Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- 22 Beyond Solitary Confinement: Rethinking the Sociopolitical Context of Local Literature in Hawai‘i
- 23 Contemporary Asian American Drama
- 24 “More Than You Ever Knew You Knew”: The Rising Prestige of Fiction
- 25 Asian American Poetry and the Politics of Form
- 26 The Forgotten War in Korea
- 27 The American War in Viet Nam and Its Diasporas
- 28 Refugee Aesthetics: Cambodia, Laos, and the Hmong
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
26 - The Forgotten War in Korea
from Part V - Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- 22 Beyond Solitary Confinement: Rethinking the Sociopolitical Context of Local Literature in Hawai‘i
- 23 Contemporary Asian American Drama
- 24 “More Than You Ever Knew You Knew”: The Rising Prestige of Fiction
- 25 Asian American Poetry and the Politics of Form
- 26 The Forgotten War in Korea
- 27 The American War in Viet Nam and Its Diasporas
- 28 Refugee Aesthetics: Cambodia, Laos, and the Hmong
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Korean War is best known for being forgotten in large part because it was orchestrated to disappear. This chapter explores three major Korean American literary works which are all vexed attempts to render the politics and brutality of a forgotten war: Richard E. Kim's long-forgotten 1964 bestseller The Martyred; Susan Choi's acclaimed first novel The Foreign Student; and Chang-Rae Lee's 2010 The Surrendered. These novels are remarkable not only because they stand as the handful of fictions devoted to the Korean War, but because all three grapple with how to tell the story of a conflict deliberately kept off-stage even as it was being fought. In their highly mannered approaches to the Korean War, these novels address an American mainstream accustomed to Cold War norms of containment, and each seeks to contain this unruly war within well-worn generic and typological conventions, but in every case the war threatens to erupt out of these constraints.
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- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 454 - 468Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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