On Intertextuality Of The Woman Warrior By Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior, written by Maxine Hong Kingston, is a classic work in Asia-American literary history and has been awarded as the National Book Critics Circle Award in1976for non-fiction. By rich cultural heritage and delicated brush strokes, she created this wonderful novel which represents the hard struggle and the indomitable spirit of the Chinese American groups to explore their own survival and cultural development. In her creation, she effectively combine the Chinese cultural tradition with the western culture, thus, she not only deepened the novel’s rich cultural connotation, but also provides an important basis for this article to interpret its unique charm from the perspective of intertextuality.The concept of "intertextuality" originated from Bakhtin’s dialouge theory, the "dialogue" actually refers to the relation between texts. Intertextuality can be divided into two schools, broad sense and narrow sense. The French structuralist scholar Julia Kristeva, is the representative figure of the broad sense, in1969she developted Bakhtin’s idea into a terminology, in her opinion, texts do not exist in isolation but intersect with each other. Gerard Genette’s explanation of the intertextuality is considered as the representative of narrow sense, he introduced the concept of transtextuality, interpreting intertextuality in a more pratical way. In this thesis, both two schools of intertextuality, are used as the theoretical framework to discuss the intertextual features of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel The Woman Warrior.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the author and her work, and the work’s academic research both at home and abroad, the theme and the research methods are also presented in this chapter. The second chapter focus on systematically exploring of the origins and evolution of intertextuality theory, including the main intertextuality theory of Saussure,Bakhtin, Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Gentte. Chapter three analyzes The Woman Warrior in the frame of narrow-sensed intertextuality, especially the allusions to MuLan Ballad, the tale of Ts’ai Yen. Chapter four discusses the novel in the broad-sensed inertextuality, analyzes the intertextual relationships with the traditional and modern Chinese literature, autobiography style and bildungsroman’s theme. The last chapter is the conclusion which summarizes the main viewpoints and structure of this thesis.