The poetics of trauma narratives and Asian American women writers

This dissertation focuses on Japanese American/Canadian and Korean American women writers, such as Monica Sone, Hisaye Yamamoto, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Nora Okja Keller. These writers explore, mainly through the mother and daughter relationship, traumatic events that emerge out of transnational histories: the Japanese internment during WWII in the U.S. and Canada, the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the issue of "comfort women" who were drafted and forced into prostitution for the Japanese military during WWII. My dissertation argues that these traumatic events ultimately destroy the object relationships of the Japanese or Korean American subjects, whether the object be a loved person, language, homeland, or ideals of assimilation, by forcing them to acquire a new counterpart as their love object; thus, losing their love objects renders them melancholic and leaves them with indelible psychic wounds. The psychological struggles and wounds of the Asian American subjects get much more complicated as they undergo the psychic contradictions of American assimilation in the country where they now reside as the displaced, dislocated subjects. Paying close attention to the historical specificities of the traumatic events represented by these women writers, I draw on psychoanalysis and trauma studies in order to examine the complex psychological dynamics in which the diasporic mothers and daughters in their works play with their love objects, both lost and newly imposed.;This dissertation is built around several thematic anchors such as the collective silence of the transnational subjects concerning their traumatic experience, the tension between the mothers' forgetting and their daughters' remembering, and the reconciling/healing process with the traumatic past and between the mothers and the daughters. With these themes, this dissertation explores how traumatic repression is evoked and how the passage of traumatic memories is made from ghostly haunting to healing: how these writers treat silence and forgetting and remembering and reconciliation in multiple ways: and how the process of trauma correlates the aesthetic structures of trauma narratives. In so doing, I investigate diverse implications and discursive power of their collective silence. Beyond the hierarchical order between speech and silence, I explore their silence as the psychological site where their traumatic memories are dammed and reserved as the residue or remnants of the past. Thus, listening to their silence I attempt to bring testimony to the psychological dynamics Asian Americans have shown in encounters with diverse constraints such as racism, partition, war, mass rape, colonialism/postcolonialism, and immigration. This task of listening to their silence is to remember what has been unacknowledged, unrecorded, and unclaimed and in so doing, to shed light on the hidden phases of official history.