Rethinking Traditional American Values in Maxine Hong Kingston"s Chinese American Contexts

• 영문명: Rethinking Traditional American Values in Maxine Hong Kingston"s Chinese American Contexts
• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: Cheang Wai Fong
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제37집 1호, 198~218쪽, 전체 21쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2005.05.30

영문 초록

  Traditional American values have been challenged in a global context, a context in which the conceptualization of a nation as a solitary, self-sufficient, homogenous unit is continuously disturbed by the transaction of economic, technological and cultural elements. Immigration and emigration are age-old praxes, which play important roles in the transaction of cultures. The study of immigrant societies and their interactions with mainstream cultures can provide interesting perspectives with which we can examine the nature of both parties.
  This paper studies traditional American values, especially the idea of individualism, in the eyes of Maxine Hong Kingston"s Chinese American characters. It covers Kingston"s first three books, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. It attempts to explore how Kingston"s heroines and heroes deal with the conflict between a Chinese cultural heritage that stresses community and an American society that stresses the individual.
  The paper explains that the reconciliation strategy is a dialogic one. Kingston"s heroines and heroes do not forsake their Chinese cultures, but draw strength from their ethnic cultural heritage to inscribe new values into their American reality, which thus hybridizes the mainstream cultures. Traditional American values, therefore, undergo a modification process in Kingston"s books when her characters instill new values into old ideas.

키워드

Traditional American values Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior China Men Tripmaster Monkey