| The doctoral dissertation establishes a theoretical argument about alter-native positioning. The theories of alter-native conceptualize the study of three alter-native writers, Pearl S. Buck, Eileen Chang, and Amy Tan, in order to situate these twentieth-century writers vis-a-vis their relationship to 'China' and to their Chinese-negotiated identities. The selected alter-native writers are situated in between 'China' and 'America'. To contextualize their reception histories, that is, the ways in which their projects are discursively constructed and critiqued by the critics, the dissertation proceeds to offer readings of certain of their texts through a series of defining tropes---domestication, cultivation, and script, respectively. The probing exploration of the complex and doubled meaning of 'native' and that term's double relationship to 'alter' or 'other' enables the study of alter-native to tease out the discursive formations at the interstices of postcolonialism, modernity, and national identity formation that each of these three writers negotiated as she reimagined the 'old' and 'new' China. The three chapters on the alter-native writers offer extensive readings of specific texts, organized around the tropes of domestication, cultivation, and script. |
