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Julia Cho’s Desert Trilogy: A Topography of the Lost

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2013, 26(3), pp.291-311
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

정광숙 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Growing up in the American Southwest as a second generation Korean American, Julia Cho knows the desert and the lives of Asian Americans. She sees the metaphorical analogy between the landscape of the American desert and Asian American life in the United States. Cho focuses on the sense of loss, dislocation, and failure the characters experience and presents their arid life in her desert trilogy—The Architecture of Loss, BFE, and Durango. This paper discusses how Cho configures the background of the trilogy, the desert, to explore the emotional and psychological landscape of the Asian American characters. The subject matters she deals with in these plays like missing child, plastic surgery, or homosexuality, however, transcend their geographical and racial specificity and are the common issues in contemporary America. The spaces of the plays are devastated by memories of personal and familial losses, and the characters go through the process of gaining a clearer understanding of their loss to live with it. Cho fathoms the depth of loss Asian Americans experience in the America by including such elements as rain and water, inexplicable episodes, and imaginary figures in her desert trilogy.

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