Three-Identities-in-One Tragedy:Research On Deviations In My Sister, My Love

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-), a frequently-being-nominated candidate for Nobel Prize in literature, is highly praised by Robert H. Fossum, the famous literary critic, as "America’s finest novelist since Faulkner (1975)". Her thirty-seventh novel My sister, My love:The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008) adopts large quantity of deviant writing techniques, which generates a literary style of "maturity in deviation". The previous research categorizes this novel into the kinds of growing-up novel. While this thesis tries to discover a new facet, new interpretation and new aesthetic experience of the text:failure in identity confirmation will lead to a self-destruction by deviation analysis.Deviation is one of many essential tools of cognitive category. For this novel, it is also the predominant power to present its stylistic features. The minute disagreement, difference, ambiguity, as well as the ambivalence and irresolution are the focuses to highlight the artistic quality of literary creation. The heroine "my sister" is the biggest attractive deviation:she only lives six years in the world, but she experiences in a very American lifetime way:obscurity, fame and end. Exposed to the unfavorable environment of loneliness, family dysfunction and profit-oriented society, "my sister" is forced to choose who she should be. The analysis of her identity confirmation aims to guide readers to think that no matter life is in short or long, each one of readers is how to live in certain identity and how to change into a proper identity to survive or to succeed. Finally, each individual will fix into a charioteer, survivor or loser. Actually, the short life of "my sister" is an epitome that how individual changes and confirms who she or he is. When failure comes in identity confirmation, it deviates from normal life so that destruction comes inevitably.The supporting theory of this paper first comes from Mick Short’s book The Exploration of Poetry, Drama and Prose Language, in which he categorizes seven kinds of deviation with the addition of Peter Stockwell’s refinement in grammatical deviation in Cognitive Poetics. The framework of this paper is that as follows. In chapter one, a main part of presentation lies in the literature review and the supporting theory. In chapter two, the phonological deviation analysis is applied into the analysis of the slight identity "Edna Louise". She is so obscure and only can murmur and repeat simple words at the time. In chapter three, the jumping reputation brings her the richest graphological deviations. She is so good as "Bliss Rampike" that her identity is overstated and exaggerated. In chapter four, skiing loser identity "the other Bliss Rampike" is in grammatical deviation analysis, in which her identity is totally a negative existence. Chapter five is the conclusion of this thesis.