Ana María Shua’s Daughter: New Experiments in Argentine Jewish Historical Fiction with Claire Solomon

Professor Claire Solomon considers how acclaimed writer Ana María Shua plays with Argentine Jewish history through a mother-daughter narrative that is also a metaliterary experiment, alternating novel chapters with diary entries about the process of its creation. On one level, Daughter is the story of a mother who longs for a child, and finally has a beautiful, talented daughter who may also be... evil. In its back-and-forth movement from past to present, Shua's novel reveals how we are drawn to fiction to grapple with history's disasters, suggesting that history has a way of erupting in our most intimate relationships.

About the speaker:

Claire Solomon is associate professor of Hispanic Studies and comparative literature at Oberlin College. She is the author of Fictions of the Bad Life, a book about literary prostitutes, and short fiction and essays about avant-garde theater, anarcho-feminism, Manic Pixie Dream Girls, translation theory and new music. She is currently at work on a novel about higher education and the libretto of a new opera, Centuries in the Hours, with composer Lisa Bielawa.