英文摘要 |
Joy Kogawa's Obasan, now a highly acclaimed literary text of the uprooting of the Japanese Canadians during the Second World war, is interspersed with the narrator's childhood memories and presented significantly through the point of view of the child narrator. This paper aims at reading Obasan in the cultural and historical matrix of North American ethnic literature by taking Kogawa's negotiation between fictional childhood and official history as its major issue. It explores how the childhood memories are deeply implicated in the fluctuations of history, and how the idea of the child makes speakable personal trauma of the internment experiences, and activates, in Michel Foucault's words, forms of 'counter-memory' in Kogawa's writing. To illuminate the historicity of childhood memories, the paper suggests, Kogawa depicts Naomi s childhood as a separate space outside of official history, and at the same time, draws upon it as a repository of cultural meanings to demonstrate the interconnection between childhood memories and ethnic histories. The first part of the paper uses theoretical perspectives derived from James Kincaid, Carolyn Steedman、and David Palumbo-Liu to examine the way in which childhood connects ethic memories and historiography. In the second part, the figure of the child in Obasan is read along with some of the theoretical insights that have been developed by Chris Jenks, Philippe Aries, and D. W. Winnicott. Through an intertextual reading of childhood in the novel, the paper highlights the dynamics of childhood narrative in the literary negotiation with the unspeakable past as exemplified in Joy Kogawa. |