The tragedy of internment during the World War II in contemporary semidocumentary Japanese-American discourse

E.S. Khovanskaya

Kazan Federal University, Kazan, 420008 Russia

E-mail: katja.khovanskaya@gmail.com

Received March 20, 2016

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Abstract

The paper deals with des­cription, classification, and analysis of historical, documentary, and autobiographic sources which underlie the novel “When the Emperor was Devine” by Julie Otsuka, a contemporary Japanese-American writer. It is devoted to the tragedy of Americans having the Japanese ancestry who were rounded up and herded into the relocation camps during the World War II. The subject of the analysis is the transformation of the historical fact into a work of art. The aim of the paper is to track the way J. Otsuka has made from documentation to a novel.

J. Otuka's choice of the references was determined by the desire not only to receive the first-hand information from the live witnesses, but to visualize their living in the internment camps.

The books and documentary evidence are divided into three groups according to their function in the transformation process of documentation into a fictional fact. The paper shows that the material J. Otsuka worked with has made itself evident both in the content and in the narrative structure of the novel.

The author comes to the conclusion that the narrative strategy is connected with the mythologization of reality. As a result, the genre of the work itself is transformed: the artistic and documentary discourse is enriched with the philosophical and psychological one, the concrete historical facts turn into something eternal and universal.

Keywords: World War II, internment, camp, contemporary Japanese-American discourse, historical fact, documentary sources, transformation, fictional fact, novel, Julia Otsuka

References

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For citation: Khovanskaya E.S. The tragedy of internment during the World War II in contemporary semidocumentary Japanese-American discourse. Uchenye Zapiski Kazanskogo Universiteta. Seriya Gumanitarnye Nauki, 2017, vol. 159, no. 1, pp. 264–273. (In Russian)

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