For our net class, please read the short story “The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz. Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for the full-length novel version of this story. In addition, read one other written piece by Diaz–the options vary in length, topic, and genre, so you might check out several of the following options to choose the one you’ll read for our next class.Please bring to Wednesday’s class your printed copies of “The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao” and the other piece you choose to read. If you particularly enjoy one, you might recommend it to your classmates either in a comment here, or in your blog post for the week. Remember that this Thursday at 6:00, Diaz will visit City Tech to talk about and read his work–join him at the Literary Arts Festival in Klitgord Auditorium.
Those of you who are blogging for this week: you can blog about any of the materials we discussed in our last class on “Poetry,” or any of the Junot Diaz texts, or the poem you’re writing about for Essay #2. You will need to bring a copy of your draft of Essay #2, so you might want to use your blog-posting time to share your explication ideas with your classmates.
Additional Diaz pieces:
Fiction:
“Miss Lora” in the April 23, 2012(this week’s) New Yorker magazine
Food:
article in Gourmet magazine about Dominican food in Manhattan
Interviews:
NY1 clip on Immigration, Diaspora, Writing
Diaz on Wao:
http://www.guernicamag.com/
http://www.theharvardadvocate.
Radio: http://www.npr.org/templates/
The New Yorker: This Week in Fiction
Essays:
“Summer Love Overheated” (from GQ)
we like:
the position of the narrative voice–a minor character
the language, vocabulary
use of minor details–very detailed, goes in depth
believable characters
these people exist in Washington Heights!
very vivid–about DR, these neighborhoods
we have a frame of reference culturally
we have a frame of reference–sex and love, relevant age span
his language adds personality, makes it more personal
not the classic story of the loser becoming the winner
rawness
transported into a past setting
things we don’t like:
why did he end it this way–with a big bang of an ending?
got fed up with Oscar–both as a character and as he was developed. He’s too pathetic.
it got boring–it just wasn’t grabbing me. Maybe because Oscar was so pathetic.
too real–too repetitive