Earticle

초록

영어

In this article, I discuss the foundational value of Therese Park’s A Gift of the Emperor (1997) in an investigation of anticommunism as the shared political unconscious in Korean and Korean American literary works of the ‘comfort women’ issue. My discussion begins by reading the novel’s assimilationist representation of a U.S. anticommunist policy called multiracial democracy through its portrayal of a romantic relationship between a Korean comfort woman, Soon-ah, and a Japanese deserter-cum-American soldier, Sadamu. Then, I examine how this assimilationist representation signals the intertextual implementation of the policy and the accompanying exacerbation of Cold War amnesia of the U.S. involvement in the ‘comfort women’ issue in the other three Korean American novels―Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997), and Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018). I arrange these three novels in chronological order to trace their gradual intensification of the policy’s implementation and the resulting amnesia. Lastly, I compare all these four Korean American novels and their Korean counterpart, Lim Chul Woo’s Farewell Valley (2010), to critique the challenges raised by the shared anticommunist political unconscious of the two kindred groups’ literatures of comfort women.

목차

I. Introduction
II. Multiracial Democracy in A Gift of the Emperor
III. The Anticommunist Representation of ‘Comfort Women’ in A Gift of the Emperor
IV. The Exacerbation of Anticommunism in Korean American Novels of ‘Comfort Women’
V. Cold War Ruins in Farewell Valley
VI. Conclusion
Works Cited
Abstract

키워드

저자

• Lee, Eun-joo [ Sogang University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810