| "'I Had Always Thought I Was a Yankee': Creating the Representative American Self in 20th Century Ethnic Autobiography" questions the common desire to read literary works by ethnic American authors as representing, whether accurately or not, life in a minority culture to readers belonging to outside groups. It argues that such works must instead be read as archetypically American. In the process of negotiation between the writers' ethnic origin and the broader national culture, these autobiographies play out, in a heightened version, the self-invention central to American mythology. A key concept to this dissertation is that of "leaving home," which Robert Bellah names as an essential aspect of American individuation. Americans turn to their peers, not to their parents, for role models, and eventually find some reconciliation between the two, or between "consent" and "descent" in Werner Sollors's terms. The autobiographical act takes self-invention even further. Writers assume critical distance not only from their families but from themselves in order to create a textual self located in a literary tradition, rather than a biological one.; Mary Antin, in The Promised Land (1912), establishes herself as an American citizen through processes of self-invention in life and writing, while Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation, 1990) and Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments, 1987) create a literary heritage by adapting and criticizing earlier texts like Antin's. In Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Jade Snow Wong facilitates her adolescent rebellion by misreading her parents as old-fashioned Chinese; the precarious political position of her Japanese American family during World War II prevents Monica Sone from doing the same in Nisei Daughter (1953). Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976), another descendant of Wong's book, generated controversy between those who read it as an oppressive parent that limits expressions of Asian American identity, and those who read it as an inspiring ancestor for their own writing. All the writers considered here, in their readings and misreadings of earlier sources, establish their own books as branches of a family tree of American literature. |
