ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper aims to introduce Korean American novels through the lens of transnationalism. Referring to the political, economic, and cultural processes that move beyond the borders of nation-states, transnationalism has become a category of analysis for transnational flows of people, capitals, technologies, information, commodities, ideologies, culture among others. In the field of Asian American literature, the transnational turn happened in the mid-1990s and this paradigm shift has affected critics and writers in the field so that we could detect critical and thematic changes in the directions of criticism and creative writing. In order to examine these changes, this paper first looks into Asian American literary criticism with a focus on the change from cultural nationalism to transnationalism. The thematic changes of Korean American writers are discussed while exploring the interests of Don Lee and Leonard Chang in representing Korean Americans as ordinary Americans who are not necessarily identified by Korean ethnicity or national identity. The writers’ interests move from Korean Americans within the categories of nation and ethnicity further to transnational subjects whose identities are fluid and flexible through individualized Korean Americans. This paper takes Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters: A Novel as an example that embodies transnational subjects whose identities are not confined by their ethnicity or nation of origin but flexible to the given condition and circumstances in the transnational era. In so doing, this paper tracks the critical and thematic changes emerged since the transnational turn.