Earticle

초록

영어

This study explores Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and The Surrendered, by remaining attentive to the novels’ shared subject matter of war and its enduring legacy reflected in the Korean American protagonists. To achieve the nuanced understanding of ethics which is not formulated negatively against the other, I illustrate how the male protagonists’ relentless pursuit of assimilation leads to subsume the other, namely, the female characters, Korean comfort woman and war orphan, respectively, through the exclusionary politics. Firstly, I will address how the male characters in both novels end up reenforcing the status quo by faithfully following the putative logic of the Cold War such as American Exceptionalism and the Cold War containment policy. Secondly, I will highlight the ways in which the debasement of the female characters, whom I regard as “homo sacer” using Agamben’s term, and their subsequent deaths are undergirded by the double process of abjection, first by the sovereignty which engenders homo sacer and pits them against each other, then by the male characters, who act as agent of abjection for the sovereignty, while suturing themselves back into their “assigned places” of the system. The female characters project multiple versions of ethics, provisional and personal through and through, to reveal the poverty of the “ethical” intervention of the male characters.

목차

I. 들어가는 말
 II. 호모 사케르(Homo Sacer)로서의 종군 위안부와 전쟁 고아
 III. 체제 순응적 윤리 : 미국 예외주의와 냉전 봉쇄 정책이 끼친 영향
 IV. 나가는 말
 인용문헌
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 진주영 [ Ju Young Jin | 서강대 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813