Quest Within And Beyond Ethnic Boundary

Since the introduction of her first novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989,Amy Tan has been esteemed as one of the major writers with her keen insight,exquisite style as well as skillful writing techniques both at home and abroad.After the glamour of her first work,Amy Tan continues to devote herself in creating The Kitchen God's Wife(1991), The Hundred Secret Senses(1995) and The Bonesetter's Daughter(2001).Quite different from her previous style,Tan has published a new work in 2005 named Saving Fish from Drowning,in which she turns her original interest in portraying mother-daughter relations,cultural conflicts and ethnic identity to a series of global issues such as politics and war,the world ecosystem,religion and faith as well as global media.Despite her innovations,this work does not arouse as much attention in academic studies as her previous works.It seems that Tan's retreat from the pursuit of ethnic identity makes her fading away from critics' major concern.This thesis,based on Baudrillard's postmodern mass media theory,especially his study on simulation and simulacra as well as implosion,explores the manipulative power of global media and indicates Tan's anxiety about human being's loss of subjectivity in an era of simulation.Through the detailed analyses of two reality shows—Darwin's Fittest and Junglemaniacs!,this thesis elaborates an entropic information-flooded American society depicted in the novel.To resist the increasing tendency of entropy and infortainment,Tan implies several indirect means including the harmonious relations between man and woman,between the East and the West and between man and nature.As a landmark of the author's transition from an ethnic writer to a global writer,Saving Fish from Drowning records Tan's growing concern to the existence and essence of the whole human race.This concept not only opens a new path for her later writing career,but offers a new insight for the development and maturation of Chinese American literature as well.