Abstract
Abstract: My most intense experience of identification came about when I first read Changrae Lee's 2010 novel The Surrendered . This article explores how that experience of identification, originating in my identity as an Asian American classicist, steered me toward an idiosyncratic and, ultimately, disconcerting reading of the novel. The novel introduces a character named Benjamin Li during a series of chapters set at a missionary school in Manchuria. I viewed Benjamin as the Odysseus of The Surrendered . Lee's nuanced engagement with the mythological tradition remakes twentieth-century conflicts in East Asia in the image of the Trojan War and its aftermath.
Published Version
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