Look Who's Morphing is a collection of bizarre, funny, often menacing stories in which, along with his extended family, the central character undergoes a series of transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film and television, music clips and video games, porn flicks and comics. He is Godzilla, a Muppet, and Whitney Houston's bodyguard; the Fonz, a robot, a Ford Bronco 4x4 - and, as a climax, a Gulliver-sized cock rock singer, played upon by an adoring troupe of sexy Lilliputians in short skirts and sailor suits and cheerleader outfits. Within these fantasies there is a deep intellectual and emotional engagement, a fundamental questioning of the nature of identity, and the way it constructs itself in a world dominated by the images of popular culture. – From the publisher's website.
Look Who's Morphing : A Collection of Fictions and an Exegesis
Victoria
:
2009
6670877
2009
single work
thesis
'This project's creative component is "Look Who's Morphing", a fiction collection that explores the theme of personal identity. The exegesis analyses an issue pertaining to the writer's creative process: what degree of directness was employed in the authorial identity in his creative work and how was this level of directness realised?' (Source: NLA.)
'Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.' (Publication abstract)
(Introduction)
'Look Who’s Morphing is a series of humorous short fiction stories, playing with issues of identity and pop culture. The humour in the book references pop culture from the 80s onwards, from Sweet Valley High books to David Hasselhof and Godzilla. The stories also question notions of identity, touching on ethnicity, family and gender and their interaction with popular culture. The series of short stories incorporates the fantastic with the real, where, with sardonic humour, characters turn into machines and celebrities, and the narrator is turned into Godzilla and a giant cock rock god. The book provides no easy answers but it leads the reader to question the societal assumptions about race, gender and identity.' (Introduction)
Cho discusses the cover of Look Who's Morphing (which features a photograph of the author), the textual 'intrusions' of his presence in the stories, the influence of trends on the stories' pop culture references, and whether short story writing was experiencing a surge of popularity at the time of the interview.
