From Cultural Amnesia To Memory Reconstruction

Amy Tan(1952-),as one of the most influential Chinese American writers in the current American literary world,climbed the best seller charts in the United States for nine months with the publication of The Joy Luck Club(1989).On the ground of her common theme of mother-daughter relationship,in The Valley of Amazement(2013),which is written for eight years,Tan integrates the city landscape of Shanghai into the growth and self-pursuit journey of the heroines,Lucia and Violet,with the help of memory.Based on the theory of cultural memory from Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann,this paper studies Tan‘s reconstruction of Shanghai cultural memory through the representation of city landscapes in The Valley of Amazement.The thesis is composed of five chapters.Chapter One consists of a brief introduction to Amy Tan and The Valley of Amazement,the literature review of this novel,the theoretical framework centered with cultural memory and the thesis statement.Chapter Two mainly analyzes the specific forms of cultural amnesia in Tan‘s work and the reasons for its formation.The distorted and exaggerated Chinese culture is attributed to forgetting caused by the intergenerational change and the transgression of certain boundaries.Chapter Three discusses Tan‘s restoration of Shanghai cultural memory through the representation of female landscape.Tan creates distinctive image of Shanghai courtesans in a specific imagination space with her grandmother‘s old photos,mother‘s letters and oral stories as memory media,so as to promote the retrieval of family past and identity recognition.Chapter Four interprets Tan‘s reconstruction of cultural memory in the construction of Shanghai architectural landscapes.Combining functional memory with storage memory,Tan presents the common memory and interpretation of Shanghai by the privileged International Settlement and the alternative prosperous Secret Jade Path.Chapter Five aims to summarize the main discussions in each chapter and points out that Amy Tan uses the representation of Shanghai city landscape to resist cultural amnesia,realizing the continuation of family and ethnic memory and pursuing her own cultural roots.