| Dominican-American author Junot Díaz is a rising star in contemporary American Latino literature.He rises to fame with his first full-length novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,which win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and is selected as one of the New York Librarys “Books to be Remembered Forever”.The work fills the historical void of the Trujillo dictatorship and challenges the official history of the dictator’s discourse by telling the history of three generations of the De Leon family.This thesis interprets the novel from the perspective of New Historicism,aiming to explore the interactive relationship between text and history,as well as Díaz’s perspective and historical writing on the period of Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.This thesis is divided into six parts.The introduction briefly introduces the life of the writer Díaz and the main contents of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,analyzes and summarizes the research on this work of Díaz at home and abroad,and elaborates the thesis statement.The main body is composed of four chapters.Chapter one is about the theoretical foundation,introducing the origin and development of the New Historicism theory,and elucidating the theoretical views of two major representatives: Louis Montrose’s the historicity of text and the textuality of history;and Stephen Greenblatt’s subversion,containment and negotiation.Chapter two focuses on the representation of “the historicity of the text” in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.This chapter reproduces various historical facts about Dominican society at the time,including the control and plunder of the colonial power and the dictatorship of the government,which clearly reflects the physical and mental destruction and persecution of the people by Trujillo’s brutal dictatorship,and further illuminates the influence of Dominican history on the creation of Díaz’s text.Charter three analyzes the“textuality of history” in the novel and explores Díaz’s strategy of writing history.By focusing on the stories of marginal characters,he deconstructs and subverts official history.Díaz creates three marginal characters in different positions: Abelard,a rebellious surgeon in the Dominican upper class;Oscar,who is discriminated against because of his lack of Dominican masculinity;and Lola,a courageous woman who seeks freedom and equality in a patriarchal society.By telling the history of three generations of the De Leon family,it maps out the decades of suffering and the plight of Latino-Americans.Finally,this chapter also analyzes Díaz’s deconstruction of history through multiple narrative strategies,employing shifts in narrative perspective,intertextuality and the native elements of Dominica to textualize history.Chapter four explores how the marginalized characters resist the dominant ideology,but at the same time is inevitably suppressed by the dominant ideology,and finally compromise with the dominant ideology in the dynamic relationship between “subversion” and“containment”,that is,both men and women are oppressed by the patriarchal consciousness and discriminated against by the white supremacy.Furthermore,it analyzes how the marginalized characters,represented by Oscar and Lola,move towards integration between races and harmony between genders with negotiation.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis.It summarizes the embodiment of New Historicism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,calling for people to face up to history and pay attention to these voices that have been overshadowed by the mainstream.In brief,this thesis tries to interpret The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from the perspective of New Historicism,confirming the intertextual relationship between text and history.This work recreates and reconstructs the history of the suffering of the Dominican people,showing Díaz’s deep thoughts on black history and racial issues as a Latino-American writer,and also evoking readers’ concern for the plight of marginalized people. |
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