Abstract
A recent controversy in the USA centres on classroom use of Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s semi-autobiographical So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986), a novel focused on the flight of Japanese settler families to Japan after the liberation of Korea at the end of World War II. Taught in a literary and historical vacuum under the thematic umbrella of “courage and survival,” the novel has been criticised as an example of “perpetrator as victim” representation. Because of its assumed high “truth value,” life-writing positions itself very specifically as a narrative of a “witness” recounting her story. The resultant authentication of suffering may thereby render issues of historicity effectively irrelevant. Diverse interpretative communities may thus read the novel in incompatible ways.
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Notes
My discussion will make only passing comment on website debates, which could be a study in themselves: they are characteristically ideologically driven, intemperate, and poorly informed. People posting on these sites, usually behind net pseudonyms, show little understanding of either fiction or historiography.
Page references are from the 1986 Birch Tree edition.
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Sung-Ae Lee has a Ph.D. from Macquarie University, where she presented a thesis on Utopian and Dystopian Elements in George Eliot’s novels. She also holds degrees from the University of Sydney, California State University, Fresno, and Ewha Women’s University, Korea. Her current research interests are in Korean fiction and film depicting the Korean War and its aftermath, and in the fiction, poetry, life-writing and popular media of the Korean diaspora.
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Lee, SA. Remembering or Misremembering? Historicity and the Case of So Far from the Bamboo Grove . Child Lit Educ 39, 85–93 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-007-9059-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-007-9059-z