Negotiating fictional space in Nora Keller's "Comfort Woman"

Multicultural literature has been characterized as primarily a collision between dominant and opposing orders, a binary dynamic manifested in any number of linguistic, cultural, social, and political forms. As valuable as this perspective has been in recent decades, multicultural literature offers more. Multicultural literature can be extended by applying to it the principles of possible-worlds theory, a recent critical approach that has pushed the envelope of literary interpretation to keep pace with other kinds of postmodern fiction. Despite the major headway of this new theory, however, its concepts have been rarely applied to multicultural fiction. Specifically within the Asian-American canon, recent literary works present fascinating and sometimes puzzling ways of referring not amenable to an analysis of East/West oppositional discourses. This thesis will go beyond these clashing discourses and explore the complex fictional and metafictional space in Nora Keller's debut novel Comfort Woman.