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Tennessee Williams in Julia Cho: Intertextuality in Julia Cho’s BFE

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2010, 23(1), pp.235-258
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Miseong Woo 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines Julia Cho’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ plot and characterization from The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire in her 2006 play BFE to describe how her extensive borrowing from the canonical American playwright might affect audiences’ potential reception of the play. Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality as well as her essay on abjection, this article maintains that the three Asian American characters in BFE are “abject” characters. The source of their familial and social relations is the internalized concept of “Asianness” as something biologically and intrinsically inferior. Karen Shimakawa has described the binary opposition of “Asian Americanness” and “Americanness” in U.S. culture. In Cho’s plays, Asian Americanness functions as abject in relation to Americanness. But, in both Shimakawa’s discussion and the understanding of Cho’s characters, Americanness is assumed as whiteness. Cho’s extensive borrowing from Williams in the play gives her characters vibration and refined texture. Her continued effort to conform her work to an American sensibility, itself formed by canonical American playwrights such as Williams and Miller, is an interesting artistic project. However, Cho has to make a turning point in her career as a playwright by turning her own representation of “Asianness” in a more progressive direction so that she does not continuously and redundantly represent only a victimized Asian sensibility.

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