『네이티브 스피커』와 『동양인 서양에 가다』 비교 연구: 존중성의 관점에서

Abstract

Kyung-ah KimIt can be said that the postcolonial environment has encouraged the migrant individuals from the third world to put their own feelings and thinking into literary expressions. In this postcolonial writing, they have recently tended to focus on the hybridity between cultural self and other. Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee, and East Goes West by Younghill Kang are its exemplar novels, because they try to deal with the new context where their main characters are in the diaspora of living in the United States after leaving their native land, Korea. The two novels are profoundly excavating this issue of identity as racial other who manages to live in racial self-centered society. In East Goes West, Chungpa Han keeps on his Korean identity so firmly all the time that he can secure the "Third Space" which Homi K. Bhabha says is where cultural or racial self and other could accomplish the hybridity. Accordingly, he can accept and assimilate western culture without any confusion about his racial identity. On the contrary, Native Speaker's Henry Park, who belongs to the second generation of migrancy, fails to find his lost Korean identity, and returns to the starting point of wearing white mask. Though these novels have the different proceedings and endings, they have the same purpose in that they are dealing with the problem of self-identity as racial other and its hybridity, respectively presenting and counterexamplifying the postcolonial motive and its practices. In other words, these novels reveal that the formerly affirmed cultural identity is definitely required for cultural other to accomplish the true mixing and hybridity with cultural self in the third space.