The Ghosts Within Literary Imaginations of Asian America Janna Odabas

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Odabas, Janna <p>Janna Odabas, Freie Universität Berlin, Deutschland</p>, Author.

Series:

Lettre

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Asian American.

Literature.

Culture.

Ghost.

Literary Studies.

America.

American Studies.

Local Subjects:

Asian American.

Literature.

Culture.

Ghost.

Literary Studies.

America.

American Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (264 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Odabas, The Ghosts Within Literary Imaginations of Asian America

Place of Publication:

Bielefeld transcript Verlag 2018

Language Note:

In English.

Biography/History:

Janna Odabas, born in 1984, completed the program of the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2014, she received the Young Scholar Excellence Award of the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA). Her work focuses on questions of identity and migration.

Summary:

The ghost as a literary figure has been interpreted multiple times: spiritually, psychoanalytically, sociologically, or allegorically. Following these approaches, Janna Odabas understands ghosts in Asian American literature as self-reflexive figures. With identity politics at the core of the ghost concept, Odabas emphasizes how ghosts critically renegotiate the notion of 'Asian America' as heterogeneous and transnational and resist interpretation through a morally or politically preconceived approach to Asian American literature. Responding to the tensions of the scholarly field, Odabas argues that the literary works under scrutiny openly play with and rethink conceptions of ghosts as mere exotic, ethnic ornamentation.

Contents:

Frontmatter 1 Table of Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1. "risk the violence of reading the ghost" - Theoretical Reflections on Ghost Figures 51 2. Postcolonial Melodramatic Ghost Figures: Signs of Dis-ease in Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Behold the Many 79 3. Traditions of Haunting: The Narration of a Ghostly Self and a Family's Ghosts in Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother 121 4. Renegotiating a Global Asian America: The Ghost in Global Genre Fiction by Amitav Ghosh, Amy Tan, and Ed Lin 169 Conclusion 239 Works Cited 245

ISBN:

9783839444498

3839444497

OCLC:

1076401024