A Postmodernism Reading Of The Autobiography Of My Mother

Jamaica Kincaid, a famous American writer, has been acclaimed as one of the most important writers in English contemporary literature. In 1949, she was born in Antigua, a country located in West Indies. She lacked in love and warmth from the family since the childhood, but it was through writing that she regained a happy life after becoming a grown-up. “Seeing writing as a kind of self-salvation” was converted into the motive power for her literature writing and the national memories contributed the material sources to nearly all of her works.Known as a novel of initiation, My Mother's Autobiography describes the writer's and her ancients' memories, imagination and cognition of the world, and the writing is characterized with uncertainty, comedy nightmare and parody and other factors of postmodernism. Firstly, the androcentrism and feminism between words and lines were incompatibly and implicitly intertwined by describing a series of discontinued, uncertain, instable and nightmare-like literary imaginations, which led to the uncertainty for the literary interpretation. Secondly, Jamaica's work subverted the conventional concept of writing from the very beginning, consciously abandoned the comic elements for the creation of traditional novels, showed factors of comedy nightmare, infused the character nightmare, scene nightmare, society nightmare and history nightmare, resulting in a shocking, thrilling even a annoyed artistic effect on reading. Lastly, My Mother's Autobiography performed the parody technique to describe how the men from generation to generation show the differences of individual development during the inheritance from the perspective of postmodernism characteristics. Parody was mainly performed to depict the characters and plots in the text. However, this novel features the suspension, colonization and intertextuality of parody when examining the similarity and difference of details, since the author created this novel as an autobiographical fiction.As an African-American women writer, Jamaica placed the root of her literary writing into the black culture. She revealed the inequality inflicted upon black women between words and lines, showed her deep sympathy for the miseries of black people, especially the black women, constituting a series of nightmare-like scenes. This novel not only showed the characteristics of the spiritual growth of minority women and the heroine's opposition to the patriarchal society, but also revealed the profound influence of conquerors during the colonial times on flesh, spirit and ideology of the conquered. Jamaica showed the nightmare-like images of postmodernism in the text, whether human's or not, formed an artistic symbol of the aesthetic object, arranged the unique emotional inclination and humanistic concern as well as her anger throughout this work, and reflected the distinctive features of postmodernism. This novel revealed the unique aesthetic value and artistic value in many aspects, arousing an intense empathy from readers during the immersion.