal involvement with the Trujillo regime. How does Aberlard's story (or at least the way we receive it from our Watcher, Yunior) marshal sci-fi and fantasy tropes to discuss dictatorship? Are there any further parallels that we can make between writers and dictators in this section?

Week 3.2: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Reading:
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 152-201

Study Questions:

1. Yunior is both the primary narrator of the novel, acting in the guise of the Watcher, as well as a participant in the de Leon family drama. Yunior characterizes himself as a super macho, womanizing jock-type—and yet in narrating the book, his writing is riddled with reference to nerdy topics like the Fantastic Four and Lord of the Rings. In other words, there seems to be a schism between Yunior the character and Yunior the writer. Why do you think that is? What could Díaz be trying to say by making Yunior’s character so seemingly contradictory?

Questions for today were adapted from the Penguin Readers' Guide

Week 3.1: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Jaime Hernandez's illustration for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao excerpt in The New Yorker. Hernandez collaborated with Díaz to produce an illustrated version of This is How You Lose Her (2012), a collection of Díaz's short stories.

Reading: 
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 99-101.

Study Question:
1. Previously, we have been discussing how The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes allusions to less reputable genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comic books. Clearly, the novel is not any of these genres. However, it clearly takes part in the tradition known both as lo real maraviilloso and/or magical realism. Look at the below definitions of lo real maravilloso/magical realism. How do these generic definitions apply to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? Why might these generic conventions appeal to Díaz?

1. Lo real maravilloso americano--The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state.  To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. (Alejo Carpentier, "On the Marvelous Real in America." In Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 85-86)

2. Rushdie sees 'El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practiced by [Garcia] Marquez, [as] a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely Third World consciousness. [Magical realism] is a way of showing reality more truly with the marvelous aid of metaphor.  (Patricia Merivale, "Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children, Magic Realism and The Tin Drum." In Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 331).

3. Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist  capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason.The magical realists' project to reveal  the intimate interdependence between reality and fantasy is shared by modernists, but magical realism and modernism proceed by different means. Magical realism wills a transformation of the object of representation, rather than the means of representation.  Magical realism, like the uncanny projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary. (David Mikics,  "Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer," In Magical Realism.  Ed. Zamora and Faris, 372).

4. Magic realism--[is characterized by] the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skillful time shifts,  convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. (A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory)

Week 2.2: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Reading: 

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,  54-99

Study Questions:

1. The author, the primary narrator, and the protagonist of the book are all male, but some of the strongest characters and voices in the book (La Inca, Belicia, Lola) are female. Given the machismo and swagger of the narrative voice, how does the author express the strength of the female characters? Do you think there is an intentional comment in the contrast between that masculine voice and the strong female characters?

2. In one of the footnotes the narrator posits that writers and dictators are not simply natural antagonists, as Salman Rushdie has said, but are actually in competition with one another because they are essentially in the same business (p. 97). What does he mean by that? How can a writer be a kind of dictator? Is the telling of a story somehow inherently tyrannical? Do you think Díaz actually believes that he is in some way comparable to Trujillo? If so, does Díaz try to avoid or subvert that in any way? 

Questions for today were adapted from the Penguin Readers' Guide

 

Week 2.1: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award.  Agraduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is the cofounder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop. (from junotdiaz.com)

Reading:
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 2-54
NOTE: The readings for this class cannot be simply completed the night before. You will need to pace yourself and use your time wisely. 

Study Question:
1. Díaz incorporates a number of different styles and allusions in the text, from slang and Spanglish to the academic footnote, from the well-respected Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott to the less culturally-respected Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. What is the effect of combining these different forms?