| Amy Tan is regarded as one of the most significant Chinese American writers in American literary field.Her first novel The Joy Luck Club published in 1989 became a great success right after its publication,and has aroused much interest and attention of mainstream readers in Chinese American literature.Besides it also has received a high praise from the American literary critics,wining the Bay Area Book Reviews Award as well as the American Literary Association Award.The novel The Joy Luck Club consists of four parts with each part including four individual stories,dealing with the theme of mother-daughter relationship:from conflicts to reconciliation.It is a pity that most of the previous studies on The Joy Luck Club focus on the analysis of the clashes between different cultures which is reflected on the relationship between mothers and daughters.The writer tries to examine the novel from an innovative way,i.e.frorn the perspective of postcoloniai cultural critique. The thesis aims to find out the elements of orientalism as well as the anti-orientalism which have influenced Amy Tan and implied in her creation of The Joy Luck Club (1989).The ultimate intention of the thesis is to appeal to the readers around the world especially those frorn western countries to look at China from an objective point of view, and to testify an ideal state that different cultures can coexist harmoniously.The thesis is divided into five parts.In chapter one,the introduction part,the writer will give a brief account of the background of the present study,which mainly examines the history of Chinese Americans as well as the development of Chinese American literature and lists out the significance,objective of the research.In chapter two,the writer will introduce the theoretical rationale involved in the thesis: Edward Said and his famous Orientalism.As the basis of postcolonial study, Orientalism can be understood as "the hostile and depreciative attitude towards the East by the West involved with various sorts of discipline such as anthropology,sociology, history,and politics",or "a Western style for dominating,restructuring,and having authority over the Orient"(Said,1978:3)in brief.The west has been creating the so-called Orient from their perspective.Since Amy Tan and her masterpiece The Joy Luck Club(1989) are chosen as the target of the research,Amy Tan and her literary life as well as the existing studies on The Joy Luck Club will be introduced mainly in the literature review.In the third chapter "The Construction of Orientalism in The Joy Luck Club",the writer will probe deep into the causes that lead to the orientalism in the novel,including Spatio-temporal disparity,cultural absence,racial discrimination from the mainstream culture,and the vendibility of the novel.Later the manifestations of the orientalized China,its culture,and customs are listed in detail.Apart from viewing China from the oriental perspective,the westerners also obtain a bias against Chinese people such as the ignorance of Chinese people,their cooking and dressing,and their being deprived from speaking out,which will be analyzed in detail in this part.In Chapter Four "The Deconstruction of Orientalism in The Joy Luck Club",the writer will probe into the deep reasons causing the deconstruction of orientalism in The Joy Luck Club(1989),including the mutual cultural communication under the background of globalization,the deep-rooted Chinese heritage in the Chinese American writer Amy Tan.One representation of anti-orientalism in the thesis will be the breaking of "silence" by Chinese mothers.The other would be the American-born daughters' "recurrence" to the Chinese culture.The last chapter will be the conclusion part,in which the writer will summarize the orientalism and the anti-orientalism demonstrated in The Joy Luck Club(1989),and call for the reconciliation between apparently different even contradictory cultures and beliefs.There must be a balanced point among them,which Amy Tan has always been trying to demonstrate in her novel. |
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