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“Historical Deafness” in Sherman Alexie`s Flight
( Hye Yurn Chung ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2014 미국소설 Vol.21 No.1
By giving nod to postmodernist Kurt Vonnegut in his epigraph of Flight (2007), Sherman Alexie advertises from the get-go a postmodern bent to his novel. One identifiable marker of postmodern thought, according to Frederic Jameson, is “historical deafness”; history is no longer of any value to a postmodern protagonist who denies its relevance and instead preoccupies himself with the present and the now. Consequently, Alexie`s referencing of Vonnegut`s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) seemingly foregrounds the significance of ahistoricity. And yet, Flight is a text in which history, be it real or imaginary, cannot be so easily elided. In fact, protagonist Zits` finding and claiming of his “real” self Michael is contingent on his “flights” back to and reconnection with the collective history of Native Americans as well as that of all Americans. The ending of Flight is ostensibly a happy one; Zits finds himself finally unfettered from self-hatred and is embraced by a wholesome All-American family (with Officer Dave, Firefighter Robert, and Nurse Mary) that promises him baseball games, acne-free skin, healthy food choices, and stability. Still, Vonnegut`s epigraph (“Po-tee-weet?”), arguably inserted to symbolize the meaninglessness of everything that`s been said, reverberates ominously throughout the novel and undercuts the optimism that the ending suggests. One may invariably ask: is the happy ending of Flight effected by Zits ultimately choosing to turn a deaf ear to history and to focus instead on the here and the now? Certainly, Zits gaining access to the American mainstream (via his newfound family) can be read as a positive move and perhaps an expected closing with Flight`s bildungsroman format. Nonetheless, I aim to interrogate if Native American narrative is yet again placed in the danger of being erased, distorted, and re-appropriated by the dominant discourse as Zits transforms into Michael and moves rather facilely from the periphery to the center and how Flight`s take on history is implicated in this problematic process.
( Hye Yurn Chung ) 한국영미문화학회 2012 영미문화 Vol.12 No.3
Andrew X. Pham`s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999) evokes oriental mysticism and the trauma and conflict of the Vietnam War by its title alone. Thwarting the reader`s expectations, Pham`s memoir and travelogue seemingly aims to disassociate itself from and does not relay much about the images his title elicits. Instead, Pham`s readers are met with a poignant tale about a Vietnamese American man`s quest to define himself and recover his ethnic roots as he grapples with ideas of home, America, Asia, family, sexuality, and identity. The son of Vietnamese "model minority" immigrant parents, Pham decides to leave his "adopted homeland" America and return to Vietnam almost two decades later, after his transsexual sibling Chi/Minh tragically commits suicide at the age of 32. Following in the tradition of travel narratives, Pham`s endeavor to reacquaint himself with his "homeland" coincides with his pursuit for self-discovery. As his travels continue, however, Pham cannot decide if his trip is indeed a "pilgrimage or a farce" as the frenetic search for his cultural roots exacerbates his state of confusion about his ethnic identity and where his "home" lies. This essay delves into the slippages that occur in Pham`s narrative as a result of his internal struggles to collapse together the two divergent "homelands"; Pham`s attempt ends in futility as the two are ultimately polarized by the end of his narrative. In the end, Pham embraces another kind of "model minority" mentality despite his rejections of becoming yet another "good Oriental." Consequently, even as Pham initially distances himself from things "so American," his journey to Vietnam ironically proves to be a process of his "Americanization."
Love Across the Color Lines: The Occlusion of Racial Tension in Susan Choi`s The Foreign Student
( Hye Yurn Chung ) 미국소설학회(구 한국호손학회) 2013 미국소설 Vol.20 No.2
Susan Choi`s The Foreign Student (1998) traces Chuck (Chang) Ahn`s journey from the war-stricken Korea to a small college town in Tennessee in the 1950s; it follows Chuck, previously displaced by the rhetorics of war and racial discrimination, as he searches for a sense of belonging in the heartland of America. Choi`s work is one among many others emerging in Asian American literary arena which stake out the south as another compelling locus of Asian America. Leaving aside for now if we can read Choi`s novel as “southern” (in the strictest sense), contexualizing The Foreign Student within the framework of southern literature not only extends our understanding of this understudied novel but its inclusion in the southern literary tradition reconceptualizes the south as a vibrant “multi-ethnic, polyglot” community, in which various ethnic, racial, sexual, social, and economic perspectives intersect and coalesce. In particular, this essay discusses how Choi`s novel aims to couch the intricacies of interracial intimacy within a heartrending love story. Chuck and Katherine are both compromised of their agency in this confined terrain of the south, weighed down by the history of its dependence on the slave economy, the perpetration and perpetuation of racial injustice, and the commodification of the “southern lady” trope. One is othered by his race while the other is marginalized by her gender. Choi`s insistence on idealizing romantic love inadvertently invites an omission of veiled contention in Chuck and Katherine`s interracial relationship, which is, upon closer inspection, fraught with racial and gender power struggle between these two protagonists.
"Retelling Tales": The Legacy of Dislocation in Larissa Lai`s Salt Fish Girl
( Hye Yurn Chung ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2009 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.17 No.2
In Salt Fish Girl, Larissa Lai reworks the origin myth of the West by merging it with the stories of Nu Wa, the "maker" in a Chinese origin myth, who forfeits her omnipotence for the company of mankind and 3of Miranda Ching, a solitary young girl, branded "alien" by her ethnicity, which is emblematized by the strange odor of durian fruit that lingers about her. Lai cleverly engineers the suturing of the mythological past of the East and the futuristic society of the capitalist West, but she inadvertently weaves a tale of female marginality. Moreover, even though Lai endeavors to redeem strangeness and difference as a way one can "write her body into the future" ("Future Asians" 169), her text evidences that it is this very difference that relegates the female body as a palimpsest, which carries the history of their exclusion, exploitation, and dislocation into the future. This essay examines Lai`s insistence on obscuring moments of historical and cultural rupture in order to contrive a collective "herstory" of Asian/Asian North American women, which ladens them with a legacy of dislocation.
정혜연 ( Hye Yurn Chung ) 성신여자대학교 인문과학연구소 2015 人文科學硏究 Vol.33 No.-
본 논문은 중국계 캐나다 작가 에블린 라우의 자서전 『가출소녀』(Runaway, 1989)에 나타난 몸의 재현문제를 다루고자 한다. 이 자서전은 십대였던 라우가 가출 후 성매매와 약물, 알콜 중독으로 보낸 2년간을 바탕으로 집필되었는데, 자극적이고 선정적인 주제로 캐나다 사회에서 큰 반향을 일으킨 작품이다. 사실 『가출소녀』는 십대인 라우가 행한 자기 파괴적인 행동을 여과 없이 조명하고 있어, 피해자로서의 그녀의 위치를 부각시킨다. 뿐만 아니라, 기존의 지배담론을 답습하여, 라우의 몸은 젠더와 인종/민족성으로 인해 타자화된다. 하지만, 이 작품을 단지 그 선정성을 악용하여 독자의 관심을 유도하기 위한 서술로 비하하는 것은 어려운데, 그 이유는 작가가 이 작품에서 가장 강조하고 있는 주제가 바로 주체성의 회복이기 때문이다. 그러므로 본고에서는 라우가왜 모순적인 자기묘사를 통해 자기 주체성 획득의 이야기를 담아내고자 하는지, 또한 이러한 문제적인 전략이 얼마나 성공적인지 살펴보고자 한다.