Chapter 2 examines the impact of racism on African-Americans by

analyzing the deformation of love in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, with a focus on the

intergenerational transferral of racial self-loathing, the backdrop of layered traumas

Morrison depicts. I use the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut's concept of selfobject and

explain the psychological impact of racism on the marginalized group in terms of the lack

of idealizing and mirroring selfobjects.

 Chapter 3 deals with the Holocaust and its survivors, with a focus on Isaac

Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story. By examining various symptoms of trauma and

the uncanny haunting by the past catastrophe Singer portrays in his characters, I read the

Holocaust allegorically as an open wound of history not worked through.

 Chapter 4 discusses the issues of immigration and cross-cultural passage

by analyzing the interstitial plight of Asian-Americans portrayed in Chang-rae Lee's

Native Speaker. By reading the dynamics of the immigrant family in terms of an inverted

oedipal drama, I examine how the precarious subject position of Asian-Americans as

inside-outsiders triggers a distorted assimilative desire.

 Chapter 5 examines questions of interpretation and the politics of mourning,

and concludes by exploring the performative, healing function of trauma literature.