Psychopathologies of the island: curses, love and trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her

Journal article


Ciocia, S. 2018. Psychopathologies of the island: curses, love and trauma in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost their Accents and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her. Journal of Modern Literature. 41 (2), pp. 129-146. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.08
AuthorsCiocia, S.
Abstract

The connection between national and personal traumas is a key concern in two Dominican-American short-story cycles, Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her (2012). Both texts link the inability to establish long-lasting romantic relationships to the violent collective past of the Dominican Republic, but they do so very differently. With its regressive chronological structure, Alvarez’s narrative casts its characters as inescapable victims of a history destined to repeat itself. By contrast, Díaz eschews Alvarez’s etiological quest, highlighting the question of personal responsibility. Only marginally successful in rejecting traditional models of national identity, the protagonist-narrator of Lose Her continues the reconceptualization of Dominicanness begun in Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

Year2018
JournalJournal of Modern Literature
Journal citation41 (2), pp. 129-146
PublisherIndiana University Press
ISSN0022-281X
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.08
Official URLhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.08
Publication dates
Print31 Jan 2018
Publication process dates
Deposited24 May 2017
Accepted15 May 2017
Accepted author manuscript
Output statusPublished
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https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/882qw/psychopathologies-of-the-island-curses-love-and-trauma-in-julia-alvarez-s-how-the-garc-a-girls-lost-their-accents-and-junot-d-az-s-this-is-how-you-lose-her

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