A escrita de Julia Alvarez: o elaborado processo de invenção de si através da literatura

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the concepts of home and displacement, elements of gender performance and strategies of life-writing in the works of the Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez. The author, although born in New York, was raised in the Dominican Republic, immigrating to the United States at the age of ten. Her experiences as a diasporic subject not only shape her life path but also influence her writing in general. Alvarez writes fiction and non-fiction that feature as protagonists Caribbean women who live in-between cultures and are often deeply connected to their homeland. The primary focus of this literary analysis is to establish a parallel between Alvarez s journey and that of her character Yolanda, highlighting both political and aesthetic concerns. Her novel ¡Yo! (1997) and a collection of autobiographical essays, Something to Declare (1998) constitute the main literary corpus of my work, but I also include excerpts from the writer s first novel How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991) and from interviews. The notions of life-writing and autofiction are going to be brought up as key elements to the appraisal of Alvarez s works. Making use of her own experiences as a Dominican-American writer to build her characters and storylines, Alvarez weaves history and fiction in order to expose the struggles of people who are caught between cultures. Furthermore, through her essays, I intend to analyze the effects of forced displacement both on the author herself and her mirrored literary representation presented in the selected novels. That being said, in order to discuss such outcomes, I am going to touch upon topics such as identity formation, gender expectations and performance, cultural hybridism and more. The authors who compose the theoretical foundation of this research write mostly from a viewpoint of postcolonial/decolonial and feminist criticism; nevertheless, in order to investigate life-writing practices I intend to use some scholars who are specialists in autobiography and/or autofiction. The basis of this thesis includes the works of Phillipe Lejeune, Homi K. Bhabha, Susan S. Friedman, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, among others