Pragmatic Analysis Of Intergenerational Cultural Conflicts And Integration In The Joy Luck Club

The global multiculturalism has made cultural conflicts and integration a central issue discussed around the world. It attracts interest of the scholars in various academic fields from philosophy, anthropology, psychology to literature and linguistics. Language, as an important issue discussed when culture is concerned, is not only a medium of culture, but also an essential part that composes culture. Therefore, language study is a significant access to the essence of cultural conflicts and integration. This thesis intends to demonstrate the cultural conflicts integration among Chinese American people through language study.After Edward Said put forward the notion of "Orientalism", the spotlight began to center on the Asian cultures. In the United States, Asia has surpassed Europe as a major source of immigrant right after 1965. As the largest ethnic community of Asian Americans, Chinese Americans and Chinese culture become a noticeable social phenomenon in American society. Chinese Americans has made incredible contribution not only to American economy, politics, infrastructural construction etc., but also the American literature.Amy Tan, with a remarkable and natural talent for novel writing, is one of the most outstanding novelists in Chinese American literature. Her first novel The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989, won her an enviable reputation by hitting the bestseller list. Amy Tan depicts, in her novel The Joy Luck Club, the life of eight Chinese American women:four mothers, who represent the first generation of Chinese immigrants settling in America; and their four daughters, who are born and raised up in America and never come to China in most of their life. Told in the form of monologues by the mothers and daughters, the sixteen stories happening in the characters'life are a mirror of the real life situation of the Chinese American generations.The relevant studies on Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club are fruitful. The scholars both in China and overseas explore the novel from a variety of perspectives, including the cultural identity of the characters, oriental elements in the stories, the mother-daughter relationships, symbolism, to name a few. Nonetheless, most of them only concern the literary appreciation and criticism. In this thesis, an attempt will be made to analyse the conversations in the novel from the pragmatic perspectives.The study of the conversations selected from the novel is supported by two significant pragmatic theories—the speech act theory and the cooperative principle. According to Austin's speech act theory, by uttering the words, people would also perform certain acts at the same time, which can be distinguished as locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Based on Searle's classification to the illocutionary acts, people's utterances can perform different acts to serve different purposes. Grice's cooperative principle points out four basic conversational maxims that guarantee people's conversation to proceed effectively. However, in real communication, people often flout the maxims to achieve their conversation implicatures. By applying these two pragmatic theories to the analysis of a group of dialogues chosen from The Joy Luck Club, the conversational purposes and implicatures behind the words are revealed to illustrate the cultural conflicts and integration between the mothers and daughters.The cultural conflicts and integration is explored in different aspects in this thesis, such as the marriage life, languages, maternal love, parenting styles and the mother-daughter relationships. The cultural conflicts between the mothers and daughters are originated from their different culture backgrounds. Through their joint effort in mutual understanding and communication, the cultural integration achieve both in the sense of culture blending and reconciliation between the two generations. In the novel, the Chinese-born mothers leave China and their wrenched life behind, dreaming to find a better life overseas. Nevertheless, the cultural conflicts make their life in American still in the awkward predicaments sometimes, especially in dealing with the relationships with their daughters. The cultural differences erect an invisible wall between the mothers and daughters. Thanks to the hardship they suffer in China, being strong and tough, mothers find their own ways to integrate the Chinese and American cultures, and adjust themselves to the American customs and ideologies. More importantly, they use their wit and life experience to save their daughters from all kinds of crisis in their life, meanwhile also break the walls erected between them.