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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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’...

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....

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...

“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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The effects and significance of unequal powers between males and females appearing in literature has been a popular topic in literary criticism. While a universal way of reading texts from a gender approach is yet to be defined. Kimmel, Hearn...

In Drown by Junot Diaz, there are decisive spaces for men and women within the text. Yunior and his mother demonstrate a compelling and complex dichotomy between a dependent maternal figure and an independent male figure. These two figures are...

Sexuality does matter. It does not matter according to the theoretical, the moral, the logical and sensible definitions of meaning, but it does matter. For those who do not identify as heterosexual, and sometimes even for those who do, liberation...

Boldly forthright and bitterly candid, Junot Diaz’s "Drown" forges a sense of community culture that propels the development of several of the work’s major themes, foremost among them the retention of historically accepted implications of...

In Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories titled Drown, the male protagonists of the stories project their ideas about masculinity onto the women that they interact with. The resulting force is a toxic overcompensation that affects every daily...

Racism in Modern America “How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie)” by Junot Diaz is a short story narrated by Yunior, a teen of Latino descent. In this short narrative, Yunior walks the reader through the steps to date and...

In his story “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”, Junot Diaz presents to the reader a couple going through a tumultuous time in their relationship. News of Yunior’s infidelity had just come to light via a letter that his mistress sent to his girlfriend...

Junot Diaz’s book This Is How You Lose Her provides an insightful look into love and loss, mostly through the eyes of its narrator, Yunior. Within this collection are stories of Yunior’s infidelity and the relationships of those around him; this...