Investigation (Oscar Wao)

Marginalia Textual annotations have a long history in literary studies. They are in essence commentary on a text, sometimes offered as marginalia alongside the main text, other times as footnotes, and yet other times as entirely separate documents.

Annotations can serve many functions, depending upon their context. They can be exegetical, drawing out meanings and interpretations from a passage or even an individual word. They can be focused on a book’s history, noting variations that occur in different editions. They can be generated from a reader’s own idiosyncratic response to a text—for example, quotations and passages from the text the reader wishes to collect and remember, and put in dialogue with one another.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an ideal novel to annotate, considering that Junot Díaz provides annotations of his own in the various footnotes. Given the characters’ countless intertextual allusions, we might even say that the novel is obsessed with textual commentary. For this investigation you will pick a two-page spread from Oscar Wao and heavily annotate it. Your annotations should not be guided by an overarching argument. Rather, annotate the page in a kind of free association way, commenting upon words, passages, and patterns in any way you are compelled to do so. I encourage you to research unfamiliar names, places, or phrases (both English and Spanish) that appear in the text, and to annotate these as well.

Your work for the assignment will consist of a photocopy of the two-page spread from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with the bulk of your annotations directly on the page. The second component is a typed collection of your annotations, plus any further commentary that would not fit on the novel’s pages, or which didn’t occur to you during the initial process of annotation. Finally, the third component is a 400-500 word reflection about the annotations. What did such intense scrutiny of a single pair of pages in the novel reveal? Was there a pattern to what you annotated? How does the material you annotated contribute to or even complicate the overall themes of the novel?

This investigation is due on October 25 and is worth 20% of your final grade. Hand in the photocopy in class and upload the other material to Blackboard.

Palimpsest photograph courtesy of Danielle Koupf, Creative Commons Licensed