Reading the Novum World: The Literary Geography of Science Fiction in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Reading the Novum World: The Literary Geography of Science Fiction in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
In “Reading the Novum World: The Literary Geography of Science Fiction in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, María del Pilar Blanco explores the author's uses of science fiction in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2007. Ostensibly a multigenerational novel that recounts the events in the life of a Dominican-American family that suffered through the 30-year rule of Rafael Trujillo, Díaz's Oscar Wao is also a direct and indirect reflection on a number of twentieth-century critical discourses that ponder the position of the Caribbean since the European invasion. The worlds invented by science-fiction practitioners also take up an important place in his complex novel. On one hand, they offer a proliferation of metaphors employed to reflect on the recent history of the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean more widely. On a different level, science fiction allows Díaz to comment more widely on the diasporic condition of planetary estrangement that is felt by the Dominican community on the island and beyond.
Keywords: science fiction, Dominican Republic, the marvelous real, diaspora, genre, Junot Díaz, Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, Darko Suvin
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