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The Sublime Object of Adoption
Author(s) -
Rasmussen KimSu
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/oli.12153
Subject(s) - ideology , sublime , gesture , relation (database) , object (grammar) , aesthetics , sociology , introspection , interpretation (philosophy) , perspective (graphical) , theme (computing) , reading (process) , epistemology , linguistics , computer science , politics , philosophy , political science , visual arts , art , law , database , operating system
This paper presents a reading of Chang‐rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life , which emphasizes the theme of transnational adoption from Korea as a displaced continuation of the comfort women issue. The essay seeks to draw attention to some of the ideological structures surrounding adoption. In the novel, the unreliable narrator Hata's unresolved relation to Kkutaeh — a Korean comfort woman — is displaced and repeated in his unresolved relation to his adopted daughter, Sunny. The paper suggests that we understand the relation between Kkutaeh and Sunny in terms of Žižek's notion of ideology. The adopted daughter (Sunny), in this perspective, is a sublime object of ideology that conceals the traumatic kernel of the symbolic order (Kkutaeh). Through an interpretation of the novel A Gesture Life , the essay seeks to draw attention to some of the specific ideologies surrounding transnational adoption from Korea.