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The Phantom and Fantasy in Julia Cho’s Desert Trilogy

정광숙 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Julia Cho’s desert trilogy—The Architecture of Loss, BFE, and Durango—are realistic domestic plays. Some of the characters, however, experience supernatural or mysterious encounters by having a fantasy and/or seeing the phantom. This paper discusses how the characters with traumatic experience project their pain and suffering by constructing fictional, fantastic reality. Abraham and Torok’s notion of incorporation and magical realist fiction critics’ ideas of the phantom and fantasy are applied in order to identity them as manifestations of metapsychological and magical reality. The presence of the mysterious makes the desert plays even more realistic by demonstrating psychological reality of the characters who suffer loss and trauma. Blurring and even transgressing the boundary between fictional reality and empirical reality by including the mysterious in her desert trilogy, Cho explores her characters’ psychological and emotional state and reveals their painful experiences of loss.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.