On The Literary Symbiosis In Maxine Hong Kingston's Works

Maxine Hong Kingston(1940-),a representative Chinese American woman writer,is “one of the most popular and controversial writers in the Asian American literary tradition”(Grice,2006:1).With her début work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts published in 1976 and other following works ever since then,Kingston has contributed immensely to the boom of Asian American literature and its recognition by the American mainstream.Exceptional achievements on Kingston and her work have been made both at home and abroad.Based on previous studies,this dissertation,by taking Kingston's three representative works—The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts(1976),China Men(1980)and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book(1989)as trilogy of Chinese American experience,tries to examine the phenomenon of literary symbiosis and evaluate Kingston's postmodern esthetics caused by it.Under the light of symbiosis,the joint study of both content and form in three works hopes to provide new thoughts on Kingston studies.The dissertation consists of introduction,three body chapters and conclusion.In the introductory part,Kingston's literary achievements are presented with extensive critical reviews of Kingston studies at home and abroad followed afterwards,and the theoretical framework and the research methodologies are stated.The necessities and feasibilities of literary symbiosis are given after theoretical reasoning of symbiosis.Three chapters constitute the body part,in which the representations of symbiosis in the forms of literary commensalism,literary mutualism,and literary parasitism are achieved through rewriting in WW,intertextuality in TM,and parody in TM.Pre-texts of Chinese,American,and other Western cultures(as guest texts)are transformed,internalized and sublimated into intertexts of Chinese American texts(as host text)by means of multi-textualities(as symbiosis).Chapter One ananyzes literary commensalism in The Woman Warrior.Kingston describes the Bildungsroman of a Chinese American girl by rewriting tales of Hua Mulan and Ts' ai Yen into Americanized stories.The identity perplexity and crisis of a female individual Chinese American is to be solved by the reconfiguration of Chinese legends.Chapter Two examines literary mutualism in China Men by analyzing the images of Kwan Kung and Robinson Crusoe under the light of intertextuality.As a community,Chinese Americans claim America as their rightful land.Chapter Three explores literary parasitism in Tripmaster Monkey.By parodying Journey to the West,the “Beat Generation” of the 1960 s and James Joyce's Ulyssus,Kingston creates an universal man represented by the unity of “Americanized Monkey,Chinese Beatnik and Modern Bloom.” The representaion of individual and collective experience of Chinese Americans as a community and the search for Chinese American identity and cultural tradition have dominated Kingston's three works,running through them into a trilogy of “Chinese American experience.”The dissertation concludes that literary symbiosis goes through Kingston's three representative works,forming an organic whole of her postmodern esthetics.For Kingston,literary symbiosis is the form and the content,the aims and the means.By integrating host texts or pre-texts from Chinese,American as well as other Western literary and cultural elements into the three works,Kingston creates her distinctive guest texts—Chinese American texts.This dissertation attempts to make contributions in the following three aspects.First,it tries to provide a new perspective to “Kingston studies” by applying literary symbiosis,with the modest hope of enriching Chinese American studies;secondly,it puts together Kingston's three works under one critical agenda—a trilogy,so as to fully evaluate Kingston's literary achievements;thirdly,by so doing this dissertation makes a tentative attempt to perfect literary symbiosis as a critical norm.