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.

This study examines the recurrence of the image of sugarcane in Caribbean literature and traces a timeline of oppressive discourse. The image of the cane field represents a tension between silencing voice and identity independent of European nation-building ideologies. There is a history of silencing associated with sugarcane, even as Caribbean authors seek a potential to use this history to create a voice. While the authors examined employ the image of the cane field to create a voice outside of the dominant discourse, the voice of the Caribbean is nonetheless restricted. Postcolonial theory will be used to examine the history of oppression through the image of sugarcane as a negative past that authors try to get beyond, while dealing with the issue that it also helped to form their voice. My thesis investigates these issues using The Sugar-Cane: A Poem. In Four Books. With Notes, a poem by James Grainger, to set up the colonial history of sugar in the Caribbean and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a reaction to that colonial discourse. / by Michael Linder. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.

This work explores Junot Daz as an author of decolonial imagination, and more specifically, how the carnivalesque nature of Dominican machismo as influenced by Trujillos el tguere masculinity creates liminal space for self-determination in opposition to colonial imagination. In exploring Dazs primary masculine characters, Oscar de Leon and Yunior de Las Casas, I trace the initial decolonial turn engendered by tigueraje performance, namely its projective creation of self outside of colonial domination. El tguere machismo as empowering for Dominican males, however, is problematized by its reciprocal domination of both women and men who fail to meet the tigueraje ideal. It becomes an attempted cure that is ultimately symptomatic of the extent to which the effects of insidious ideologies and political policies, in this case, imperialism, perpetuate themselves across time, space, and perhaps most significantly, cultures. Ultimately, identifying Junot Daz as decolonial author is a misrepresentation; though Daz writes to break free of coloniality, his failure to largely acknowledge in his writing the cost and damage done to Dominican women reveals a narrow focus antithetical to the larger goals of decoloniality.

This creative thesis is comprised of stories that present characters who deal with guilt and betrayal and explores various points of view. My work is informed by Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which contains these themes and investigates narration. “Surviving Fog” centers around survivor’s guilt, while “Coming Full Circle, No Detour in Sight” demonstrates how a person can exert expectations on herself due to a religious background and personal values. Perhaps my most provocative story, “Beyond the Apple Orchard” delves into the emotional and physical betrayal of a father and the daughter’s struggles to overcome it. “Photographic Memories” embraces the surreal with a woman who can “read” photographs, whose story blends past transgressions that bleed into current ones, while “Send in the Clowns, Send in the Mob” explores herd mentality that stems from fear. Ultimately, each story contains kernels of truth that readers can grasp.

No description available.