Mask Of Anti-orientalism Orientalism

Amy Tan is a well-known Chinese-American woman writer, her works appear on several best-sellers lists, and have been enjoying a high reputation in the United States. With more translations in recent years, more and more Chinese readers have got familiar with Amy Tan and her works. But she has also been criticized for the Orientalism in her novels. Using the text narration method, the thesis analyses the forming factors of Orientalism in Amy Tan's works.The thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter I is the preface, stating subject choice, purposes and the literature review at home and abroad as well as an overview of Amy Tan's writing background and main works.Chapter II is the structural analysis of Amy Tan's novels. The most prominent feature of the structure is the double-layer description: two narrators (often the mother and daughter) describe their past and present life. The two layers of description shift naturally and deliberately, combining the past and the present together. The double-layer structure reveals multi-subjects of marriage, race and culture. Yet, owning to the unbalanced emphasis on these subjects, her works show Orientalism. The double-layer reveals three contradictory systems in deep structure: contradiction of marriage, racial contradiction and cultural contradiction. The writer emphasizes the marriage and cultural contradictions, but neglects the racial one. Such kind of arrangement shows the Orientalism of the writer. The reason why Amy Tan avoids the ethnic conflicts in American society is based on her cultural values: she was born and brought up in America and considers herself as "American writer" rather than "ethnic writer." Therefore, she wouldn't be inconsistent with the mainstream of American values which would make her works lose American market.Chapter III analyzes the narrative perspective and the narrator in Amy Tan's works. The narrators in Amy Tan's works are also the characters in the novels. The functions of their narration, thoughts and communication are focusing on the subject of marriage, race and culture. Highly subjective and selected narration, judgment of two generations of Chinese and American as well as communication barriers between the narrators make the image of the Chinese and China contaminated suffering and conflict elements. The use of multiple first-person limited perspective method in her work plays an important role in many aspects; of which, the creation of the true and mysterious autobiography effect is the evidence of the West collective imagination on China. However, such kind of perspective brings possibility for the equal dialogue between the hosts and causes changes of the narrative distance and emotional distance, which works to dilute Orientalism. Limited first-person perspective makes the work inevitably limited in observations on the main characters; and to some extent, affects the expression of the broad field of vision. In order to resolve this problem, Amy Tan usually extends the first person perspective to the omniscient perspective.Chapter IV analyzes the work of Amy Tan's narrative time model. Time component is an integral part of narrative literary. Narrative time is often not in compliance with constraints of the story time. Amy Tan's novels follow the same tendency. The writer controls the pace of the narrative speed freely: she writes detailed conflict scenes of the mother and daughter; she reduces, even omits, the hard time of those mothers when they first arrived at America. The time speed highlights political property. As to the narrative frequency, her repeated image of food, imitate contact of food and culture shows the "exotic" taste, but further strengthens the Orientalism as well.Chapter V analyzes narrative space model in Amy Tan's works. Space analysis in this chapter only refers to the geographical space. The analysis of Amy Tan's works is full of the Chinese taste, the narration of the Chinese spaces are the most direct display of exotic places. This chapter focuses on the analysis of the "pent-rich Planet" "untold Guilin" "microfilm version of the Chinese: Chinatown,". The writer is full of sympathy with the Chinese perspective, describing its ignorance, poverty and backwardness as well as attractions. However, she portrays it not an ideal and undesirable alien. Amy Tan's novels have a common trend, that is, the Chinese mothers experiencing the suffering of war in China, tortured marriage, acquaintances with some Chinese-American youth and with whose assistance, came to the United States. Therefore, on the broad spatial tendency, the works shows an obvious geographical track from China to America. This coincides with the "Exodus" of the Bible.Chapter VI, "Break Barriers", sums up the analysis and evaluation of Amy Tan's narrative model of Orientalism. The artistic effect of her narrative mode is the co-existence of Orientalism and Anti-Orientalism. The fixed model in series of her works has become the bottleneck. To make a breakthrough, she can gain inspiration from the American Jewish literature. In addition, Chinese readers and researchers should also read with a perspective breakthrough: not only see the Orientalism in works of Amy Tan, but also see the "Occidentalism ". For example, the deformation of the Christian culture, and then a transcendence that results in a general narrative, rather than a nation's Fables.