Martin, Thomas L.

Multicultural literature opens up unique "worlds" that allow readers to experience multicultural spaces; these works are not only representations of real-world conditions, as many critics posit, but also "possible worlds" artfully constructed that transport readers to unfamiliar places. This thesis presents an analysis of the unique symbiosis and exchange that occurs between reader and author in multicultural literature through the use of possible-worlds theory. This study shows how such texts support a complex relationship between the real and the fictional through a process I deem "multicultural symbiosis." Two strategically chosen texts are considered, each representing a different socio-political-cultural context as well as a different literary genre: Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story, a realist novel set in South Africa; and Joy Harjo's A Map to the Next World, a historical-mystical cycle of poems and tales that draw on Native-American heritage.

Much of postcolonial and feminist criticisms reflect on how the oppressor-oppressed relationship of the past affects the present. However, possible-worlds theory expands these critical borders and respects the differences existing between textual world and actual world, supplying readers with the interpretive power to recognize that every past and present is complete with "possibilities" not yet explored. The fantastical elements of Gloria Naylor's narrative worlds complement the overall fiction. Through three conflicting narrative frames, she shows characters negotiating their assigned space in the inverted world of Linden Hills, not a mimetic representation exactly but reminiscent of Dante and Poe and compelling on its own. Forcing the reader to reevaluate settled assumptions about the actual world, in Linden Hills, Naylor presents the generational re-spawning, and ultimately the breaking, of patriarchy concentrated in the figure of Luther Nedeed.

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.