Research Guide to American Literature
90 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
- Like coming-of-age novels, memoir and autobiography by ethnic American
writers trace the development of identity, tracing similar movements from
innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge, or idealism to realism,
with an emphasis on ethnicity and race. In The Hunger of Memory (1982), for
example, Richard Rodriguez describes his education as a transformation into
“a public man” which entails loneliness, and “a movement away from the com-
pany of family,” from the Spanish language of his parents and Mexican tradi-
tions, and from “private” or ethnic identity. In this work, Rodriguez describes
his intellectual development within an “either/or” context; he either becomes
an “assimilated man” or remains forever alien and unsuccessful. Other writ-
ers have conceived different models of cultural contact, finding alternatives
to binaries that make, for example, “nonwhite” and “white” or “minority” and
“majority” mutually exclusive terms. Meena Alexander in Fault Lines: A Mem-
oir (1993), Jimmy Santiago Baca’s A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet (2001),
and Diana Abu-Jabar in The Language of Baklava (2005) all exhibit more
hybrid and heterogeneous understandings of ethnic American identity, as does
Richard Rodriguez in his second book, Days of Obligation (1992). Focusing
on a memoir or autobiography, students could consider creative ways writers
express multicultural identity. How do they demonstrate the ways “majority”
and “minority,” foreign and native cultures, come together to challenge, alter,
and revitalize one another? For help in identifying primary works, students
might consult Joe Rodriguez’s “United States Hispanic Autobiography and
Biography: Legend for the Future,” in Francisco Lomelí’s Handbook of Hispanic
Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art (1993), and Guiyou Huang’s
Asian American Autobiographers (2001).
- The British Indian writer Salman Rushdie has described magical realism
as the “commingling of the improbable and the mundane.” An important
aspect in contemporary fiction, magical realism is a term applied to realistic
narratives that include “magical” and supernatural happenings as accepted
and integrated aspects of everyday life. In her introduction to Ordinary
Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystif ication of Narrative (2004)
Wendy Faris offers this definition: “Very briefly defined, magical realism
combines realism and the fantastic so that the marvelous seems to grow
organically within the ordinary, blurring the distinction between them.
Furthermore, that combination of realistic and fantastical narrative, together
with the inclusion of different cultural traditions, means that magical real-
ism reflects, in both its narrative mode and its cultural environment, the
hybrid nature of much postcolonial society. Thus the mode is multicultural.”
Students interested in this topic might begin by examining the elements of
magical realism of a particular work. How do these elements challenge or
revise Western European notions of reality? How do magical realist tech-
niques help writers to bridge cultural differences and gaps? How do writers
“integrate them into contemporary U.S. culture in order to enrich or remedy
it?” (Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts
in U.S. and Latin American Fiction,” in Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds.,
