Workshops by Graduate Students - Thania Muñoz
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
Date and Time: February 4, 2015 | 2:30 PM-3:30 PMEvent Location: SST 122 (Social Science Tower)
Event Details
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of California, Irvine
Presents
Workshops by Graduate Students to present their work in progress:
Discussions between zombies, immigrants, and detectives: Memoria narrativa in Norte by Edmundo Paz Soldán
In Norte (2011) Edmundo Paz Soldán explores different perspectives of Latin America immigration to the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He presents them through a “Luvina” plagued by zombies, and focuses on a Bolivian grad school dropout with dreams
of becoming a graphic novel artist and a Mexican detective patrolling Texas. Through intertextuality, the author engages in a complex relationship between plagiarism and homage, the zombie narrative, detective fiction and the “literature of immigration”. I emphasize the intertextual connections of the novel specifically through what I call the narrative memory, memoria narrativa, to explore how Soldán in this novel contributes to the strengthening of a Latin American cultural memory from, but also for, the U.S. By highlighting the different discourses that Paz Soldán explores, reformulates, confronts, and dialogues with, I indicate how the author questions contemporary issues of national identity, biculturalism, and the intergenerational and multidirectional nuances of immigration. I leverage these insights to further explore how the U.S/ Latin American relationship has changed, and how it is still changing due to continued border crossing.
Thania Muñoz
Thania Muñoz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation, “Memoria narrativa: reflexiones literarias contemporáneas sobre la relación entre Latinoamérica y Estados Unidos” explores Latin American immigrant subjectivity in the United States and the literary imaginaries about the U.S. proposed in the 21st-century fictional works of Cristina Rivera Garza, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and Alberto Fuguet. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, Latino literature, border studies, cultural politics, and intertextuality.