Transpacific Resonances and Affiliations in Leanne Dunic’s to Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s the Tale for the Time Being

Authors

Michel O'Brien, Central Washington UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Department or Administrative Unit

English

Publication Date

4-4-2019

Abstract

This article examines methods of tracing affiliations across transpacific critiques through a reading of Leanne Dunic’s To Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s The Tale for the Time Being. The article proposes that, rather than reproducing a nation-bound framing of the 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku that envisions it as a solely Japanese crisis, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works explore what it would mean to read the earthquake and its aftermath as a transpacific event. It argues that these works facilitate new relations between national cultures and the global, suggesting that, by narrating the earthquake and recovering its transpacific resonances, both works recover and write transcultural links that are obscured in nation-bound narratives of events. By self-reflexively commenting on this process of creative forms of transpacific intimacy, Dunic’s and Ozeki’s works directly address the potential for literary narratives to implicate individuals from disparate nations in a global, historical, narrative of events

Comments

This article was originally published in New Global Studies. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.

Recommended Citation

O’Brien, Michelle. “Transpacific Resonances and Affiliations in Leanne Dunic’s to Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s the Tale for the Time Being.” New Global Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2019, pp. 35–59. https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2019-0006.

Journal

New Global Studies

Rights

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston