| Alice Walker(1944 –)is a Pulitzer Prize winner,novelist,poet,and social activist.Her works reflect the spirit of black women’s struggle for their rights,which is echoed by the vast number of woman readers.Alice Walker’s literary theory fully shows her as a realistic writer,but her literary creation style is more modernist,even close to the characteristics of postmodernism.Walker inherits the tradition of female literature of African realism in the United States,and she also meets the special period of “postmodernism” in the West,which endows her works with full postmodern characteristics.Walker combines feminism and postmodernism,showing the unique postmodern traits of feminist thought.The use of space-time conversion,deconstruction of traditional ideas and post-colonial thoughts in the collection,and other postmodern creation features,as well as unique feminist thoughts,fully demonstrate Walker’s avant-garde creation features and original literary thoughts.The thesis can be divided into the following three parts:The first part briefly introduces Alice Walker and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down(1982),the literature review,and the theoretical framework.By analyzing the postmodern traits of the ideas in the collection,this thesis tries to find the connection between Walker’s original literary ideas and the previous feminist thought by analyzing the postmodern traits reflected in the work.The second part is the main part of this thesis,which can be divided into three chapters.Chapter One examines Walker’s deconstructionist thought,revealing that she not only builds upon feminist literary criticism concepts and postmodernist creative techniques but also strives to break up with tradition,making her ideas distinct and unique.Nineteen Fifty-five uses space-time conversion to show the historical connection of black women’s musical tradition,exposes the contradictions and hypocrisy of white men’s material world,and shows the power of black music and the beauty of black women.Elethia and Advancing Luna – and Ida B.Wells criticize the tradition of lynching and break the illusion of American body politics through fragmented plots,aiming at helping African Americans to realize their inner self and seek the balance of the black and white race.By deconstructing mainstream ideology,Coming Apart boldly explores lesbian themes by calling on sisterhood and draws new forms of interpersonal relationships from the homosexual lifestyle,to establish a pluralistic relationship between men and women.Chapter Two focuses on the differences in history,body,and black women’s language,and deeply analyzes womanist thought embodied in the binary opposition.Petunias adopts surrealistic techniques to deconstruct true and false history to show her concerns about the civil rights movement,and the fate of black women.By dispelling the binary opposition of the body in Porn,Walker constructs the discourse power of black women’s bodies,which means that the existence of the female body is not to meet the needs of men.Nineteen Fifty-five constructs the cultural identity of black women through the way of speech,to eliminate society’s sick and negative stereotype of the black South,and endows black women with the subject of literary expression.Chapter Three reveals the connection between the original thought and traditional feminist thought under the characteristics of Walker’s avant-garde creation,which is a revision,supplement,and supassing of traditional feminism.Abortion corrects women’s subjectivity in bearing children,marriage and political consciousness,black women realize the reconstruction of their subjectivity authority.A Sudden Trip Home supplements and expands the relationship between husband and wife,father and daughter,and grandparents and grandchildren.It proposes that gender equality and reciprocity are essential for black women to seek health,integrity,authenticity,and creativity.Through the overall analysis of the images of black women,it is found that the “new” black women created by Walker are more inclusive and self-reliant,more national and philanthropic,and more whole and grown-up in terms of feminist understanding of female images.Based on the above analysis,this thesis comes to the following conclusion:because of the questions and resolution of universalism and the philosophical tradition of binary opposition,Walker fully demonstrates her avant-garde creation features and original literary thoughts,the thought of womanism reflected in the works have obvious postmodern characteristics.You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down(1982),her second published collection of short stories,laid a solid foundation for the publication of The Color Purple and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,which later made her famous and paved the road of putting forward of “Womanism.”... |
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