Rewriting loss : melancholia, ethics, and aesthetics in selected works by Chuang Hua, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Fae Myenne Ng.

Pehkoranta, Anna Rewriting Loss: Melancholia, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Selected Works by Chuang Hua, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Fae Myenne Ng University of Jyvaskyla, 2013, 173 p. Diss. This doctoral dissertation investigates the dynamics of melancholia, ethics, and aesthetics in a selection of Chinese American women’s fiction. The corpus of the study consists of four prose narratives written by three different authors: Crossings (1968) by Chuang Hua, The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston, and Bone (1993) and Steer Toward Rock (2008) by Fae Myenne Ng. The study is comprised of four individual articles accompanied with a reflective introduction that illuminates the theoretical, methodological, and discursive context of the articles. While the theoretical framework of this dissertation is rooted mainly in sociologically oriented literary criticism, most importantly in Asian Americanist, psychoanalytical, and feminist critical practices, the study also shows a particular interest in the literary form and the aesthetic in the narratives it examines. It thus embodies a historically and materially engaged critical approach that also pays close attention to the literary and aesthetic character of the texts. Further, it recognizes the intimate relationship between literature and theory, suggesting that in Chinese American women’s writing the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of the text are often deeply intertwined. The study departs from the Freudian notion of melancholia as a pathological response to loss; instead, it understands melancholia as a politicized concept which offers an alternative to the postmodern rhetoric of postethnicity, and as a site where the realms of ethics and aesthetics effectively elide. Each one of the four original articles examines the subject of the study from a particular angle, accentuating a specific aspect of melancholia in the narratives it investigates. On the strength of this kaleidoscopic view on the subject at hand, this dissertation suggests that the selected Chinese American narratives are rewriting loss not only in the sense described above, but also by offering alternative readings of parts of American history neglected or lost in dominant historical narratives, and by rewriting personal and communal losses into fiction that actively participates in the production of new theory. The study argues that the selected works of fiction exemplify what could be termed an ethics and an aesthetics of melancholia, wherein the past is ever present in a fundamental way. In this vision, the dynamic of melancholia, in which the past is never completely lost or replaced by the present, becomes the very mechanism that constructs and maintains subjectivity, thus entailing a future that fully acknowledges its own historicity and its irremovable ties to the material histories of earlier generations. Finally, this dissertation suggests that melancholia is present in the selected narratives not only as an ethical or political construct, but equally as an aesthetic element that substantially adds to the ethical import of Chuang’s, Kingston’s, and Ng’s fiction.