Cognitive Mapping Of The Wayfinders In Through The Arc Of The Rain Forest

Karen Tei Yamashita is a noteworthy Japanese American writer,who experimentally situates her border-crossing subjects not merely within Asian American terrain but a global framework.Her first novel,Through the Arc of the Rain Forest that depicts the displaced life of six culturally heterogeneous protagonists in an imaginary site of Brazil,Matac?o,serves as a mirror text for the individuals' living condition after crossing of geographical,ecological and cultural boundaries.In view of this,this thesis assumes the protagonists as global wayfinders and investigates their cognitive mapping,with the aim of exploring how the writer of the novel through literary mapping reflects upon the root of social and ecological problems facing global immigrants and the corresponding solutions.In doing so,this thesis offers a cognitive interpretive option,which is theoretically informed partly by Frederic Jameson's conception of literature as “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” that derives from individual perceptions of his external world and can provide an orientation for humankind to make sense of their existence in a postmodern condition,and partly by Nancy Easterlin's proposal for integrating evolutionary psychology with ecocriticism,which suggests anunderstanding of human beings as home-based wayfinders as well as a knowledge of human mind that consists of human affective ties with other human beings and nature and governs human adaption to the environment.On this theoretical basis,this thesis contends that with the employment of the unnatural narrator(“the sphere” in the novel),the narrative tactically knits together the separate wayfinders' cognitive maps,and in the form of memory,it maps the transformation of their cognition and emotion in the process of displacement from home,development and crisis of the land of settlement,and its imaginary reconstruction,unfolding a cognitive mapping of motivation,disorientation and reorientation.Firstly,this thesis probes into the motivation underlying the wayfinders' displacement from home.The wayfinders are somewhat motivated,as they migrate for capital or technology circulation or involuntarily exile for the chance of survival and development.Secondly,this thesis explores their disorientation in the land of settlement,Matac?o.While global capitalism transforms Matac?o into a prosperous commodity society at a devastating ecological cost,the wayfinders are reduced to the slaves of commodity fetishism,ecology-destructive commodity production and consumption.Underlying such an ecological and social mutation is the wayfinders' cognitivedisorientation,which entails an erosion of familial bonding and a fear of the life-threatening ecological crisis.Last but not least,this thesis focuses on their reorientation towards an imaginary home.The fictional reorientation is achieved at the end of the novel when only two wayfinders,Kazumasa and Bastia survive from the crisis,slip away from Matac?o and return to a life-thriving pastoral home.Their retained affective ties with other human beings and nature supply the basis of their successful reorientation.In particular,the cross-cultural romance between Kazumasa and his Brazilian maid Lourdes enriches the connotation of home and reflects a multicultural model for the future.Through her mapping of an ideal home,the writer of the novel tends to mobilize readers to recognize that a strong sense of home sustained by human affective ties with other human beings and nature functions as an enduring basis of human adaption to the global condition.What's more,her literary mapping displays an awareness of “community with a shared future” in which human beings coexist in harmony with each other and nature.