Self-Construction In Cultural Imagination

Since 1976,the American Novelist Maxine Hong Kingston has become a superstar in the Literary world by writing her first piece of works The Woman Warrior,she wrote several novels including China Men(1980),Tripmaster Monkey(1989) and The Fifth Book of Peace(2003) soon after.All of her works are well-reputed among literary critics. Because of the profound content and the original character in her novels,Maxine has established herself as one of the best writers in the history of Chinese-American Literature.This essay takes Maxine's four novels as a development sequence,by which showing a dynamic exploring process.Through close reading,we find out that in different stage the self-image presents different characteristics in her novels.From the cultural imagination's angle,and combining the psychology,the development of self-theory in philosophy and narratology,this essay summarizes three dimensions of self in these novels,and make out some new connotation and practical significance of self-image by analyzing the methods of self-construction and the trend of self-development.This essay is divided into "introduction","body" and "conclusion".The introduction guides the whole discussion of this paper mainly from the following aspects:bringing forward the problem,analyzing the research situation,defining the related concepts and the innovation,the introduction guides the whole discussion.The body includes three chapters.Chapter one studies the self-image that constructed in the works.Through studying the text,this paper abstracts three different dimensions of self-image,and interprets the way of self-realization by analyzing the characteristics.Chapter Two explores how the writer builds the self-image.Through the cultural imagination,the report-type writing and narrative perspective,this chapter analyses the artistic strategy that the writer used when constructed the self-image.Chapter Three analyzes the significance and the value of self-image by combining the reasons for the author constructs it.Meanwhile it discusses the dynamics development of self-image and the self-transcendence in Aesthetic Consideration.Combining the development of the self-theory,the conclusion part analyzes the characteristics of self-image,and then it draws a conclusion that the exploration of self-image in this paper makes a great contribution to the Chinese-American Literature.In the process of building the characters,Maxine Hong Kingston achieves the self, and with the development of her writing,she transcends the self-images,the "harmony" theme in her works becomes more and more prominent.As a Chinese-American writer, Maxine has a dual-cultural background,she puts forward to a new writing direction of "global novel",which plays an important guiding role to the immigrant writers. Therefore,through the cultural imagination,studying the self-construction of her works not only has the time significance but also has the universal significance.