History, narrative, and trauma: writing war crimes in Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture life

• Main Author: Wang, Ying-bei
• Other Authors: Wittenberg, David
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of Iowa 2010
• Subjects: Modern Novel; Narrative; The Comfort Women Issue; Trauma; War Crimes (WWII); War Memory; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/620; https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1805&context=etd

This thesis examines how Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999) represents the issues of war crimes. Writing the comfort women issue, Lee handles the bitter history of the Second World War in a postmodernist way. Against the modernist perspective on war history that draws on a simple and moral conclusion, Lee's writing underscores the function of narrative and the influence of trauma in the representation of the war crime. It offers a literary approach to the issue that complicates the role of the perpetrator and the victim, thus distances itself from the common understanding of war crimes. I argue this literary representation of the history of war crimes could be more powerful than historical writings, because it will ultimately challenge the concept of war itself.