Chang Rae Lee

In this essay, I consider postmodernist tendencies in two recent climate change novels, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). While I hesitate to claim that these herald a distinct postmodern turn in climate change fiction, I argue that these novels’ postmodernist self-awareness constitutes a promising new direction for fiction in the Anthropocene. Displaying a postcolonial awareness and deploying the postmodernist strategies of metafiction and magical realism, the novels undermine the omniscience of third-person narrators and the reliability of focalizers in order simultaneously to destabilize realist, imperialist, and anthropocentric constructions of the world. Indeed, they not only question the dominance of master-narratives; they question domination per se. That is, in these novels, voice itself comes under suspicion as an anthropocentric fallacy.

Wilhite contends that a general indebtedness to Cold War cultural critique has kept literary scholars from reading the suburbs and suburban fiction for what they truly are: the endgame and final outpost of US regionalism. Drawing on discussions of regional writing and cultural geography, Wilhite argues that we should read suburban narratives for the ways they update and revise long-standing regionalist approaches to local and global concerns: the charged insularity of the domestic sphere, the geographic containment of racial difference, the repressive construction of a common national identity, and the imperial reach of nation. As a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped US residential geography. When read as form of regional writing, suburban fiction exposes our homes and neighborhoods as national and transnational “sites of contestation.” To develop this line of thinking, Wilhite offers Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) and Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft (2004) as case studies for his broader claims about region and the spatial effects of residential sprawl and suburban domesticity. Franzen and Lee both locate the political subject within the competing ideologies of privatism and globalization, but they produce radically different responses to the suburb as a symptomatic fact of twenty-first-century life in the United States. Taken together, these novels offer divergent paths for understanding the suburbs as a uniquely problematic and potentially transformative cultural and geographic region.

This article analyzes “comfort women” novels by the Korean American authors Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee in terms of the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language. I specifically look at these authors’ stylistic strategies to describe rape in writing and how they (more or less successfully) avoid voyeuristic portrayals of the “comfort women” by controlling the narrative point of view and relying on traumatic “speechlessness” and abjection. Building on relevant notions from the fields of photography, cinematography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this analysis suggests that in-progress representations of rape in language become a futile project if the intention is to avoid ethically problematic images. Rather than reobjectify the “comfort women” depicted, the three writers under analysis find creative ways to occlude potentially exploitative accounts of sexual violence and bring prominence to their stories.

This paper presents a reading of Chang-rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life, which emphasizes transnational adoption from Korea as a displaced continuation of the comfort women issue. In the novel, the unreliable narrator Hata’s unresolved relation to Kkutaeh, a Korean comfort woman, is displaced and repeated in his unresolved relation to his adopted daughter Sunny. The paper suggests that we understand the relation between Kkutaeh and Sunny in terms of Žižek’s notion of ideology. The adopted daughter (Sunny), in this perspective, is a sublime object of ideology that conceals the traumatic kernel of the symbolic order (Kkutaeh). Through an interpretation of the novel A Gesture Life, the paper seeks to draw attention to some of the specific ideological structures surrounding and informing transnational adoption from Korea.

Book published by Palgrave Macmillan in the series American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Can order print copy, e copy, or individual chapters at https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230110458.  First Place Winner of the President's Book Award at Texas Tech University.

One of the most striking yet overlooked features of contemporary minority writings certainly pertains to the multiplication of “unlikely or impossible kinds of telling” (Richardson 2006) – of the sort that an emergent field in narrative theory has subsumed under the rubric of ‘unnatural narration’. Because they complicate the “mimetic reductionism” (Alber et al. 2010) that generally informs our understanding of story-worlds and speech situations, ‘we texts’ are ‘unnatural’ in many ways. As Ruth Maxey indeed remarks after Amit Marcus and Uri Margolin, the first-person plural narrator is “flexible and ambiguous”; it represents a voice that is “inclusive and exclusive, everyone and no-one, all-seeing yet strictly limited” (2015).
Looking at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) – this essay contends that the ‘we form’ of these novels ‘has intention’, as it were, in that Otsuka’s and Lee’s “strategies of referential indeterminacy,” as Monika Fludernik put it in a related context (cf. 2011), have the potential for interrogating received notions about Asian American identity. Although Otsuka’s text excavates problematic chapters of Asian American history – that is, the little-known story of the ‘picture brides’ and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2 – and Lee’s dystopia portrays a future version of America where the descendants of the migrants from “New China” are held in relative captivity in “B-Mor” by the dominant class, both texts are underpinned by a similar resolve: to expose the ‘exclusion-by-inclusion paradox’ faced by the Asian American ‘model minority’ in the U.S.
The purpose of my essay is twofold. First, my goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions generated by the ‘we’ narration in these two Asian American novels prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into questions essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building (or when it comes to revealing the ways in which individuals, including readers, are shaped by the amnesias and tyrannies of History). But these two ‘we texts’ are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, given their strategies of selective individualization, address function for readers, and shifting referentiality. Drawing on the unnatural narration theoretical framework, I wish to examine how the ‘we’ narration in Lee’s and Otsuka’s texts helps us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.