Genre Hybridization: Cosmopolitanism as a Literary Approach in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker

This study explores how Chang-Rae Lee, a Korean American writer, adeptly reworks the generic elements of spy fiction to serve as a conduit for interweaving his semi-autobiographical elements into Native Speaker, ultimately yielding a literary precondition sought by literary cosmopolitanism. The examination engages in a continuous search to identify literary preconditions that can address the challenges posed by prevailing power imbalances in discourse systems, which persist in impeding the progress of comparative exchanges toward a genuinely cosmopolitan literary ecology. It positions Lee’s literary practice within the landscape of U.S. literature, where he navigates similar challenges posed by the American publishing industry and the expectations of the reading public for ethnic writers to conform to formulaic representations that reinforce essentialist notions of identity. Analyzing Lee’s literary construction within this context reveals how his formal blend, in and of itself, not only subverts the role of genre as an ideological reinforcer but also empowers him to convey his authentic personal narratives without being reduced to a simplistic representation. This approach, therefore, ensures the preservation of authentic selfhood before embarking on further comparative literary exchanges.