A Study Of The Text World In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan (1952-) is a famous Chinese American author. Her first novel The JoyLuck Club has gained a universal popularity since it was published in1989. The noveltells stories between American-born daughters and immigrant Chinese mothers.Conflicts exist among them due to cultural diversity and special identity of minorities inAmerica. But at last, conflicts between them are eliminated. Previous studies on thenovel mainly concern with cultural conflicts, mother-daughter relationship, symbolismand so on. But few cognitive analyses have been done from Text World Theory.This study does a cognitive analysis of the novel under the framework of TextWorld Theory. It analyzes text worlds and mental representations formed in readers’mind when they deal with the novel. Meanwhile, it explores how the language andtextual mechanism of the novel promote the cognitive world construction. Withdescriptive approach and case analysis, it does a systematic study on text worlds byanalyzing two typical stories in the novel. Findings of the study include three aspects:(1) On discourse world level, Amy Tan and her mother’s life experiences are importantcreative sources of The Joy Luck Club. When readers read the novel, they will activatethis kind of knowledge from their mind in order to interpret the novel.(2) On text worldlevel, Amy Tan narrates different events that happen in a same story by applying uniquenarrative ways. Based on textual information and related background knowledge indiscourse world, readers will form rich mental representations.(3) On sub-world level,various modal sub-worlds and world-switches are constructed due to the direct speeches,modality structures, tense shifts and memory words.By researching the world construction of The Joy Luck Club within framework ofText World Theory, it is hoped that the study could interpret the contents and narrativeway of the novel thoroughly from a cognitive perspective. Meanwhile, it could testifyand extend the feasibility and applicability of the Text World Theory in analysis of suchliterary works.