Monday, April 25, 2011

Junot Diaz

What kind of stories are those collected in Drown, if you had to place a "genre label" or other kind of descriptive label on them? Are they "coming of age" stories? "Stranger in a strange land" stories? Some other readily recognizable type?
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20 comments:

  1. I though it was a “loose autobiography” because Yunior, like the author, was born in Dominican Republic and was transplanted to the United States. But Diaz relocated to the States long before yunior’s migration.Since the Drown stories tells other people’s stories complete with dialogue that sounds very true and real like tales passed from grandparents to younger generations, I would call it a Biofiction.

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  2. Having read so much on Junot Diaz for my presentation, I know how strongly he emphasized that his short stories were not purely autobiographical. While they do possess some autobiographical elements, I think they can better be described as coming of age stories. On the surface level, each story deals with a young man struggling to grow up in a tumultuous and often dangerous world. I think it would be difficult to describe them as “stranger in a strange land” stories because, while this may be true for one or two of the stories, many of the others feature characters who have more or less found a place in their own surroundings. While they still may feel like outsiders because of personal shortcomings, it doesn’t seem like skin color is a defining roadblock to them fitting in. Rather, many of the narrators possess an apathy that keeps them removed from the actions of the rest of the characters.

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  3. If I had to put a label, I would use "documentary". To me, it is a documentary of the Dominican diaspora of Diaz's generation. Diaz's own experiences contribute greatly to the realism of these stories. There is definitely "coming of age" stories, but these are set in specific environments unique to Dominican immigrants. I also feel like some characters, especially the immigrant women of Diaz's parents' generation to be "strangers in a strange land", as they are portrayed secluding themselves in their homes in silence. However, the children seem to be just as comfortable in their new American homes and back in Santo Domingo. The children seem to assimilate well into American culture, but still retain their Dominican heritage in many aspects. Some of the challenges the characters face (e.g. fatherlessness, poverty, etc.) could transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, but so much Dominican culture from the dialect to the scenery is embedded it makes these truly revolve around the life of the Dominican American immigrant.

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  4. I would have to say biographical. The stories tell about a person’s life. It’s not really in any order, but it describes the boy’s life in a very real way. It could be a coming of age story but, he’s not really going through a lot of beneficial experiences to learn and grow. He is just kinda there and taking what’s given to him.

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  5. Having read the Stories in "Drown" I would say that they are coming of age stories. The protagonists in each story deals with different situations, and from these situations they learn who they really are. The young men in these stories have fathers who left them, causing them to learn from society how young men should "act".

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  6. Though the stories with Yunior form something of a bildungsromanette, with heavy outsiderishness dolloped on for good measure, I think most of them fall under the general category of "Unsatisfying Epiphanic Stories as Popularized by The New Yorker Magazine."

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  7. I thought most of the stories so far have been about struggles and hardship the families faced. This could also be viewed as coming of age and being in a different land was just a small piece in the big puzzle.

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  8. I tend to agree with James the most in that it could've been a documentary of sorts. The stories were realistic and in some scenes overly descriptive. The stories were never overly outlandish. The story could be biographical because it seems that Diaz is pulling in personal experiences to put the short stories together. As far as a story about a stranger in a distant land, I would disagree. He is surrounded by his own ethnic community in the US.

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  9. I feel that the collection of stories in "Drown" is both coming of age and an pseudo autobiography that details the lifestyle of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. These stories detailed different points of Yunior's life with graphic details so that it may become more tactile for the reader to understand. This applies to modeling the immigrant's lifestyle; the choppy sentence structure and lack of a defined narrator make it seem almost as if we're reading something the narrator wrote only for themselves; hence, a "pseudo autobiography".

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  10. These stories are hero sorry, there is always a plot where the down trotted are still to function in a world not their own. I did like how no-face was described like as a ever vigilant superhero. but in every story you want to character to succeed against the odds or the villains that are in front of him.

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  11. I think that Diaz's stories in Drown are mostly coming of age stories. Like I mentioned in class, it seemed as though masculinity, which often times comes with age, plays a big roll throughout all of the short stories. Yunior had to mature faster because his father left when he was so young. This also happened to Diaz in real life.

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  12. I think his stories are coming of age. The father of many of the characters in the stories were not present. So young boys had to come up with a their version of being a man. In doing so, they idealized it too much, and put several requirements into it; such as being dominate and never showing empathy.

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  13. Junot Diaz's stories deal with the coming of age of the protagonist. The character has to deal with not having a father and how to figure out what it means to become a man. This is problematic because the only role models available to him are other men in his neighborhood who feel that masculinity comes from being a dominant man. This becomes the main issue of the story, how to become a man in a place that defines manhood as needing to be a "macho" man. This is a thirst for power. It can be concluded that a thirst for power can lead to other conflict, especially creating otherness based on gender or even race.

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  14. I believe they most closely correspond to "stranger in a strange land" stories. To me, they feel like the protagonist is exploring something that is completely foreign to him and that he is simply trying to learn of ways to cope with his existence. In my short answer essay on the final, I expand on this to say that Diaz may actually be trying to convey his understanding of the human condition through these stories, and that the dark, grittiness of them is simply what he knows of it.

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  15. The stories in Drown as a collective seem to be a coming of age story. However as the short stories they all seemed to include other types of genre labels. for example in the last story the label would be that of a stranger in a strange land. Yunior's father leave the Dominican Republic and moves to America. in America he has to conform to the new ways of life that the Americans live by.

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  16. I would generally categorize the stories in Drown as tales of emotional evolution, or coming of age stories. They are very much stories which describe the dynamic and dangerous emotive landscapes of people who have been deprived of guidance or empathy, resulting in chaotic and beautiful emotional struggles.

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  17. To me, Drown came off as a coming of age story. Yunior's experiences are mostly based on his confusion caused by the abandonment of his father. It seems as if Yunior is trying to fill the void caused by the absence of his father, and perhaps he was trying to somehow understand his fathers infidelity.

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  18. The stories contained in Junot Diaz's Drown can be considered coming of age stories, concerned mainly with the familial changes encountered during the evolution from childhood to manhood. Those changes and experiences are told with a specific view of one who has a Dominican-American background, and contain elements of coming of age in a strange land as well.

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  19. I would have to say it is more of a coming of age story. The although the stories are autobiographical in nature, they tell the story of a boy and his adventures as he becomes a young man. Yunior deals with issues that he is attempting to come to terms with and must do so in order to become comfortable with himself as a man.

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  20. I would describe the stories as a collection of fictional biographies. A number of the stories definitely contain coming of age stories, but they also provide a window into the world of Dominicans immigrating to America. They present a look, not just at the positive story, Negocios, but at the problems immigrants face, as well as the pain that families go through when attempting to immigrate.

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