Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros (2009)

Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American writer and poet of Mexican descent, who appeared in 1984 with her first novel Das Haus in Mango Street (English original title: The House on Mango Street ) , also became internationally known. Cisneros plays with literary forms, which Cisneros herself attributes to her intercultural background and the difficult material conditions in which she grew up. She is considered one of the key figures in so-called Chicano literature .

Her literary work reflects the influences of her childhood and youth: she grew up as the only daughter in a family of six male siblings, which contributed to the fact that she often felt isolated within her family. During her childhood she lived alternately in Mexico and the USA, which forced her to cope with the demands of two heterogeneous cultures without clearly belonging to either of the two. In her literary work, Cisneros therefore regularly deals with how cultural identity is formed and addresses the misogynist attitude that, in her opinion, is present in both cultures. The experience of material poverty is also a theme found in her work. Both of these contributed to the fact that her first novel, The House on Mango Street , was translated into numerous languages ​​and is now part of the reading material that is regularly treated as a typical educational novel in American school classes.

Sandra Cisneros has received several awards. She received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her short story collection " Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories ". In 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow .

Life

Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954 in Chicago , Illinois, the third of seven siblings. Cisnero's great-grandfather had been wealthy but gambled away that wealth. Her paternal grandfather was a participant in the Mexican Revolution and placed great emphasis on enabling Cisneros' father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, to study. Sandra Cisneros herself, however, confirmed that her father was not interested in studying. After failing exams, he went to the United States to escape his father's wrath. During a stay in Chicago he met Elvira Cordero Angulano. The two married and settled in one of the poorest residential areas in Chicago.

Cisneros' father worked as an upholsterer to support his family while they commuted between Chicago and Mexico City . This became the dominant aspect in Cisneros' youth. It meant that the family had to regularly find new housing and schools for the children. This instability caused her six brothers to separate from the family in pairs, adding to their sense of isolation in their male-dominated family. Her father also contributed to this isolation, calling his children “ seis hijos y una hija ” (six sons and one daughter) and not as “ siete hijos ” (seven children). However, Cisneros' biographer Ganz emphasizes that the feeling of isolation was essential for Cisneros to develop a passion for writing. Her mother Elvira, who was an avid reader and had a higher education and a more pronounced social awareness than her father, had a major influence on Cisneros. Cisneros' biographer Ganz, however, takes the view that Elvira was too dependent on her husband and, in general, her options were too limited to realize her potential. Instead, she did a lot to give her daughter the opportunity to express her abilities.

When Cisneros was 11, her family bought their own home in a Puerto Rican- dominated neighborhood. This neighborhood and the people who lived there were a major influence on Cisneros' first novel The House on Mango Street . Cisneros spent her high school years at the Josephinum Academy, a small Catholic girls' school. Here she found a mentor in one of her teachers who encouraged her to write poetry about the Vietnam War . She worked on a school magazine, but she says of herself that she didn't really start writing until she was in college. The trigger was the first seminar on creative writing she attended there in 1974 . It took a while before she came to her own form of expression. She herself explained this as follows: I rejected the obvious and imitated the voices of the poets that I had always admired in books: weighty male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke , but none of them were right for me.

Cisneros received his bachelor's degree from Loyola University Chicago in 1976 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1978 . During her time at the University of Iowa, she became aware of her particular social position. She remembers suddenly realizing how different she was from her fellow students:

“It wasn't that I wasn't aware of who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But, I had not yet realized that this had something to do with the imbalance in my life, although everything was related to it! My race, my gender and my class. But none of this had made any sense up until that morning in the seminar. At that moment I decided that I would write about something that my fellow students couldn't write about. "

From that moment on she gave up trying to adapt to the American literary canon and developed a writing style that was deliberately different from that of her fellow students. She realized that she shouldn't be ashamed of her own cultural roots, but that this was her source of inspiration. From then on she began to write about her neighbors and about poverty, which shaped the life stories of women in particular.

In addition to her work as a novelist and poet, Cisneros held a number of different professions. After completing her MFA in 1978, she taught early school leavers at Latina Yough High School in Chicago . The success of her first novel The House on Mango Street led to her being invited to various universities as Writer in Residence to teach seminars in creative writing. Universities at which she has carried out such activities include the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan . Most recently, she worked at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. One of the authors who see himself influenced by Sandra Cisneros is Junot Díaz , who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief Miraculous Life of Oscar Wao . Similar to Cisneros, Díaz grew up bilingual and bicultural and often uses Spanish idioms or words in his English-language texts such as Cisneros.

writing style

Cisneros now lives and works in San Antonio , Texas . She justified her decision to move from Illinois to Texas by saying that she needed physical distance from her relatives. Only then does she allow her to concentrate fully on writing: For her, writing is like diving her head under water.

Cisneros' literary work is often shaped by her personal experiences and observations of the people in her immediate environment. During a conference in Santa Fe, she mentioned to other writers that she frequently wrote down fractions of dialogues and monologues that she happened to hear. She then mixes these fragments with others and changes them to fit into her stories. She often chooses the names of her characters from the San Antonio phone book. She flipped through the pages until she found a surname that's appealing to her, then repeat the process for the first name.

Her bilingualism and her bi-cultural identity are essential aspects of her work process. Robin Ganz refers to a direct statement by Cisneros when she writes that the author is grateful that she has twice as many words to choose from. It would be a twofold way of looking at the world.

With the specific narrative structure of her narratives, Cisneros also undermines common narrative conventions by preventing a closed, systematic structure through breaks, delays, digressions or episodes in order to draw the reader into the narrative event. In doing so, she deliberately undermines common narrative conventions by renouncing a clear beginning or ending and by neglecting a systematic narrative in favor of reproducing the immediacy of experience.

Significance in Chicano literature

The literary critic Claudia Sadowski-Smith has called Cisneros probably the best-known Chicana writer ("Chicana" is the feminine form of "Chicano") and she was the first Mexican-American author to be published by one of the major US publishing houses, granted a role as a pioneer. Cisnero's first novel Das Haus an der Mango Straße was published in 1989 by the small publishing house Arte Público Press , whose publishing program aimed at a reading public with Latin American roots. The second edition, however, was published in 1991 by Vintage Books, a publisher within the Random House group. In 1991, Woman Hollering Creek was published direct by Random House. As Cisneros' biographer Ganz notes, up until this point it was only male Chicano authors who had successfully switched to one of the major publishers. The fact that Cisnero's first novel attracted so much attention that a publisher such as Vintage Books took it on illustrates the growing importance of Chicano literature within the American literary scene.

In an interview on National Public Radio , Cisneros said on September 19, 1991.

“I don't think I can be happy if I'm the only one published by Random House when there are so many great writers - both Latinos and Latinas or Chicanos and Chicanas - who are not great in the US Publishing houses are published or are not even known to them. If my success meant that the publishers would take a second look at these writers - and then publish them in large numbers, then we will finally arrive in this country. "

The literary critic Alvina E. Quintana describes The House on Mango Street as a book that now radiates well beyond the typical reading audience of Chicano literature and is read by people of all ethnic backgrounds. Quintana believes that Cisneros' narrative work is equally accessible to Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans because it is free from any annoyance or accusation and presents issues such as Chicana identity and gender inequalities in a way that is convenient for both groups make accessible. Cisnero's work has influenced both Chicano and female literature in general. Cisneros herself sees her narrative work as a form of social commentary that is part of a literary tradition of contemporary anthropologists who would also try to authentically reproduce the cultural experiences of a group of people.

Publications

literature

  • Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands / La Frontera . The New Mestiza. Spinsters, San Francisco CA 1987 ISBN 0-933216-25-4
  • Felicia J. Cruz: On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. In: Modern Fiction Studies. Vol. 47, No. 4, 2001, pp. 910-946, doi : 10.1353 / mfs.2001.0078 .
  • Reed Way Dasenbrock: Interview: Sandra Cisneros. In: Feroza Jussawalla, Reed Way Dasenbrock (Ed.): Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson MS et al. 1992, ISBN 0-87805-571-1 , pp. 287-306.
  • Jacqueline Doyle: More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. In: MELUS. Vol. 19, No. 4, 1994, pp. 5-35, doi : 10.2307 / 468200 .
  • Jacqueline Doyle: Haunting the Borderlands: La Llorona in Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek. In: Frontiers. A Journal of Women Studies. Vol. 16, No. 1, 1996, pp. 53-70, doi : 10.2307 / 3346922 .
  • Robin Ganz: Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond. In: MELUS. Vol. 19, No. 1, 1994, pp. 19-29, doi : 10.2307 / 467785 .
  • Deborah L. Madsen: Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia SC 2000 ISBN 1-57003-379-X
  • Alvina E. Quintana: Home Girls. Chicana Literary Voices. Temple University Press, Philadelphia PA 1996 ISBN 1-56639-373-6
  • Claudia Sadowski-Smith: Border Fictions. Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville VA 2008, ISBN 978-0-8139-2677-3

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ^ Doyle: More Room of Her Own. 1994, pp. 5-35, here p. 6.
  2. ↑ a b Madsen: Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. 2000, p. 107.
  3. ↑ Jacqueline Doyle: Haunting the Borderlands. 1996, pp. 53-70, p. 54.
  4. ↑ Cruz: On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. 2001, pp. 910-946, p. 910.
  5. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 19.
  6. ↑ a b c Ganz: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 20.
  7. ↑ a b c d Ganz: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 21.
  8. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 22.
  9. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 23.
  10. ^ Women Writers and Artists of Color . The original quote is: "I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me."
  11. ^ Doyle: More Room of Her Own. 1994, pp. 5–35, 6. The original quote is: “It wasn't as if I didn't know who I was. I knew I was a Mexican woman. But, I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn't make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about. "
  12. ^ Dasenbrock: Interview: Sandra Cisneros. 1992, pp. 287-306, p. 302.
  13. ↑ a b Ganz: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 24.
  14. ↑ San Antonio Journal; Novelist's Purple Palette Is Not to Everyone's Taste .
  15. ↑ Introduction. In: Anzaldúa: Borderlands. 1987.
  16. ↑ a b Ganz: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 26.
  17. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 27
  18. ↑ Nadine Requardt: Cisneros, Sandra. In: Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 137 f.
  19. ^ Sadowski-Smith: Border Fictions. 2008, p. 33.
  20. ^ Complete: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 27.
  21. ↑ Interview with Tom Vitale on National Public Radio, quoted in Ganz: Sandra Cisneros. 1994, pp. 19-29, p. 27.
  22. ↑ Cruz: On the 'Simplicity' of Sandra Cisneros's House on Mango Street. 2001, pp. 910-946, pp. 911.
  23. ↑ Quintana: Home Girls. 1996, p. 73.
  24. ↑ Quintana: Home Girls. 1996, p. 67.
  25. ↑ Quintana: Home Girls. 1996, p. 75.
personal data
SURNAME Cisneros, Sandra
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH December 20, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago