Consensual hallucinations : cyberspace, narrative, and poetics in Asian North American literature

• Main Author: Chan, Sunny
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42549

This thesis examines the effects and applications of Web 2.0 in contemporary Asian diasporic literature. Since the early days of cyberpunk, cyberspace has long been considered an object of science fiction to be depicted through futuristic tropes. With the advent of Web 2.0, however, cyberspace has become integrated into our everyday lives and virtual subjectivity is now as much a part of daily experience as racial subjectivity. Previous scholarship on cyberspace in literature has focused largely on the past generation of cyberpunk, and although it acknowledges that imagined Asian subjects are intimately tied to understandings of cyberspace, it has not yet turned its attention to the growing number of texts that treat cyberspace as a quotidian reality. I argue that the recognition that cyberspace is no longer science fiction but is instead a realistic part of ordinary life allows several Asian North American writers to use cyberspace to comment on racialisation. This study is split into two main parts, which explore cyberspace's relationship with narrative and with poetics in non-canonical Asian North American literature. In the first part, a chapter on the Internet's effect on narrative, I analyse the short stories of Wena Poon's Lions in Winter and a graphic novel by Jen Wang, Koko Be Good. I read the ways in which cyberspace as a literary concept affects these authors' approaches to racial issues of class and representation. In the next chapter on poetics, I examine Rita Wong's forage and its use of what Fred Wah has defined as alienethnic poetics. I then attempt to read Sachiko Murakami's online experimental poetry site, Project Rebuild, through the non-traditional application of alienethnic poetics and propose a new methodology for reading the virtuality of the Internet. This thesis contributes to the existing body of critical work on cyber literature by suggesting new directions for the mobilization of cyberspace as a literary mode.