Biography
Clara Oropeza is Professor of English Composition and Literature at Santa Barbara City College, California, USA. Her research brings comparative mythology to literary studies and cultural theory. She is the author of several essays, most recent The (Mal)Creation of Food the Monsanto Way: Returning a Mythic Sensitivity to Food Production. She received her BA and MA in English Literature from California State University, Los Angeles and her PhD in Comparative Mythology and Literature from Pacifica Graduate Institute.
"As a new-generation Nin scholar, Clara Oropeza expands Nin’s mythic territory into a feminist realm of self-realization beyond the strictures of literal male autobiography and logocentric Modernism. Informed by the academic field of self-life writing, Oropeza provocatively reexamines the diary as an exploratory genre in which Nin "slants" fact into fiction largely through her creative role as a literary trickster. This is a daring, fresh interpretation of Anaïs Nin’s artistic orientation."-Suzanne Nalbantian, PhD., author of Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience and editor of Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives
"Anaïs Nin: A Myth of Her Own is more than a groundbreaking study of a major modernist author, for this book reveals a mythic method to rival that of T. S. Eliot on Joyce, one superbly crafted by Nin to re-make being as feminine, creative, flexibly narrative, embodied and trickster-like. Oropeza traces a new direction in modernist studies that is Jungian, feminist, ecocritical and liberatory. This superb book is a must for all serious students of modernism, women writers, life writing, feminist theory and psychoanalytical approaches to literature as well as scholars of interdisciplinary breakthroughs to a new paradigm in the humanities."-Susan Rowland, PhD., author of Jung as a Writer (2005), The Ecocriticial Psyche (2012) and Remembering Dionysus (2017)
