Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1944. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-104).

My thesis will be a collection of short stories about Asian and Asian-American families and the expectations of their children that leads them to certain decisions and actions. The majority of the stories will be focused on Vietnamese-American families, but I will explore the family dynamics within the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese families as well. Through this short story collection, I hope to dramatize the internal conflicts of children of Asian and Asian-American families as they question their identities and aspirations and as they struggle to preserving culture while simultaneously creating their own individual cultures and redefining what it means to be Asian or Asian-American. For my critical introduction, I will examine the immigrant literature of Junot Diaz. Particularly influential to my own writing are Diaz’s focuses on familial relationships, his experiments with point of view, and his use of a native family language (in his case, Spanish) alongside English.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, August, 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

This work explores Junot Díaz’s incorporation of nerd culture into his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and that move's larger impact on the genre of trauma narratives. By using allusions to nerd texts such as The Lord of the Rings to structure his depiction of the brutal reign of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, Díaz effectively rewrites Dominican history, creating a retroactive continuity of fantasy. Retroactive continuity, or retcon, is a little-discussed interpretive strategy of the nerd community with striking parallels to Lacanian notions of fantasy. A reading of Díaz's retcon ultimately casts doubt on the silent victim's traditional role as the foundation of trauma narratives, suggesting instead that the ideological root of these stories is actually the hypothetical denier of trauma.

This diploma thesis deals with a literary analysis of the collection of short stories by an American-Dominican author Junot Díaz. The central subject of his work Drown is the problematic of immigration mainly from the Dominican Republic to the United States. This diploma thesis is focused on a detailed study of the alienting consequences caused by the uprooting of characters from their Dominican culture and nation but at the same time by the effort to assimilate with the new culture, in this case with the culture of the United States. Each of the ten stories of the collection of short stories Drown is separately evaluated and subsequently the possible causes of the alienation are deduced. Alienation is not only restricted to the culture and nation, but it also plays an important role in considering conflicts within the family members. Secondly, the thesis analyses the matter of not being able to adapt to the new environment. For a broader scope of all the probable causes and manifestations of the alienation, another three short stories by Junot Díaz published in The New York Time are added to for the analysis. Junot Díaz repeatedly mentions some of the poingnant historical events of the Dominican Republic. For better orientation, the brief history of the Dominican Republic as well as the major points of the U.S.-Dominican relations are included in this diploma thesis. The introduction also consists of biographical information about Junot Díaz and short theory of postcolonial literature.

The purpose of this thesis was to contribute to a dialogue that considers the relationship between history, literature, and empathy as a literary affect. Specifically, I explored sites of literature’s transformative potential as it relates to cultural studies and the ethics of deconstruction. Via a deconstructive, post-colonial reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I considered how subjects in our current socio-political moment can feel history. Emerging from a post-structurally mediated engagement with history, signification, and feeling, I argued that empathy, as it is contentiously presented in the context of deconstruction, is not necessarily a reductive or essentialist approach towards relating or “being-with” an-other. Instead, I proposed that the act of reading historiographical novels that take constructions of the Atlantic Slave Trade to task might generate an affective empathy, which could in turn engender a more empathetic relationality and way of being-in-the-world.

Narratives of resisting the Trujillo regime are so prevalent in Dominican-American literature that it seems Dominican-American authors must write about Trujillo to be deemed authentically Dominican-American. Within these Trujillo narratives there seems to be two main ways to talk about resistance. “The resistance,” an organized entity that actively and consciously opposes the Trujillo regime, can be seen in stories like those told about the Mirabal sisters. The other resistance narrates how characters capitalize on opportunities to disrupt business or political functions, thus disrupting the Trujillo machine. This resistance works much like Ben Highmore's explanation of de Certeau's resistance in that “it limits flows and dissipates energies” (104). Characters from the socio-economic lower-class typically use this type of resistance because they are not recognized by nor allowed direct access to the regime. My thesis focuses on the latter type of resistance through my study of Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both authors narrate instances of unrecognized resistance against Trujillo, but they also articulate modern resistance to economic, racial, and gender pressures, such as materialism and hyper-masculinity, through Trujillo narratives. While these narratives create a space for Dominican-Americans of different gender, class, and race, they also create Trujillo as a marker of Dominican literature, perpetuating the idea of Trujillo as inextricably connected to Dominican identity and obfuscating more complex issues of race and gender in Dominican culture.

Contemporary transnational literature presents a unique interpretive problem, due to new methods of language and culture negotiation in the information age. The resulting condition, transnational compositionality, is evidenced by specific linguistic artifacts; to illustrate this I use three American novels as a case study: Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon, Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. By extension, many conventional literary elements are changed in the transnational since modernity: satire is no longer a lampooning of cultures but a questioning of the methods by which humans blend cultures together; similarly, complex symbolic constructions may no longer be taken at face value, for they now communicate more about cultural identity processes than static ideologies. If scholars are to achieve adequate interpretations of these elements, we must consider the global framework that has so intimately shaped them in the twenty-first century.

Originaire de la République dominicaine, Junot Díaz est un écrivain dominico-américain, qui a émigré aux États-Unis à l’âge de 7 ans avec sa mère et son frère aîné, venus rejoindre le père qui les avait précédés cinq ans auparavant. Fort du succès de son roman, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, qui lui a mérité le prix Pulitzer en 2008, et de ses deux recueils, Drown (1996) et This How You Loose Her (2012), l’auteur occupe une place importante dans la sphère littéraire américaine, comme le montre la thèse. Deux de ses nouvelles, "The Sun, the Stars, the Moon" et "Wildwood" sont analysées et traduites dans la présente thèse, de même que leur traduction en français est commentée. La thèse montre en outre comment la nouvelle est un genre littéraire qui sert bien le texte diazien, sa poétique et son esthétique. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" et "Wildwood" sont de bons exemples du style inimitable de l’auteur, dont les principales caractéristiques sont le rythme syncopé de sa phrase et l’usage du spanglish. Le persillage textuel qui résulte de la présence de l’espagnol dans des textes rédigés en anglais perturbe et interrompt le lien narratif. Il représente aussi pour l’auteur une stratégie linguistique au service de son projet politique, qui est d’affirmer sa dominicanité et de s’adresser directement à ses compatriotes dominicano-américains afin d’avoir un dialogue avec eux, mais aussi avec son lectorat blanc pour lui rappeler que l’anglais et l’espagnol s’influencent mutuellement aux États-Unis. La langue de Diaz est sonore, imagée, son ton est oral et informel, le registre est tantôt populaire, voire grossier, tantôt relevé. Vecteur d’identité et de culture, les expressions grossières ou vulgaires ponctuent les propos de Yunior, le narrateur de "The Sun, the Moon the Stars", comme s’il s’agissait d’un tic langagier. Dans "Wildwood", la formule juratoire se retrouve davantage dans la bouche de la mère colérique de Lola, la narratrice, que chez la jeune fille en quête d’une autre vie loin de sa mère, du New Jersey, de Paterson, de l’espagnol. Traduire en français la langue de Diaz qui mêle l’anglais à une sorte d’argot dominicano-américain relève d’une gageure, d’autant plus que le traducteur canadien doit choisir entre une variété de français trop hexagonale et une variété de français trop québécoise. Dominican-born writer Junot Díaz emigrated to the United States at age 7, with his mother and older brother, to join his father, who had emigrated five years earlier. The success of Díaz’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and two short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), has made him an important figure in the U.S. literary world, as will be shown in this thesis. This thesis includes an analysis and commented French translation of two of his short stories, namely “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood.” It also discusses the ways in which the short story is a literary genre that suits Díaz’s text, poetics and aesthetics. “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood” are good examples of the author’s inimitable style, which is characterized by syncopated sentence rhythms and the use of Spanglish. English sentences are peppered with Spanish, which interferes with and breaks up the narration. Díaz uses Spanglish also as a language strategy that serves his political agenda, namely to affirm his Dominican roots and engage his fellow Dominican-Americans in a direct dialogue, and to remind white readers that English and Spanish influence each other in the U.S. Díaz’s language is musical and vivid, his tone, informal and conversational, and his register, sometimes colloquial—or even vulgar—and sometimes literary. Coarse and vulgar expressions are conveyors of identity and culture that punctuate the statements of Yunior, the narrator in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” like a verbal tic. In “Wildwood” the cursing and swearing come more from the mouth of the furious mother of Lola, the narrator, than from the young woman herself, who seeks a life far from her mother, her home town Paterson, New Jersey, and Spanish. Translating Díaz’s language, a combination of English and a kind of Dominican-American slang, into French is challenging, especially since translators in Canada are faced with choosing between varieties of French that are either too Parisian or too Québécois.

Originaire de la République dominicaine, Junot Díaz est un écrivain dominico-américain, qui a émigré aux États-Unis à l’âge de 7 ans avec sa mère et son frère aîné, venus rejoindre le père qui les avait précédés cinq ans auparavant. Fort du succès de son roman, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, qui lui a mérité le prix Pulitzer en 2008, et de ses deux recueils, Drown (1996) et This How You Loose Her (2012), l’auteur occupe une place importante dans la sphère littéraire américaine, comme le montre la thèse. Deux de ses nouvelles, "The Sun, the Stars, the Moon" et "Wildwood" sont analysées et traduites dans la présente thèse, de même que leur traduction en français est commentée. La thèse montre en outre comment la nouvelle est un genre littéraire qui sert bien le texte diazien, sa poétique et son esthétique. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" et "Wildwood" sont de bons exemples du style inimitable de l’auteur, dont les principales caractéristiques sont le rythme syncopé de sa phrase et l’usage du spanglish. Le persillage textuel qui résulte de la présence de l’espagnol dans des textes rédigés en anglais perturbe et interrompt le lien narratif. Il représente aussi pour l’auteur une stratégie linguistique au service de son projet politique, qui est d’affirmer sa dominicanité et de s’adresser directement à ses compatriotes dominicano-américains afin d’avoir un dialogue avec eux, mais aussi avec son lectorat blanc pour lui rappeler que l’anglais et l’espagnol s’influencent mutuellement aux États-Unis. La langue de Diaz est sonore, imagée, son ton est oral et informel, le registre est tantôt populaire, voire grossier, tantôt relevé. Vecteur d’identité et de culture, les expressions grossières ou vulgaires ponctuent les propos de Yunior, le narrateur de "The Sun, the Moon the Stars", comme s’il s’agissait d’un tic langagier. Dans "Wildwood", la formule juratoire se retrouve davantage dans la bouche de la mère colérique de Lola, la narratrice, que chez la jeune fille en quête d’une autre vie loin de sa mère, du New Jersey, de Paterson, de l’espagnol. Traduire en français la langue de Diaz qui mêle l’anglais à une sorte d’argot dominicano-américain relève d’une gageure, d’autant plus que le traducteur canadien doit choisir entre une variété de français trop hexagonale et une variété de français trop québécoise. Dominican-born writer Junot Díaz emigrated to the United States at age 7, with his mother and older brother, to join his father, who had emigrated five years earlier. The success of Díaz’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and two short story collections, Drown (1996) and This Is How You Lose Her (2012), has made him an important figure in the U.S. literary world, as will be shown in this thesis. This thesis includes an analysis and commented French translation of two of his short stories, namely “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood.” It also discusses the ways in which the short story is a literary genre that suits Díaz’s text, poetics and aesthetics. “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” and “Wildwood” are good examples of the author’s inimitable style, which is characterized by syncopated sentence rhythms and the use of Spanglish. English sentences are peppered with Spanish, which interferes with and breaks up the narration. Díaz uses Spanglish also as a language strategy that serves his political agenda, namely to affirm his Dominican roots and engage his fellow Dominican-Americans in a direct dialogue, and to remind white readers that English and Spanish influence each other in the U.S. Díaz’s language is musical and vivid, his tone, informal and conversational, and his register, sometimes colloquial—or even vulgar—and sometimes literary. Coarse and vulgar expressions are conveyors of identity and culture that punctuate the statements of Yunior, the narrator in “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” like a verbal tic. In “Wildwood” the cursing and swearing come more from the mouth of the furious mother of Lola, the narrator, than from the young woman herself, who seeks a life far from her mother, her home town Paterson, New Jersey, and Spanish. Translating Díaz’s language, a combination of English and a kind of Dominican-American slang, into French is challenging, especially since translators in Canada are faced with choosing between varieties of French that are either too Parisian or too Québécois.