Speaking of Madness in the First Person / Speaking Madness in the Second Person? Junot Díaz’s "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love”

Drawing on Soshana Felman’s distinction between “the texts of madness” and “the madness of texts”, Munos looks at Junot Díaz’s "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" (2008) and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” (2012), a short story written in the second person, with a view to showing how the “reader-effects” at play in these two texts further ambiguate the suggested equation between cultural authenticity and Dominican hyper-masculinity. By comparing Díaz’s use of the first person in his novel and that of the second person in his short story, Munos’s aim is to show how “The Cheater’s Guide” shifts the ground of analysis even more irrevocably from thematizing the madness of Dominican hyper-masculinity to dramatizing the status of knowledge and the very possibility of interpretation.