Abstract Remarking Realism: Asian Character in Contemporary Anglophone Narrative Heather Elisabeth Levien Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Dorothy J. Hale, Chair Traditionally, Anglophone depictions of Asian character have been composed based on the conventions of realist narrative. The various formal experiments deployed by the Modernists in their projects of representing character generally have been eschewed by artists when representing the Asian Other. In the last twenty years, however, traditional representations of Asians in English have been challenged by a number of works whose content and technique perform conscious critiques of the realist techniques commonly deployed. My first two chapters provide background for my analysis of the four artists whose work I discuss in detail: Jessica Hagedorn, Margaret Drabble, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha. These artists have chosen to deploy formal linguistic and structural innovation as a means of constructing a link between various sorts of texts and the Asians to which these are taken to refer. My first chapter offers a brief history of the representation of Asians in Europe and the United States. I argue here that even the apparently individual characterization of Asians has been applied historically to large communities. My second chapter begins with an examination of the role of Asian character in Joseph Conrad's experimental narratives and analyzes artistic and critical response to the history of the representation of Asian character. My chapter on Drabble's The Gates of Ivory and Hagedorn's Dogeaters focuses on their development of critiques of the conventions of realist art using techniques which superficially appear realist. Both authors, for example, examine problems of representing multiple characters through a representation of multiplicity. These conventions are subverted by the authors' intentional refusal to provide closure for their various stories. Finally, I analyze texts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists who have eschewed realist depiction of character and incident for formal experimentation which makes no claim to represent multiple characters and their relationships in time. Instead of focusing their task on creating several figures to be read as real people, they center on the problems of adequately suggesting the play of a single subjectivity, this subjectivity serving as the node through which complex social forces operate.