Discussing the Canon with John Fante and Carlos Bulosan: Immigrant Narratives as Sites of Memory

The essay explores diasporic Californian writers John Fante’s and Carlos Bulosan’s practice of mentioning literary models in their autobiographical narratives from an intertextual perspective. The practice reveals instances of affiliation and identity: a way to insert themselves in the dominant literary canon, not simply as a need of assimilation, rather to negotiate their intellectual and social position. Their books are thus sites of United States literary memory through the building of a global canon.