Social Latitude, Awareness and Personal Capability: The Problem of Agency in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
0
조회
0
다운로드
1
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This paper examines the problems of agency in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and argues that agency needs to be understood in terms of three distinct but inter-related concepts: social latitude (the freedom afforded by society), awareness (one’s understanding of oneself and one’s situation) and personal capability (the will and ability to act even when one has both social latitude and awareness). In contrast to Marxist and critical theories that stress the power of hegemonic metanarratives to mold subjectivities, this formulation of agency stresses the interplay of cultural forces and individual psychological factors. In Lee’s tragic tale, Franklin ‘Doc’ Hata is shaped not only by the social pressures of growing up an ethnic Korean in Imperial Japan or living as an Asian American in a largely white town in the USA, but also by the psychological mechanisms of defense he employs to navigate his difficulties. Although Hata’s modest aims seem perfectly attainable by most, he is repeatedly unable to take the actions necessary to achieve his goals because he lacks either the social latitude to do so, a true awareness of his own motivations or the world he lives in, or the personal capacity to act even when he finally sees the truth. In constructing a modern form of tragedy that stresses the interplay of social and psychological forces, Lee outlines some of the complexities of modern life and reveals some of the lacunae of contemporary theoretical formulations of agency.
Abstract
This paper examines the problems of agency in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life and argues that agency needs to be understood in terms of three distinct but inter-related concepts: social latitude (the freedom afforded by society), awareness (one’s understanding of oneself and one’s situation) and personal capability (the will and ability to act even when one has both social latitude and awareness). In contrast to Marxist and critical theories that stress the power of hegemonic metanarratives to mold subjectivities, this formulation of agency stresses the interplay of cultural forces and individual psychological factors. In Lee’s tragic tale, Franklin ‘Doc’ Hata is shaped not only by the social pressures of growing up an ethnic Korean in Imperial Japan or living as an Asian American in a largely white town in the USA, but also by the psychological mechanisms of defense he employs to navigate his difficulties. Although Hata’s modest aims seem perfectly attainable by most, he is repeatedly unable to take the actions necessary to achieve his goals because he lacks either the social latitude to do so, a true awareness of his own motivations or the world he lives in, or the personal capacity to act even when he finally sees the truth. In constructing a modern form of tragedy that stresses the interplay of social and psychological forces, Lee outlines some of the complexities of modern life and reveals some of the lacunae of contemporary theoretical formulations of agency.
참고문헌 (23)
- Alexander, Jeffrey C., "Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity", pp.1~30 (2004), University of California Press
- Althusser, Louis, "Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays", pp.127~188 (1971), New Left Books
- Bhabha, Homi, "The Location of Culture" (1994), Routledge
- Borges, Jorge Luis, "Collected Fictions", pp.235~241 (1998), Penguin
- Butler, Judith, "The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection" (1997), Stanford University Press
- Caruth, Cathy, "Trauma: Explorations in Memory", pp.3~12 (1995), Johns Hopkins University Press
- Caruth, Cathy, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History" (1996), Johns Hopkins University Press
- Cheng, Anne Anlin, "Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan", American Literary History, 17, pp.553~574 (2005)
- Chua, Cheng Lok, "Asian American Literary Studies", pp.64~78 (2005), Edinburgh University Press
- Foucault, Michel, "The Order of Things" (1994), Vintage
- James, William, "Essays in Radical Empiricism" (1912), Longman Green and Co.
- Laverty, Megan, "The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature", pp.191~205 (2005)
- Lee, Chang-rae, "A Gesture Life" (2001), Granta
- Lee, Young-Oak, "Transcending Ethnicity: Diasporicity in A Gesture Life", Journal of Asian American Studies, 12, pp.65~81 (2009)
- Lowe, Lisa, "Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics" (1999), Duke University Press
- Marx, Karl, "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1904), Charles H. Kerr
- Nguyen, Viet Thanh, "Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America" (2002), Oxford University Press
- Russell, Keith Ames, II, "Dislocated: Trauma and Narrative Distance in Korean American Literature" (2007), Southern Illinois University
- Said, Edward, "Orientalism" (2003), Penguin
- Smith, Sidonie, "Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives" (2008), University of Minnesota Press
- Sophocles, "Oedipus the King" (1947), Penguin
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak", pp.287~308 (1996), Routledge
- Vaillant, George, "Adaptation to Life" (1977), Little, Brown