Living Between Dialectics: A Bakhtinian and Lacanian Reading of Jade Snow Wong\u27s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s The Woman Warrior
This dissertation creates a dialogic web encompassing the sociocultural and psychological aspects of Jade Snow Wong\u27s and Maxine Hong Kingston\u27s 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\u27s and Kingston\u27s 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\u27s and Kingston\u27s 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\u27s 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
