Abstract
The stellar novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Caramelo, respectively, emerge in an age when Latino ethnicity is often marketed as an exotic commodity. As a result, a paratextual network of the performance of latinidad overlays the writers and their cultural creation. Both novelists interact with this expectation inside and outside the books, inviting readers to pass through multiple paratextual portals as they engage with the texts. Gérard Genette’s analysis of paratexts—the framing elements inside and outside literary texts that shape the reading process—is expanded in this study with a broader conceptualization for the digital age. The interplay of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism undergirds many of the paratextual networks of the two novels.
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Notes
See, McCracken, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
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© 2016 Ellen McCracken
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McCracken, E. (2016). Introduction. In: Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137603609_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137603609_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88817-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-60360-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)