• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.23-48
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• 2014

Considered as the first generation of the Chinese American male writers, Shawn Wong has often been tagged with the male-centered or cultural nationalistic writer for his first short novel Homebase since the 1970s. He has, however, shifted his own gender and cultural attitudes toward his male character in his second novel American Knees, published in 1995. By focusing on his second novel, this paper examines how Wong critically reconsiders the male-centeredness and cultural nationalism in a way to invalidate them in relationships among male and female characters in the formation of the Chinese American male's identity. Attempting to establish his own national and cultural identity as an American citizenship and the self-awareness of masculinity as a man, Rainsford Chan in Homebase believed that he could achieve his identity and masculinity with the chronological experiences related to his ancestors in American society. He even strictly erased the presence of female in his own identity formation. In doing so, he seemed to anchor his authorship at the discourse of the male-centeredness and cultural nationalist like other contemporary writers such as Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan who always strongly marked cultural tradition. By creating a non-conventional male character Raymond Ding with compromising and open-eared attitudes toward female characters, however, Wong dramatically changes the idea of representing the relationships between male and female characters in American Knees. In this novel, he suggests that the male character' identity can be properly formed not in the extreme reinforcement of masculinity or the ethnic-based cultural awareness but with the mutual understanding between male and female individuals regardless of ethnic and nationalistic biases. Consequently, Wong attempts to bail out of the male-centered images of the first generation of the Chinese American male writers through Raymond Ding.

• American Studies
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

This paper examines the benefits of teaching The Adventures of Wu Han of Korea in secondary education in Korea. The novel is a rare sample of twentieth-century American fiction that features a Korean protagonist. What is notable in this novel is that its major Korean characters seem to share the mindset of their American author and creator and represent the Western perspective in their discourse of Korean/Eastern idea and culture. The novel is packed with Orientalist attitudes and could be taught as a case study of Orientalism. Teachers can also use the novel to teach students the art of close reading by analyzing selected scenes from the text.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.331-344
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to explore sorts and roles of Afro-American music genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, and swing which were shown in post-structural Afro-American literary works: Toni Morrison's novel Jazz, Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, and August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson. It has been phenomenal for several important Afro-American writers to create their works in which they invite traditional Afro-American music genres. This has made significant effects to depict a wide range of episodes in their works, which are historically and culturally associated with such music genres. This paper analyzes varied ways in which the writers combine these two artistic fields, which are all Afro-American, and express their authenticity and identity as being blackness.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1311-1337
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• 2010

This paper deals with one of the hottest debates in the history of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) since its inception in the late 1960s. In 1998 at Hawai'i, the AAAS awarded Lois-Ann Yamanaka its Fiction Award for her novel Blu's Hanging, only to have this award protested. The point at issue was the inappropriate representation of Filipino American characters called "Human Rats" in the novel. This event divided the association into two groups: one criticizing the novel for the problematic portrayal of Filipinos in colonial Hawai'i, and the other defending it from the criticism in the name of aesthetic freedom. Such a "crisis of representation" in Asian American identity reflects on the ways in which local Hawaiians are positioned in the complicate power dynamic between oppositional Hawaiian identity and cosmopolitan diasporic identity within the larger framework of Asian American pan-ethnic identity. The controversial event triggered the eruption of Asian Americans' anxiety over the identity-bounded nation of Asian America where intra-racial classism and conflict have been at play, which are primary themes of Blu's Hanging. This paper shows how Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging becomes so disturbing a work to prevent the hegemonic formality of Asian America identity from being fully dogmatic. Ultimately, it contradicts the political unconscious of the reading public and unmasked its false consciousness by engendering a "free subjective intervention" in the ideological reality of colonial Hawai'i.

• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.211-229
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• 2021

Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008) describes Jacob Vaark, an early settler from England, and his grand house that symbolizes the American Dream in the 1680s. The source of his success is colonialism and slavery, as revealed by four female characters-a white Englishwoman Rebekka and three non-white women Florens, Sorrow, and Lina. Analyzing how the novel compares the women's experiences with nature and natural objects, this paper draws on ecofeminism as a theoretical frame of analysis to examine the novel's hitherto overlooked representations of naturalized women and feminized nature. The paper analyzes how the novel represents oppressions and exploitations of the four women in relation to nature that is similarly appropriated and developed by European men. The paper maintains that the novel does not represent these "naturalized" women as powerless and passive but portrays them as growing characters who resist patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.25
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• pp.313-336
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• 2011

The objective of this thesis is to unfold Latin American trends overlapping with Korean contemporary novels as an interesting scene in the circle of Korea literature at the beginning of the 21st century. This study was conducted largely in two directions. One is examining how long novel A Guest of Seok-yeong HWANG, a representative realist writer in Korea, and another long novel One Hundred Years Motel (Baeknyeon Motel) of Cheol-woo IM, a writer who has expressed Korean shamanic flowering as his fictitious characteristic since the 1980s, meet and interact with the world of magic realism in long novel One Hundred Years of Solitude of G. G. Marquez born in Colombia, Latin America, and the other is discussing the fictional techniques of H. L. Borges overlapping with short stories in novel collections The Age of Twenty and Fictions of Midnight by, respectively, young writers Yeon-soo KIM and PARK Hyeong-seo who displayed a unique world of fictions in the 2000s. For these purposes, we developed the points of discussion from the viewpoint of 'the meeting of two essences' for Seok-yeong HWANG and Marquez, of 'the meeting of two 'hundred years'' for Cheol-woo IM and Marquez, of 'novel writing as the finding of the original' for Yeon-soo KIM and Borges, and of 'novel writing surrounding fictions' for Hyeong-seo PARK and Borges. Around 2000, the trend of Latin American novels emerged as a phenomenon in Korean novels. It was probably a natural consequence of contemporary writers' struggling with genres and post-genres, the overturn of the center and the periphery, and blurred boundaries. Seok-yeong HWANG, Cheol-woo IM, Yeon-soo KIM, and PARK Hyeong-seo borrowed the contents and techniques of Latin American novels, but further research is required on how continuously their works internalized the characteristic properties of Marquez-style, Borges-style or polyphonic Latin American novels and, by doing so, how much they expanded or determined their own line. This is why this study has been performed productively out of vital importance. In every age throughout history, there have been the phenomena of encountering and sympathizing, and overlapping and spreading with foreign novels. This study is meaningful in that it illuminated the aspects of Korean contemporary novels in the flow of world literature through tracing the origin and reality of the trend of Latin American novels emerging conspicuously through overlapping particularly with Korean novels published in the 2000s.

• American Studies
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.179-202
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• 2018

This study approaches the novel from psychodynamic perspectives, where the narrative is woven into the strands of traumatic memories and past. Deriving from Julia Kristeva's discussion on melancholia, this paper discreetly examines Hata as a melancholic, who is unaware of what he has lost and even that he has lost. Racially abject but in defiance of his separation from 'the mother,' Hata introjects loss as his own subjectivity. The insoluble void causes him to wander through the bravado of belongingness, which he eventually transforms into Sublimation. This paper reads that Hata finally faces his own black sun, deviating from his earlier gesture life; thus, the novel becomes a successful case study of the melancholic. However, female bodies are at stake, subsumed under Hata's sexual perversion. The novel renders trauma behind the fragmented narrative of an Asian American man at the expense of consuming morbid 'feminine' bodies physically and psychologically.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.323-348
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• 2009

Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel When We Were Orphans (2000) tells the story of Christopher Banks, a private detective, who embarks on the ultimate case of his career, the puzzle of his own life. The novel consists of two overall parts, one taking place in London, the other in Shanghai-a division which reveals one of the novel's major themes, the relation between home and abroad. Set in the 1930s, Ishiguro's novel on the one hand contains all the classic ingredients of the so called golden age detective genre-an archetypal English private detective, equipped with fierce deductive skills and a magnifying glass, as well as suspects, criminals, and victims-and yet on the other hand it also deviates in significant ways. In this article, I will attempt to make some links between When We Were Orphans and the genre paradigm of the golden age detective story, arguing that Ishiguro's novel offers an exploration of the genre's ideological connections to a larger historical discourse of imperial nostalgia and decline.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.81-106
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• 2017

Using recently emerging quantitative methods, this article provides a comparative study of the diachronic changes in the narrations of novel, history, and science from the early 18th-century to the 20th-century. To trace the narrative changes in different genres, this article discusses how text-mining methodology can be introduced in literary studies. We compared the traces of narrative in three genres—novel, history, and science—as a pilot study, with the three major grammatical elements of narrative: pronoun, subordinating conjunction, and action verbs in past tense. The results of data-mining show that the use of pronoun and action verb has increased in the genre of novel toward the $20^{th}$ century, while history and science has developed less story-like writing styles.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.49-72
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• 2010

As the first of Philip Roth's recent series of novels that delve into American Cold War history deeply entwined with the post-war Jewish American experience, American Pastoral traces the tragic fall of a third-generation Jewish American named Seymour "Swede" Levov, whose dream of complete assimilation to the post-ethnic American paradise is irrecoverably disrupted when his young daughter blows up the local post office to protest against the Vietnam War. This essay proposes to examine Swede Levov's interrupted pursuit of the American dream by locating it within specific Cold War contexts and national imaginaries propagated particularly during the years from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson. In so doing, I will argue that Roth presents a paradoxical vision of Jewish American identity that could be acquired by performing perpetual self-effacement and submergence into the non-place of anonymity and doubleness, a mythic location of the post-ethnic Cold War American family. Levov's life becomes true part of the mythic narrative of American history when he realizes that his life, just like the nation's history, is a series of temporalities radically discontinued without any manageable detour ot divine bypass to cross over. Rather than indicating Roth's retraction from the postmodern understanding of subjectivity, the novel's historical realism, I will argue, serves to illuminate the postmodern conditions of American Cold War history and ethnic identity.