Madsen, Deborah L.

English

National Taiwan Normal University Repository

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.2 
September 2007: 81-97 
Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and 
the Ethics of Literary Trauma 
 
 
Deborah L. Madsen 
University of Geneva 
 
 
Abstract 
The enforced sexual servitude of Korean women and girls, so-called 
"comfort women," under the Japanese military occupation of World War Two 
has, since the early 1990s, become a significant issue in global sexual politics. 
In lectures and written testimony, survivors have called for recognition of and 
financial compensation for their suffering. However, the situation raises 
questions concerning the nature of traumatic memory and the reconstruction 
of historical narratives of trauma. Nora Okja Keller's 1997 novel Comfort 
Woman is an interesting intervention, constituting a literary recreation of 
historical testimony and raising the question of the ethical position of the 
writer who takes as her literary subject a trauma she has never experienced 
personally. This essay situates Keller's work in terms of recent theoretical 
debates about the ethics of literary trauma. In the close reading of some key 
passages of the novel, I explore the ethical issues of witnessing, of 
commodifying trauma as a literary subject, and the potential dangers of 
"normalizing" stories of trauma in the process of retelling them. 
 
 
Keywords 
Nora Okja Keller, comfort women, sexual slavery,  
trauma, testimony, normalization 

Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and the Ethics of Literary Trauma

http://ir.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/ir/retrieve/32161/ntnulib_ja_B0205_3302_081.pdf

Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman and the Ethics of Literary Trauma

Abstract

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