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영어

This study tries to view Korean American novelists in the perspective of hybrid culture. Korean English literature scholars tended to concentrate on the problems of Korean immigrants’ exclusion and alienation by main stream American society or the problem of their identity through Korean American novels. However, the perspectives that scrutinize into problems of domination/assimilation or of identity in Korean American novel is being doubted through the complex reality of hybrid culture. The perspective of hybridity required in the fast changing modern times questions positions that consider identity as being fixed or pure. The perspective of hybridity is an effort to explain the Korean American novels’ complexity which is difficult for clear ethical evaluations to do within the opposition of resistance/ assimilation. This study evaluates Suki Kim and Chang-rae Lee as the representative Korean American novelists who intensely face with the ongoing American hybrid society. This study examines how the two novelists look upon the ethnic minorities’ and racial problems differently from general ethnic writers and achieve significant narrative developments. Examining The Interpreter and her articles in American newspapers and magazines, we see how aspects of Suki Kim’s performative subject can be characterized as ‘addressing to the American mainstream society as a immigrant.’ Chang-rae Lee has transcended the title of Korean American novelist and already established as a prominent modern American novelist. Aspects of Chang-rae Lee’s performative subject is exhibited in how he is striving in the difficult search for mutual understanding within the hybrid culture through Native Speaker and Aloft. This study also deals with the self consciousness and ethical demands of Suki Kim and Chang-rae Lee who rely on Korea and the life of the Korean immigrant as their asset.