| Home is a rich theme in much of literature and holds importance as a complex social and psychological concept. This study examines home as a trope that has yet to be fully identified and explored in three novels by Chang-rae Lee: Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, and Aloft. Its initial discussion looks at the primary meanings of "home" and at delimited versions of home that appear in Chang-rae Lee's novels and works by other writers. Through intertextual analysis incorporating the poststructuralist theories of Judith Butler, further discussion explores the intricacies of the various versions of home that appear in Lee's novels and at the tension between these versions. Lastly, a closing chapter discusses a reading of Lee's novels as political works and as products of a social reality that is rendering home in its current form obsolete and incapable of containing increasingly fractured personal narratives. |
