Rereading the past and reshaping the future: Narrative texts by Asian North American women writers (Edith Eaton, Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Denise Chong, Chuang Hua, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Joy Kogawa)

Asian North American women writers have combined challenges to the life/art boundaries with defiance of the limits of conventional literary genres by merging these genres with the discourses of history, biography, and autobiography. Taking as its point of departure the intersection of narrative strategies and the process of re-telling history, this thesis attempts to explore a varied and complex range of narrative strategies adopted by some of the Asian North American women writers as they explore multiple identities that arise from the complex social, historical and cultural conditions.; The study entails an examination of works by Edith Eaton, Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Denise Chong, Chuang Hua, Amy Tan, Sky Lee and Joy Kogawa. Chapter 2 analyzes different narrative techniques used in five autobiographical works and attempts to illustrate how the mode of (re) organising these personal or collective histories manifests these writers' efforts to establish a new self that embraces differences and embodies diversity. Chapter 3 explores how the two novels—The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and Disappearing Moon Café by Sky Lee—manipulate storytelling techniques in an effort to explore memory or a historical past. Like Tan and Lee, Kingston, in China Men, and Kogawa, in Obasan , foreground the act of storytelling as the means by which history is remembered and transmitted. Yet, I argue in Chapter Four, these two narratives go beyond family history to a broader and more profound social and cultural history. Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book is discussed in the final chapter as a form of conclusion. By discussing the way in which the novel engages in a reconstruction of version of the past through a transformative power and multiple discourses, the chapter serves to bring out a better understanding of the significance of the various narrative strategies discussed in the thesis.; In these writings, the problem of how to get control over one's own story and how to find an appropriate voice that is suitable is represented through various narrative strategies which reflect intersections of past and present, dreams and realities, fictional and historical time. By displaying subjectivity across multiple discourses—feminist, racial, national, socio-economic, cultural and historical—these writers offer a grounded political sense of identity, at once multiple, competing, fragmented and contradictory. The study of the various narrative strategies in these women's writings is thus also a study of the process by which fragmentary and contradictory discourses are transformed into a positive force and an advantage.; In the process of writing, these writers perform an act of reinscribing themselves within a new world, creating for themselves a fresh mode of relation toward their past, present, and future. While each text is grounded in a complex particularity, collectively they contribution to our apprehension of the world as a larger text inscribing immensely productive human difference.