Latin American Literature Commons^™

The Crafting Of The Self In Private Letters And The Epistolary Novel: El Hilo Que Une, Un Verano En Bornos, Ifigenia, Querido Diego, Te Abraza Quiela, And Cartas Apócrifas, Angelica A. Nelson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inherent flexibility of the letter form or epistolary mode of writing frees the writer within the framework of salutations and closings to use vocabulary and language to create, to omit or to invert conventional constraints imposed on women by a patriarchal society. The letter begins as a blank page but becomes the space for writing one’s personal thoughts and emotions to the absent other in a communicative effort to minimize the separation.

This dissertation examines the female narrator in actual letters written during the Spanish emigration to the New World in the sixteenth century and four epistolary novels written …

"A Bastard Jargon”: Language Politics And Identity In The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Rachel Norman

Faculty Publications

This essay explores Junot Díaz's only full-length novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, through the theoretical lens of sociolinguistics and examines the ways in which Díaz has attempted to overcome the publishing industry's complicity in maintaining the nation's ethnocentric expectations in regards to English as the only acceptable language of publication. By introducing the work of several sociolinguists into the discussion, examining the use of African American Vernacular and “nerdish” alongside the Spanish, and reviewing Díaz’s relationship with his editors, I provide a more nuanced reading of the ubiquitous code-switching throughout Oscar Wao and suggest that beyond …

A New Definition Of Magic Realism: An Analysis Of Three Novels As Examples Of Magic Realism In A Postcolonial Diaspora, Sarah Anderson

Honors Program Projects

In the world of literature, magic realism has yet to find its place as an established genre or style. The following paper posits that magic realism stems from marginalized writers in a postcolonial diaspora, attempting to make sense of their world without the influence of Western gaze. Gabriel García Márquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children, and Toni Morrison in her novel Paradise use similar elements of magic realism in order to establish a grounding mythology for their cultures. These three novels can demonstrate the direction of fiction that uses magic …