A Rhetorical Study On The Mother Images In The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan, as an influential writer in the CA (Chinese American) literature, published her most famous novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989. Since it was published, it has won several awards and attracted wide attention at abroad and home. As we all know that one of great successful reasons of the novel is the creating of four Chinese mother images. And then, many researchers and commentators started to do some research on the mother images from different perspectives, but their research was relatively narrow, which were mainly from the cultural, political, feminist and post-colonist perspectives, etc.However, this thesis adopts the rhetorical theory of James Phelen and Li Jianjun to analyze the mother images, which is a new attempt. Li Jianjun inherits critically the theory of Wayne Booth, who is the founder of rhetorical theory of novel, and put forward his own point of view. He divides the rhetorical techniques into macro-rhetorical level and micro-rhetorical and further points out that the rhetorical narrative techniques are classified as macro-rhetorical techniques while common figures of speech are classified as micro-rhetorical techniques. James Phelan put forward the theory of narrative process, which provided the main rhetorical narrative techniques.Therefore, the thesis combines them to reveal the mother's image comprehensively, that is, the image from the"other"who survived between Chinese and American culture to the building of self-images who fought against the mainstream culture, broke the stereotype impression, and mastered the rights of speaking.This thesis which adopts the rhetorical perspective is also a response to the latest trends in the research on CA Literature, that is, we should pay attention to the exploration of its literary characteristic, including reading the text, analyzing its structure and evaluating the aesthetic value. At the same time, it is hoped to provide a new approach to analyze the character's image in the novel.