| This dissertation proposes an examination of alimentary discourse in Chinese and Chinese-American writings, and argues that the Chinese experience with food and practice of eating are a shaping force in Chinese cultural interpretation of the world. Combining textual analysis with an interdisciplinary cultural studies model, the study explores the ways in which oral experiences connect the physical body with the body politic, blend food with speech and language, and invest human energy and desire that are irreducibly plural, diverse, and open-ended.;Eating has furnished an important model for social criticism, cultural production, and consumption in pre-modern Chinese writings (chapter I). In modern China, eating functions as a predominant trope that has delineated a crucial aspect of modern Chinese literary and cultural history, developed from "cannibalism" in Lu Xun (chapter II), via the "revolutionary hunger" for a "socialist feast" during the Communist revolution (chapter III), to the empty "big rice-pot" in the post-revolutionary era (chapter IV).;American writers of Chinese descent also have inherited this "oral" tradition in their "assimilation" into the "melting pot" and more recently the "salad bowl." From Jade Snow Wong (chapter V) to Amy Tan (chapter VI, which also discusses Maxine Hong Kingston), textual construction of self-identity revolves around orality in its dynamic process of eating and story-telling, and operates on a special mode of "double-tongued" cross-cultural signification. |
