Quest On The Road" On The Postmodernist Characteristics Of Kingston's Works

This thesis is intended to explore the postmodernist characteristics embodied in Maxine Hong Kingston's major works. After a brief introduction to Kingston's life and works in Chapter I, Chapter II bases its theoretical foundation by depicting a paradigm of postmodernism on those generally-agreed characteristics in postmodernist literary writings such as anti-tradition in thematic idea, intertextuality in structure, fragmentation in subjectivity and language.In the following three chapters, Chapter III of this thesis attempts at analyzing Kingston's The Woman Warrior from the perspective of Bildungsroman. It is believed that this book gives a postmodernist interpretation of the traditional Bildungsroman genre by its ethnic background and feminist voice. The rewriting of the traditional Bildungsroman which sets a WASP man as the protagonist is the quest for building an identity for ethnic women who are considered both as the gender 'other' and the ethnic 'other'. Chapter IV takes intertextuality and fragmentation as the key words to exemplify the postmodernist features in Kingston's second book China Men. The transformed employment of Chinese ancient literature, the interwined personal imagination and historical facts all lead to the process of searching for a cultural identity in modern American society. Interweaving paternal memory and maternal discourse undoubtedly constructs an androgynous subjectivity, which helps the narrator to transcend the gender boundaries and 'discover' the buried past and, moreover, to reconcile the conflicts of gender and rebuilt a unitary identity of the ethnic group. Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey is generally considered as a novel with very distinct postmodernist characteristics. Chapter V of the thesis focuses on the postmodernist characterization and ethnic humor in this book and concludes that Kingston posits such a protagonist filled with postmodern spirit in order to achieve a 'therapeutic' effect on the way of identity formation.In conclusion, this thesis maintains that though it is hard to categorize Kingston's works, it is still valuable to conclude that reading her books with postmoderninterpretations helps us understand Kingston and her quest for cultural identity in the multicultural and multiethnic American society.