Resumen de “Dude was figureando hard”: el cambio y la fusión de códigos en la obra de Junot Díaz
This article examines how the Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz uses Spanish in his Pulizer prizewinning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, (2007), and his most recent collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (2012), both published in English. After reviewing the main claims made in different scholarly studies regarding code-switching (in general and in literature), the article elaborates on several comments from interviews with Díaz–who is bilingual, multidialectal, and controls a large spectrum of sociolinguistic registers–, in which he explains the reasons for which Spanish is an essential component of his work. Different types of code-switching and hybrid lexical creations, often humoristic, are discussed, and the conclusion is that, unlike his predecessors, Díaz does not limit himself to the use of a sustained alternation between Spanish and English, but rather, through congruent lexicalization, he produces a sort of code-fusion which is reflective of the heteroglossic practices of postcolonial biand multilingual societies, known as translanguaging
