Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of
Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of
Monica Hanna is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton.
Jennifer Harford Vargas is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the author of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cannibalist: Reading Yunior (Writing) in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Published:January 2016
Monica Hanna, 2016. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cannibalist: Reading Yunior (Writing) in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Monica Hanna, Jennifer Harford Vargas, José David Saldívar
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This chapter addresses the identity of the mysterious narrator of Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It traces Yunior de las Casas’s artistic coming of age, his Künstlerroman, arguing that what emerges in his narrative is an aesthetics of artistic consumption, which reflects Díaz’s vision of the development of the model writer-activist. Yunior, as a budding writer and intellectual not yet sure of his place in the world but desperate to try to narrate the story of the de León and Cabral family, consumes and embodies their stories as a way to write Dominican Americans into history. The nonnormative bodies that populate the novel are given a sacred and central position by Yunior’s loving consumption. The novel’s narrative form creates a literary space for Dominican American identity through an artistic cannibalism, drawing on the artistic vision provided by the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto.”
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