THE STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT IN AMERICAN ETHNIC LITERATURE: JEWISH AND CHINESE AMERICAN LITERATURES

American ethnic literature is most strongly and impressively represented by its Jewish American element. This element manifests four different stages as the literature expresses the evolving selfhood of the Eastern European Jews characterizing their entry into American society. This thesis generalizes these four stages as a framework for the analysis of Chinese American literature.; The writings of each of these groups reveal a composite self-image, the "self," that reflects its response to the impact of Americanization. In the first stage, the writers, caught between two cultures, engage in preserving their former self while embracing the new world. The self that emerges in this stage mediates between the often opposing forces of two cultures. In the second stage, as the children of immigrants emerge as writers, they strive to lose their marginality as Americans. But the ghetto-bound self, for all its railing against the ethnic community, ultimately submits to a self-imprisonment which is represented by characters who feel trapped in a world not of their own making. In the third stage, the strained relationship between the self and society relaxes as more of the social and cultural barriers are removed by the self's adaptation to American society. Generally a flowering of ethnic literature occurs at this point. Many of the writers whose works exemplify this stage are major literary figures in the larger society. If they deal with ethnic material, this becomes universalized to represent the human condition. In the fourth and final stage, the self appears secure in its dual identity. No longer preoccupied merely with the quest for selfhood, the writers turn to artistic quests, in search of affirmation of their art. They, the descendants of immigrants, now reach back to their earlier avatars and the source of their ethnic heritage. With freedom and even playfulness the writers appropriate all traditions available to the artists.; Compared with the Jewish writers, most writers of Chinese descent tarry longer in the first two stages, only one writer has entered the third stage, and none is found in the fourth. Social barriers and racial differences have prolonged their self-perception as outsiders and thus hampered their participation in the literary mainstream.