The Identification Of Double Cultural Identity

Irish American writer Frank McCourt published his first autobiography Angela's Ashes in his sixties, which has won Pulitzer Prize of nonfiction in 1997. This book depicts the hardship that the McCourts suffered in Frank McCourt's childhood. Most domestic scholars view Angela's Ashes as a bildungsroman. However, few people have paid attention to the cultural environment in which the book is generated and the special cultural phenomenon revealed from the book.Nonfiction rose abruptly in world literature in the twentieth century. As a main part of nonfiction, biography has drawn much attention from scholars. In literary critical area, deconstruction prevails as a weapon to deconstruct the authority, the center, etc. Critics no longer care for the life of famous men or heroes; instead, they focus on the living conditions of the minority ethnic groups, which had been totally ignored before. The changes in the trend of writing and the switch to the cultural studies in criticism enable this autobiography outstanding.This thesis tries to dig into the cultural identification of Angela's Ashes by introducing the diversion in cultural study circle and the ideas of Homi K. Bhabha's, a famous literary theoretician on Post-Colonialism. Bhabha's theory on identity and identification gives a practical way to understand the identification of double cultural identity that is reflected by Angela's Ashes. Cultural identification can not be limited to one certain kind of cultural identity or the other one. It is a relative identity that needs the other to construct. It also can not be understood as the combination of multi-identities or two identities. Identification is a process that different cultural identities struggle, modify, and hybrid to get together. In this book, the McCourts are always regarded as the others wherever they go. They live in marginal culture which is also seen as a state of Diaspora. The author uses his writing technique to make a balance between these identities. He depictes many Irish cultural characteristics that Americans are not familiar with by using many writing techniques that Americans usually employ in their writings. Different cultures get hybridization in one book, which help the book gain wide recognition. As a writer of minority ethnic group, on one hand he wants to break the domination of American literature, on the other hand he tries to seek identification from American society which is related to the American culture's centripetal force. During the course of Americanization of the minority ethnic groups' literature works, they also bring some variations to American Literature, such as content, theme, etc. Under the centripetal force of American culture, minority ethnic groups choose a way of struggling and compromising to seek their double cultural identity.