Redressing the pained body: The politics of sentimentality in Asian American literature

This dissertation claims that Asian American literature has been and remains a deeply sentimental literature. While critics such as Lisa Lowe and Patricia Chu have anticipated this stance by arguing for the centrality of the bildungsroman tradition to Asian American literature, this project extends Lowe's and Chu's work in several ways. Chapter One historicizes Asian Americanist criticism on sentimentalism through a new reading of Frank Chin's critique of "the fake," particularly as it is articulated through his play The Year of the Dragon and short story "Railroad Standard Time." Chapter Two provides a comparative reading of three novels by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Patti Kim, and Fae Myenne Ng in which Asian American literature's dominant sentimental narrative, the mother-daughter story, is supplanted by a father-daughter story. I show that while the father-daughter novels historicize Asian American men's labor and thus rework the sentimental tradition, this rewriting is also accomplished through formal strategies that thwart the sentimental tradition's developmentalism. Chapter Three reads two Korean "comfort woman" novels by Nora Okja Keller and Chang-rae Lee to show that while Asian American histories of exclusion and racism have resulted in an abundance of novels that spectacularize suffering, collective pain may be better represented through a focus upon the mundane and quotidian effects of violence. Chapter Four's extended reading of Yamanaka's novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers demonstrates that sentimentality is a necessary but flawed ideological and emotional resource.