Graduation Term

2015

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Department of English

Committee Chair

Ricardo C. Cruz

Abstract

This dissertation creates a dialogic web encompassing the sociocultural and psychological aspects of Jade Snow Wong's and Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographies Fifth Chinese Daughter and The Woman Warrior. The American mainstream society and Chinese patriarchal community have conceived insurmountable ethnic and gender differences that are inherent in Wong's and Kingston's growing-up environment. The dissertation argues that how the two authors perceive the way of how these differences have been conceived is central to our understanding of their representations of ethnic female consciousness when they are writing as both subjects and writers. The dissertation notes, to be more specific, Wong's and Kingston's texts are like a mirror reflecting how they are informed by the principal social ideologies such as Orientalism, the American dream, and the patriarchal definition of womanhood.

The dissertation goes on to argue that the literary strategies Wong and Kingston have

adopted in their texts function to represent the difference of the protagonist's world longtime suppressed by dominant social values, and the mixture of different cultural and literary elements in the text metaphorically manifest the dialogic nature of American ethnic literature and culture. The dissertation contends that all these strategies have political implications because they are used to challenge the conventional unitary literary language.

Access Type

Dissertation-Open Access

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2015.Luo.X

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