초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Phong Nguyen’s The Adventures of Joe Harper revisits America in the Reconstruction era through the eponymous narrator-protagonist, who is a marginal character from Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. One of the most recent spin-offs of Huckleberry Finn, it is an interesting Asian American project to appropriate Twain’s American epic while refusing to be reduced to and defined by the author’s racial identity. Nguyen overlays the saga of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer with an Asian American presence and experiences but his investment in Asian American experiences is not only on account of his identity as Asian American but also by virtue of his inheritance of Twain’s literary legacy. The significance of Joe Harper is both in its association with Huckleberry Finn and in its inheritance and development of Twain’s literary legacy overall, including an interrogation of the Chinese question and the dismantling of Chinese stereotypes in American literature. Introducing a memorable Asian American character, Lee, and embedding his history in Twainesque postbellum America, Nguyen considers the theme of racialized mobility, Asian American similarity, and the desexualization of Asian masculinity. The characterizations of Joe and Lee are to be compared with Twain’s famous characters, and the larger context of American literature is also to be brought to bear on the consideration of Lee and Joe’s journey and their interracial homosocial bond. Joe Harper features interesting twists of Twain’s plots and characters, showing the ways in which Nguyen inherits and revises Twain’s original tale, by way of the contemporary American imagination.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
퐁 윈, 『조 하퍼의 모험』, 마크 트웨인, 외전, 아시아계 미국 남성성
