the brief wondrous life of oscar wao thesis

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Oscar Wao: Introduction

Oscar wao: plot summary, oscar wao: detailed summary & analysis, oscar wao: themes, oscar wao: quotes, oscar wao: characters, oscar wao: symbols, oscar wao: theme wheel, brief biography of junot díaz.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao PDF

Historical Context of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Full Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
When Written: 2005-2007
When Published: 2007
Literary Period: Postmodernism, Contemporary Dominican-American Literature
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Setting: Paterson, New Jersey; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – 1944-1997
Climax: Oscar’s final return to the Dominican Republic, where he consummates his relationship with Ybón. Oscar is then killed for his love of Ybón, a prostitute with ties to the old Trujillo regime.
Antagonist: Trujillo, The Capitán
Point of View: First Person Narrator

Extra Credit for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Alter Ego. Yunior, the narrator of Oscar Wao , is also the main character of Diaz’s previous novel Drown and his later collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her. Díaz has called Yunior a “quasi-autobiographical figure”.

A Big Deal. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and in 2015 was named one of the most important works of literature in the 20th century.

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"Still Lost": The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction

“Still Lost”: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Academic Fiction Tracing “Oscar’s progression from inauthentic diasporic male to an assimilated, unsentimental un-virgin” (Machado Saez 538), Junot Diaz’s novel seems to exemplify the logic of the student-centered college novel as a bildungsroman focusing on the growth of a “character who must in the end be allowed to escape [the university’s] gravitational pull” (Connor 69-70). The novel is academic through and through: littered with footnotes based on research in an archive of Oscar’s unpublished papers, the novel is narrated by Yunior, who rooms with Oscar at Rutgers University and later teaches “composition and creative writing at Middlesex Community College” (Diaz 326). Nicknamed “Mr. Collegeboy” while still in high school, Oscar dreams of finding among the “thousands of young people” at Rutgers “someone like him” (Diaz 49). And yet the criticism devoted to the novel fails to register its obsession with academe. I argue that this failure sheds light on the limitations of canonical academic fiction, which tends to privilege a picture of the school as a place of poignant transformation for students and professors alike. Though Rutgers serves as the setting for nearly half of the novel, the reader encounters not a single professor or college classroom, and virtually all of the topoi of academic fiction – from frat parties and parent visits to sex scandals and committee meetings – are absent. Extracurricular attempts to educate Oscar – most notably Yunior’s attempt to “fix [his] life” (Diaz 175) – not only fail, but leave little potential for redemptive rebellion, and Oscar moves back home after graduation to teach at his old high school, where he’s just as miserable as he was when he left it. Insisting that the book is nothing if not a college novel, I suggest that Oscar’s conspicuously static selfhood challenges the image that pervades canonical academic fiction of the university as a “closed world” (Connor 69) enfolding a uniquely defined “university community” with its own “quirky, pedantic, vengeful, legalistic, and inhumane” (Showalter 119) means of producing change. Works Cited Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History, 1950-1995. New York: Routledge, 1995. Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Showalter, Elaine. Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Related Papers

Cristian Perez de Guzman Vallejo

Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is one of those cases in which critical acclaim and commercial success coincide and establish the author and his work as a major literary phenomenon. The main aim of this dissertation is to analyze Díaz's novel as a literary project that proposes, as a new and distinct feature within current literary scenes, a democratizing reading of history that allows a more politically critical assessment of the present. It is my intention to examine the aesthetic and discursive dimensions of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) in order to question degrees of sociopolitical and historical engagement within postmodern literary representations, and question the extent to which the novel's success is due to its clear political overtone or to its mastering of postmodern technicalities and its constant inclusion of references to and from popular culture

Vincent Walsh

Fernando Valerio-Holguín

This essay discusses, on the one hand, Díaz's search for cultural identity in his story cycles. The repetition of characters, especially that of Yunior, breaks with the 'aura' of singularity and uniqueness in order for the author to immerse himself in New York's Dominican community as the storyteller who tries to recover a lost but fragmentary cultural tradition. On the other hand, there is an exploration of the concepts of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and 'glocality,' that is, the local in the global, as well as the (in)hospitality of which Oscar Wao, the protagonist of the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is a victim in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, as a result of his cultural hybridity.

Pamela J . Rader

Charles W Scheel

This paper contends that Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, while thematising “SF” and other “nerd genres” plenty, is a complex work that mixes a playful, postmodern variation of magical realism with the narrative techniques of the thriller and of the family saga in a McOndoist setting. While often referring critically to Dominican Republic history and culture since the days of Trujillo's dictatorhip, the novel's foremost achievement and appeal is to offer a new language, a creolized Spanglish of the Dominican diaspora in the USA, and a new irreverent literary style that might be called "hip neo-baroque".

Science Fiction Studies 38.1 (2011): 92-114

T. S. Miller

This essay examines the relationship between Junot Díaz's 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel /The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao/ and the genres of science fiction and fantasy, which number among this decidedly mainstream novel's most important subjects. In the end, Oscar Wao’s greatest debt to genre fiction lies not in the narrator's presentation of ambiguously supernatural explanations for certain plot events, but in his incessant use of metaphors from sf—such as the Watcher and the Lensman—to describe and understand his own position as narrator-author of the sprawling family saga he relates. The ubiquity and complexity of other genre allusions in the novel prove them to be more than throwaway pop-culture references, testifying to the narrator’s deep engagement with the genre as a legitimate "lens" by which to understand human experience. The essay concludes with an attempt to situate this perspective on science fiction in relation to the current trends within the genre, with particular reference to other contemporary "literary" authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature

Lauren J Gantz

This article reads The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a critique of metatestimonial fiction and of the tendency to overstate literature’s power to heal cultural traumas. Metatestimonio bears figurative witness to historical atrocities and interrogates who is or is not allowed to speak of such events. Although Junot Díaz’s narrator Yunior gathers testimony from multiple survivors of the Trujillo regime, he mediates their experiences through his own authorial voice. The novel suggests that in refusing to allow testimony to speak for itself, Yunior (and by extension metatestimonio as a genre) replicates the discursive practices of the regime it denounces. Furthermore, by referencing specific comic book series, the artwork accompanying the 2007 Riverhead edition of the novel generates a counter-narrative critiquing Yunior’s project. This graphic counter-narrative illustrates that ending the Trujillato’s hold on Dominicans is impossible—that certain traumas cannot be healed once and for all. Oscar Wao thus suggests that in claiming literature’s power to heal the past, we (like Yunior) privilege our own desire for resolution over the lived realities of survivors, for whom the working through of trauma is an ongoing and incomplete process.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao b...

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Essays

Latino/a sexuality and the heteronormative nina ki, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao.

In his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz examines Latino identities and sexuality, and the ways in which both are affected and informed by violence. This violence is enacted through institutions like the state, through...

Views on the Relationship of the Individual and Society in Oryx and Crake, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Woman in the Dunes Robert Lee Jackson College

The relationship between society and the individual is presented in powerfully differing ways in the novels Oryx and Crake , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and The Woman in the Dunes . While Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake shows how the...

Belicia as a Parent in The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao Alexandra Karadzas College

It is said that “Children suffer the sins of their parents.” In a more literal sense, many people believe that it is the parents fault for any flaw possessed by the child, not literal “sin”. People blame the child’s development whether bad or good...

The Power of Good and Evil Anonymous College

The Cabrals, like many other Dominican families claim to be “victim[s] of a high-level fukú” (p. 154). They are constantly plagued by bad luck, so frequently, in fact that it does not seem to be just luck, making them helpless to their...

Gender in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Jessica Simpson College

In many cultures, including Dominican culture, rigid and binary gender roles have shaped and reinforced the development of a mostly patriarchal society. Indeed, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents the traditional gender...

From Sula to Oscar Wao: Interpreting Sex in Literature Anonymous College

Love is said to be blind, and sex impervious to reason. However, a person’s outlook on sex is incredibly telling of that person's fundamental outlooks upon life itself. To some, it is a sacred act to be committed in marriage only, and to others it...

Love and Madness Anonymous College

Love is inherently linked with madness. All of history has proved love to be not only blind but deaf, and yet it stubbornly persists as one of the most defining characteristics of the human condition. It certainly perseveres throughout Junot Díaz’...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: A Fukú Story to End the Curse of the Dominican People Madeline Bilbra College

In his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz brings to light a piece of Dominican history that he sees as both relevant and problematic. Within the first few pages of the novel, the speaker identifies his story as a fukú story....

The Tragic Life of Oscar Wao: Understanding the Downfall of a Virtuous Protagonist Louis Catalano College

In the novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the main protagonist, Oscar de Leon, is introduced to the reader as a despicable and a rather distasteful individual. He is characterized as an overweight nerd who is often...

Beli's Non Serviam: Joycean Parallels in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Justin M O'Connor College

“And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her to the states and beyond. I will not serve . Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La...

Overcoming Trauma: Lola's Life and Experiences Lauren Bevan College

In the novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the character Lola experiences a traumatic event that changes the way she perceives herself in a strict Dominican society. At a young age, Lola discovers a tumor in her mother’s...

Construction of Nice Guy Manhood Within "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" Juliette Bauer College

Rasmussen Tinsley of Annie Proulx’s “People in Hell just want a Drink of Water” and Oscar de León of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao represent male characters who interact with a constructed form of manhood, which this paper...

Sex and the Community in the Writings of Lourde, Shange, and Diaz Anonymous College

The works of Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Junot Diaz have featured communities that are formed around a shared sexual identity: one that is either chosen to be empowering or one that is forced upon the community members. In some cases, these...

The Need for Parents, One Way or Another, in the Fiction of Diaz and Highsmith Anonymous College

Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt both explore the romantic relationships of characters that lack parents. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , Beli, the mother of the protagonist, is...

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Essays on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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In , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao offers a wealth of material for fascinating and engaging essays. Whether you're interested in exploring the novel's themes, characters, or historical context, there's plenty to unpack and analyze. Get started on your essay today and enjoy the process of uncovering the richness of Junot Diaz's novel.

The Role of Gender in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

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The Curse of Fukú in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

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The Theme of Sex in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Sula

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The Relationship Between Society and The Individual as Presented in The Three Different Novels

Joycean parallels in "the brief wondrous life of oscar wao", latino identities and sexuality in "the brief and wondrous life of oscar wao", a study of how yunior hides from reality as highlighted in junot diaz's book the brief wondrous life of oscar wao.

September 6, 2007

Novel, Domestic Fiction

Yunior de Las Casas, Hypatía Belicia Cabral, Abelard, Oscar de León, Lola

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