Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart was born in the USSR in 1972 and moved to the U.S. when he was seven years old. Like many of the authors we've read during this quarter, Shteyngart had a complex relationship to his immigrant status--always feeling both Russian and American. Most of his work focuses on these feelings of alienation and otherness.

Shteyngart has published three acclaimed novels--The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and A Super Sad True Love Story. All three novels share a dark, satirical edge, an interest in international intrigue, and a commitment to absurd fictional conceits and complicated plot devices.

Shteyngart’s latest novel has been called a dystopia. Look up this concept and describe 1-2 other dystopian texts you’ve experienced (books,movies, comics, etc.). How is the novel a dystopian one?

Danticat and The Dew-Breaker

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti before moving to a Haitian-American community in Brooklyn. Danticat was educated at Barnard College and Brown University and came to prominence at a very young age with the publication of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Attaining widespread critical praise upon its publication, she became the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States and the acceptance of her work is seen to mark the beginning of a belated opening of American literary culture to the stories of women and people of color.

Danticat's writing focuses on a number of themes we've discussed in class--from the power of the past to the importance of telling stories in order to construct an identity. Her work also often represents another theme fundamental to our work in class, her sense of feeling pulled between a number of cultures: Haitian and American; black and white; English- and French Creole- speaking; the political and the literary.

The Dew-Breaker is a particularly interesting book to read alongside The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because it shares many of the central preoccupations of Diaz's novel (not to mention the fact that Danticat and Diaz are good friends). However, Danticat's book more directly addresses the questions about torture and human rights that Diaz's introduce. Also, unlike Oscar Wao, The Dew-Breaker is not a conventional novel, but a series of linked stories that function much as a novel does. As you read, think about how Danticat's choice to render the narrative in this way affects your experience of The Dew-Breaker. What are your first impressions of the book?

Blog post on Diaz here

Look up the concept of “intertextuality.” How does Diaz use intertexts/ allusions in his novel? How do they go along with the work’s larger themes?

Diaz interview about genre

Junot Diaz originally conceived of Oscar Wao as being not unlike a comic book. Read this interview with Diaz for more.

Junot Diaz and the American Novel Beyond America

For the next week or so, we will be exploring The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao, published in 2007, is Diaz's first novel; he published his award-winning book of short stories, Drown, ten plus years ago. Since its publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer.

Diaz's novel 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, with ease. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation. It also asks us to think a lot about the form of the novel--as we have been doing thus far in class. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like Mao II, Diaz's book also asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature; Diaz provides us with a graphic, 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 girl to date him. How do personal and world history intertwine here?