In Junot DIaz: On the Half-Life of Love, JosE David SaldIvar offers a critical examination of one of the leading American writers of his generation. He explores DIaz's imaginative work and the diasporic and immigrant world he inhabits, showing how his influences converged in his fiction and how his writing-especially his Pulitzer Prize--winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao-radically changed the course of US Latinx literature and created a new way of viewing the decolonial world. SaldIvar examines several aspects of DIaz's career, from his vexed relationship to the literary aesthetics of Whiteness that dominated his MFA experience and his critiques of the colonialities of power, race, and gender in culture and societies of the Dominican Republic, United States, and the AmEricas to his use of the science-fiction imaginary to explore the capitalist zombification of our planet. Throughout, SaldIvar shows how DIaz's works exemplify the literary currents of the early twenty-first century.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"This is an engaging, important contribution to understanding of Junot DIaz's work and life. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." - A. A. Edwards (Choice) "Junot DIaz is a good introduction to the Diaz oeuvre, while at the same time, a must-read for an intermediate reader of Junot DIaz's work." - Gustavo Gutierrez Hernandez (Kritikon Litterarum) "Junot DIaz: On the Half-Life of Love offers a compelling critical examination of DIaz's fiction and his distinctive place in the development of Latinx literature in the United States. It represents an indispensable and insightful guide to the emergence of DIaz's decolonial aesthetic for scholars and students interested in the study of contemporary Latinx fiction. SaldIvar's absorbing and thorough interpretation of DIaz's fiction and literary career demonstrates that DIaz's work matters, perhaps more than ever, as the legacy of colonialism and other systems of control continue to influence the trajectories and fiction of Latinx authors." - Jose O. Fernandez (New West Indian Guide)
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Dicke: 15 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-1871-1 (9781478018711)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
JosE David SaldIvar is Leon Sloss Jr. Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author or coeditor of many books, including Junot DIaz and the Decolonial Imagination and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico, both also published by Duke University Press.
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction 1
1. "Wrestling with J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings": How Junot DIaz Thinks About Coloniality, Power, and the Speculative Genres 27
Part I. Junot DIaz's MFA Program Era at Cornell University and Beyond
2. DIaz's Planet MFA: "Negocios" 47
3. DIaz's Planet POC (People of Color): Drown 73
Part II. Understanding Imaginary Transference and the Colonial Difference
4. Becoming Oscar "Oscar Wao" 99
Part III. A Legacy In-formation
5. Junot DIaz's Search for Decolonial Love 151
Conclusion and Coda: "Monstro" and Islandborn 179
Notes 191
Bibliography 225
Index 239
