Walking out on LanguageVerbal Spaces in Junot Diaz’s “Invierno"

Abstract

Junot Díaz has gained much attention for his pervasive themes of social, cultural, and linguistic identity through his multilingual writing. In “Invierno,” This Is How You Lose Her (2012), Díaz presents a crossing of spatial and verbal concepts that creates a system of isolation and oppression through a story of reclusion and imprisonment. This article places “Invierno” within a linguistic framework in which verbal, psychological, and physical categories involve movement, and thus, possess a spatial dimension. The multidisciplinary perspective from which this story is analyzed reveals the notion of imprisonment as a complex and dynamic interplay of the material and the immaterial, the physical, and the verbal. This analysis rests on Foucault’s theories of knowledge and power, as well as on van Dijk and Fairclough’s developments in critical discourse analysis, and de Certeau’s concepts of language spaces