Chinese Culture In The Eyes Of A Foreigner

Pearl S. Buck, as a controversial American woman writer, wrote many works about China and its people, especially those in the countryside. In 1938, Buck won the Nobel Prize, being the first female winner in America, though she herself has never admitted it. At the same time, she was also a humanitarian. She used the exotic images to reproduce a China not only with mystery and exoticism, but also unswervingly put the humanitarian spirit into her works.Imagology is an important branch of comparative literature, proposed first by Jean-Marie Carre, a French scholar in the 1960's. Imagology, as its name implies, is the study of images. But imagology in comparative literature is the study of mold and description of "exotic" images in a country. Therefore, its research field is no longer confined in the scope of national literature, but in fact it belongs to the cross-language, cross-cultural, or inter-disciplinary research based on the factual contact. However, works of foreign and exotic literature are rare in ancient literature in China, and only exist in several notes on traveling and reading. From late Qing and early Ming dynasty to the contemporary era, such works increased day by day. With China's reform and opening up and the advent of information age, such kinds of travelogues and literary works have increased in number. In China, the study on Buck's The Good Earth has become a unique landscape. However, national scholars don't pay much attention to the exotic images in The Good Earth from the perspective of imagology. Through two familiar groups of opposing images—self and other, native and exotic as well as their mutual relationship, this thesis intends to make a systematical survey of Chinese images in The Good Earth. The objective is to identify the images of U.S. writer Pearl S. Buck and of the American people, as well as how the hetero-image was shape by Buck. This paper focuses on the observer, through the statement of other to reflect self, so this way of self-image has even greater cognitive function than directly on self-awareness. This thesis is divided into four parts:Part One is a brief introduction to the author and her masterpiece The Good Earth as well as literature review and current research status on The Good Earth. Part Two is an interpretation of Buck's study of Chinese images in American Literature, to grasp the background of her works. Part Three analyzes Imagology Theory and its reflection in the novel The Good Earth, digging into how the characters of Chinese farmers, such as Wang Lung, O-lan, reflect American People as well as Buck's inward world by these exotic images. Part Four makes a conclusion on the basis of general analysis, in order to reject some critics on Buck herself and her works.