“Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
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Pieter Vermeulen
Abstract
While the extensive criticism on Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker (which upon its publication immediately became the most successful Korean American novel of all time) has not failed to assess the novel’s negotiation of issues of ethnicity and identity, as well as of the possibilities and pitfalls of political enfranchisement, it has generally concluded that in the last analysis, Native Speaker despairs of the possibility of political change. By paying attention to the (ostensibly apolitical) question of how the novel deals with strategies for coping with personal loss, with histories of dispossession, and with social injuries, this essay argues that the political significance of the novel lies in its dismissal of a melancholic conception of political agency and its concomitant recognition of the need to develop adequately explanatory social narratives for coming to terms with experiences of loss (a process that is related to Freud’s notion of mourning). As such, the novel undertakes a wide-ranging critique of the recuperation of melancholia as an adequate ethico-political posture in critical theory in the last quarter century
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Confessions of a Thug: The Voice of the Criminal in Colonial Crime Fiction
- Stowe and Brown Revisited: Fiction-Made Characters in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
- Where Is the West-Running Brook Flowing? Robert Frost in Taoist Perspective
- A Complex Kind of Feminism: Margaret Drabble’s “A Success Story”
- “Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia
- Lineages of the Present: Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass and India’s Embattled Secularism
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
