| Korean American literature is a vibrant field of study. I have chosen to analyze the following authors and works from this corpus: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Richard E. Kim's Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl, and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life. By blending literary, historical, psychological, and sociological methods, my dissertation crafts a paradigm to explore personal and cultural trauma. While I draw on various disciplines, I heed Sue-Im Lee's call for a renewed attention to literary aesthetics for Asian American texts by examining various narrative features through concepts articulated by Wolfgang Iser, Wayne C. Booth and Gerard Genette. I couple this focus on literary analysis with discussions of cultural trauma as articulated by Jeffrey C. Alexander and his colleagues as well as introducing my concept of dislocated imagery, which occurs through jarring personal trauma that resonates within cultural trauma. These dislocations disturb and disrupt narrators, who erect varying degrees of narrative distance. For the set of texts selected, fragmentation and stylistic scarring correlate with greater narrative intimacy and reliability, while congruency and cohesion bespeak opacity and remoteness. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee ripples with trauma, distortion and inaccurate documents, but its narrator does not distance herself from her audience. Richard E. Kim's Lost Names contains choppy, elliptical prose, yet its narrator remains relatively close to readers. Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother vacillates between narrative voices, creating a degree of separation and uncertainty. Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl constructs a temporal frame to push readers away, and the narrator skips or hides portions of her story that are damaging to its narrative mood. Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life soothes with silken, sweeping prose, but its narrator obfuscates huge portions of his life, causing a chasm between him, other characters and readers. I analyze how these narratives arise from personal and cultural traumas, and how these traumatic stressors affect certain patterns of images: documents, snow, myths, animals and water. Japanese colonization and American influence have profoundly altered Korea, and representations of cultural traumas associated with these two nations are paramount to explorations of American literature by writers of Korean descent. My project traces the trajectory of Japanese and American relations with Korea through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, including examinations of immigration and historical backdrops that enhance my literary readings. |
