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?
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