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A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban"
A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban"
A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban"
Ebook49 pages44 minutes

A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 27, 2016
ISBN9781535822190
A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban"

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    A Study Guide for Cristina Garcia's "Dreaming in Cuban" - Gale

    12

    Dreaming in Cuban

    Cristina Garcia

    1992

    Introduction

    In her debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), the Cuban American author Cristina García presents the oft-turbulent, occasionally magical lives of women in three generations of a Cuban family gradually divided by time, fate, and revolution. Critically admired and nominated for the National Book Award, the novel is widely deemed a stand-out text in the emerging canon of contemporary Latino literature. García originally launched a career as a journalist with national publications, but inspired by a visit back to her nation of birth and her reconnection with family and the culture there, she turned to fiction to fulfill her burgeoning creative impulse.

    With her imagination fueled by poetry by the likes of the American modernist Wallace Stevens, she created a textually rich, imagistically powerful narrative that swirls around the young Cuban American Pilar—García's fictional counterpart—and her grandmother Celia. In fragmented post-modern fashion, the novel mixes third-person omniscient narration with first-person narration provided mostly by Pilar's generation as well as by Celia in epistolary form—old unsent letters that she ultimately bequeaths to her granddaughter. As reflected in her original title Tropics of Resemblances (taken from the Stevens poem that serves as the novel's epigraph), García sought to portray how the mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons in her story, in light of their differing experiences, form various and often conflicting conceptions of Cuban life and society.

    Dreaming in Cuban is aimed at a mature readership. The novel contains occasional scenes marked by sexual interaction or violent assault.

    Author Biography

    García was born on July 4, 1958, in Havana, Cuba, to a successful cattle rancher and his wife. In the Cuban revolution, along with many in the middle and upper classes, they suffered confiscation of their property and denunciation by the government, and in 1960, they left for New York City. Growing up in Brooklyn, García attended the Dominican Academy and worked for her parents' restaurant and retail business. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in 1979 with a degree in political science, having taken only a single English class—one on the novella that instilled in her a lasting affection for literature.

    Over the next decade, she would be inspired by the American authors Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Maxine Hong Kingston—of African, Native American, and Chinese descent, respectively—whose perspectives from outside of the dominant white American culture seemed to help make them exceptional observers. García next earned a master's degree in international studies from Johns Hopkins University and embarked on a career in journalism. Becominga correspondent for various prominent publications through the 1980s, including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and Time magazine, she relished the opportunities to delve into radically different worlds with each new assignment.

    In 1984, she finally returned to Cuba, a visit that gave her the perspective of her grandmother and other Cuban kin, one vastly different from the anti-Castro stance maintained by her

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