Understanding Chang-rae Lee

Amanda M. Page

Description

The first study that traces the career of an author who pushes against formal and thematic boundaries

In Understanding Chang-rae Lee, Amanda M. Page provides the first critical survey of the work of one of America's most acclaimed contemporary novelists. Chang-rae Lee, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford University, has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, an American Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lee is the author of five novels, including The Surrendered, which was a named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011. In considering the novelist's oeuvre, Page examines Lee's evolving use of narrative perspective and how it attests to the power of voice by showing that storytelling can reveal hidden truths—whether intended or not.

After a brief biography, an overview of Lee's critical reception, and a discussion of his nonfiction essays, Page traces the trajectory of Lee's career to illustrate the ways his work continues to push against formal and thematic boundaries with each new novel. In her exploration of Lee's first and best-known novel, Native Speaker, Page introduces many of Lee's recurring themes, including the pains of cultural assimilation, the significant role of language in identity, and emotional alienation as a result of constructs of masculinity. Page then argues that Lee's second novel, A Gesture Life, uses evasive narration and the guise of a suburban novel to conceal a meditation on war trauma and contemporary isolation. Aloft, the last of Lee's novels told in the first person, plays with expected conventions of American suburban fiction to critique the white privilege at the heart of this familiar form.

Page also explores The Surrendered, Lee's ambitious historical epic that deploys third-person perspective to show the variety of ways historical trauma reverberates in the present. Page's final chapter focuses on Lee's dystopian novel On Such a Full Sea. In his most bold experiment with narrative voice to date, this novel is told from the collective perspective of an entire community, reflecting on the experiences of a lone girl as she navigates a highly stratified social hierarchy. Page argues that this work shows the culmination of Lee's interest in the relationship between the individual and the community and the power of a single voice to speak truth.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Nora Okja Keller
• Equanimity
• A Gesture Life
• Superiority (short story)
• I Wish (manhwa)
• Captivating (book)
• Of Education
• True History
• Moral high ground
• Chang-Rae Lee
• Self-sufficiency
• Mrs.
• Asian American
• Good faith
• The Resistance
• Amy Tan
• Ha Jin
• American
• Profession
• Ursula K. Le Guin

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177831
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING CHANG-RAE LEE
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
UNDERSTANDING
CHANG-RAE LEE
Amanda M. Page

The University of South Carolina Press
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-782-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-783-1 (ebook)
Front cover photograph David Burnett
For Maura and David, the sweetest distractions, and for Troy, who makes it all possible
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Understanding Chang-rae Lee
Chapter 2 A life univocal : Native Speaker (1995)
Chapter 3 The basic mode of wartime : A Gesture Life (1999)
Chapter 4 The last living white man : Aloft (2004)
Chapter 5 Differing scales, unlikely modulations : The Surrendered (2010)
Chapter 6 A special conviction of imagination : On Such a Full Sea (2014)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Linda Wagner-Martin for her untiring efforts to mentor a new generation of American literary scholars. A model of dedicated teaching and scholarly generosity, her energy and encouragement have made all the difference.
Thank you to Jennifer Ho at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who introduced me to many of the texts and concepts that inform this book. Thanks to the English departments at Marywood University and Juniata College for welcoming me to engaging, dynamic, and supportive academic environments while I was at work on this book. Special thanks to Hannah Bellwoar for helping to make the transition from student to professor so much easier. Shout out to my Juniata College Writing Workshop students for their insightful comments on drafts of this book and for pointing out when I need to practice what I teach.
And, finally, much love and gratitude to Troy, Maura, and David Taylor. You are my happiness.
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Chang-rae Lee
With the publication of his debut novel in 1995, Chang-rae Lee became an immediate critical and popular success. For Native Speaker , Lee won the American Book Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Best First Novel, and many other honors. His second novel, A Gesture Life , was critically lauded when it appeared in 1999. That year the New Yorker listed Lee among the twenty best American writers under the age of forty. Lee s subsequent novels, Aloft (2004), The Surrendered (2010), and On Such a Full Sea (2014), have been well-received best sellers like their predecessors. The Surrendered won the Dayton Peace Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Now a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, Lee has become a major voice in contemporary American literature.
Chang-rae Lee was born in South Korea on July 29, 1965, to Young Yong and Inja (Hong) Lee. At the age of three he moved to the United States, where his father was completing a psychiatric residency. The family lived briefly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before moving to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, where Dr. Lee took a position at Bellevue Hospital. The family eventually settled in suburban New Rochelle. In an interview Lee recounted that his primary contact with the Korean community came on Sundays when the family attended a Korean Presbyterian church in Flushing. 1 Lee s biography is different from the usual narratives of first-generation immigrants struggles with poverty and alienation. Though living in predominately white neighborhoods in Westchester County, Lee did not feel like an outsider and has reported being fairly well-integrated. 2 He did contemplate changing his name when beginning school but chose to keep Chang-rae. 3 He had a comfortable middle-class suburban childhood, attending boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy before heading to Yale University to earn a BA in English in 1987.
Lee spent a year working on Wall Street for an investment bank before quitting his job to write his first novel, called Agnew Belittlehead. 4 Though unpublished, the manuscript helped get Lee accepted into the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. He received his MFA in 1993, the same year he married Michelle Branca, an architect. Lee remained at the University of Oregon until 1998 as an assistant professor of creative writing. After the acclaimed publication of Native Speaker , he moved back to the East Coast to create the graduate creative writing program at Hunter College. While at Hunter, Lee taught and befriended the writer Gary Shteyngart; Lee helped him publish his first novel, The Russian Debutante s Handbook . 5 With the success of A Gesture Life in 1999, Lee joined the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, where he has taught from 2002 until 2016, when he joined Stanford University s faculty. Lee has also repeatedly served as a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He lives with his wife and two daughters, Eva and Annika.
Despite Lee s personal and professional success, his first novel reflects the outsider tension characteristic of immigrant fiction, which, in turn, influenced the publicity for Native Speaker and for the author. The press perpetuated the idea that Lee s novel was the first Korean American-authored book to be published, even though the beginnings of Korean American literature had been established decades earlier with Younghill Kang s novels The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West (1937) and Richard E. Kim s best seller The Martyred (1964), among others. 6 Native Speaker , however, marked the beginning of a series of popular books by Korean Americans in the second half of the 1990s, as such authors as Susan Choi and Nora Okja Keller published popular and critically acclaimed books.
Because the marketing around Native Speaker positioned Lee as the first Korean American writer, reviews of his novel often sought to conflate the character of Henry Park with the author. In Pam Belluck s New York Times profile of Lee, titled Being of Two Cultures and Belonging to Neither, she focused on Lee s biography to draw parallels with the novel to suggest Lee s alienation. 7 Also in the New York Times , Rand Richards Cooper s review, Excess Identities, went a step further to suggest that the novel was really a memoir struggling to get out-a rapturous evocation of a past life, viewed across a great gap of time and culture, and the review concluded that if Lee had scrapped the spy stuff, it would have been a better read. 8 By presuming the autobiographical significance of the text, the reviewer worked to undermine the book as a work of creative fiction. Cooper went further to suggest that autobiography would be a more appropriate genre for Lee s work. The implication of this suggestion, of course, is that an autobiographical account would be more authentic as well as in keeping with the tradition of first-person immigrant literature. 9
This particular critical response to Native Speaker reveals the double-edged nature of being lauded the premier Korean American author. Yoonmee Chang wrote, Chang-rae Lee, who routinely rejects categorization as an Asian American writer and whose work does not always focus on Asian American characters, finds his success rooted in the reading of his texts as ethnographic autobiography. 10 David Palumbo-Liu has argued that the surge of interest in contemporary Asian American literature requires Asian American authors to follow a narrow set of scripted conventions that seem to suggest answers to a generalized problem of racial, ethnic, and gendered identities in order to be successful, answers which then reinscribe what Asian Americans and Asian American literature should be. 11 What is published and accepted by the public, he stated,