Growth Of Kai Ting In The Novels Of Gus Lee

Bildungsroman has a long history,whose prototype could be traced back to the 17th century in the United Kingdom,but actually the notion was first proposed in Germany in the 18th century.Bildungsroman in Britain and Germany,as the representative of the traditional European novels,is characterized by emphasizing the role of social enlightenment.Faced with the conflicts of the individual pursuit with the social reality,it advocates to give up the individual spirit and give way to the community.In the 19th century the Bildungsroman were introduced into the United States and developed rapidly there.In the beginning,the Bildungsroman in the United States followed the characteristics of the traditional European novels.However,with the strengthening of the subjective consciousness,by the twentieth century the heroes of the American Bildungsroman mostly rebels against social morals.They no longer give up their pursuit of personality in order to integrate into society.They refuse Social education and insist on self-reliance.This is also the trend of development of Bildungsroman nowadays.The two novels of Li Jiansun explored in this paper,composed at the end of the 20th century,conforms to the diversified development of today's Bildungsroman.Ding Kai,the hero of the novel,has experienced from the initial compromise to social ethics to the final pursuit of personality,which embodies the process of evolution of American initiation stories.The Chinese American writer,Gus Lee(1947-),is a new generation of Chinese American writers after Maxine Hong Kingston(1940-),Amy Tan(1952-),His debut China Boy(1991)and its companion volume Honor and Duty(1994)find favor in the eyes of the major American press,and are hoped to become the second Amy Tan.The books can not only "shock the American social spirit of the word",but also promote the development of the US publishing industry.In the year of its publication,Honor and Duty was listed the bestseller by the New York Times;and among the ten best novels by the Chicago Tribune in 1994.Besides,these two novels have been adapted to the screenplays.It can be seen that Lee's novels have not only succeeded in commerce,but also made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary Chinese American literature.The hero of the novel,Kai,Ting changed the marginalization or feminization of the male image in the writings of Chinese American writers,and created a full-bodied image of men,as American dramatist David Henry Hwang said,American man really strong sound,to fill the long-term neglect of American literature blank".Most of the researches on the two novels are carried out at home and abroad from the perspectives of linguistic style,violent theory,male image and culture.There is little or no comprehensive study of the topic of growth.The topic of Growth could be usually seen in autobiographical works of Chinese American writers.Their own growing experiences are often closely knitted into works through art processing,thereby the bildungsroman is formed.This article simply combs the development of traditional European Bildungsroman and American initiation stories,summarizes its characteristics,and analyzes the embodiment of these features in the novel,indicating that both novels have typical features of Bildungsroman,but possess its own features.Under the background of dual cultures,there inevitably accompanies the problem of identity.The two novels give a panaramatic description of the hero's growing process,experiencing from the exclusion of American culture to identification for the culture,then to redefine identity,that is,the establishment of identity as Chinese American.This is also the epitome of entire ethnic minority groups in the process of pursuit of identity,which have some reference for growth and development of ethnic minorities.In short,these two novels are both autobiographical ones and typical male Bildungsroman of Chinese American.This paper attempts to analyze the development of the hero Kai Ting from the perspective of Bildungsroman,exploring how Kai Ting as a Chinese born in the United States deals with the issues of his own cultural identity in the context of multiculturalism,how to realize the "self" and get rid of the confusion.