An Interpretation Of The Intertextuality Between Bone And Everything I Never Told You

Chinese American writers have been arousing increasingly widespread attention from critics and researchers abroad and at home.This thesis focuses on the intertextuality between Chinese American writer Celeste Ng's debut novel Everything I Never Told You(2014)and another Chinese American writer Fae Myenne Ng's debut novel Bone(1994).Up to now,studies from various aspects on Bone have been conducted and great achievements accomplished,while studies on Everything I Never Told You are few.And so far there has been no intertextual interpretation for Bone and Everything I Never Told You.Further,the field of comparative studies between Bone and Everything I Never Told You is still blank in academic circles.Intertextuality,a term articulated by Julia Kristeva,a French theorist in the 1960 s,was introduced into China in the 1980 s.Any literary and non-literary art is set in a system of the pre-existent and the subsequent texts.Domestic studies on intertextuality can be divided into three stages: initial translation stage(1980-1990),developing stage(1990-2000),and deepening development stage(since 2000).In recent years,intertextuality has been the focus of academic researchers,to which this thesis' intertextual perspective is attributed.Bone and Everything I Never Told You are set in the 1970 s and narrated in flashbacks.Bone describes the conflicts and compromise between the first and second generation of Chinese Americans,while Everything I Never Told You concerns more about intergenerational relations between the second and the third generation.According to the different versions of intertextuality in different theoretical contexts,the co-existent and derivative relations between their plots,themes,narrative techniques,characters,settings and historicity determine the intertextual relations between Bone and Everything I Never Told You in the aspects of texts,subjects and culture.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion,this thesis incorporates three chapters.Introduction gives a brief sketch of Fae Myenne Ng's and Celeste Ng's life experience and the plots of Bone and Everything I Never Told You.Then studies abroad and at home are presented in detail and theoretical framework is also elaborated in this part.Chapter One expounds intertextual relations between Bone and Everything I Never Told You on the textual level by means of paratextuality and architextuality advanced by Gerard Genette.Their mutual paratextual narrative strategy apparently manifests Bone and Everything I Never Told You's intertextual relation.Furthermore,in terms of architextuality,such as analepsis,themes and plots,intertextual relation between Bone and Everything I Never Told You are eloquently demonstrated.Chapter Two interprets intertextual subjectivity of characters through the comparison and contrast approach between characters in Bone and Everything I Never Told You.The differences of the writers' choices of characters and the characters' different choices in similar settings outstand and embody the intertextual nature of characters' subjectivity which in turn testifies the intertextual subjectivity of Fae Myenne Ng and Celeste Ng.Chapter Three explores Bone and Everything I Never Told You's intertextual relation on the cultural level.Culture is an unavoidable and indispensible topic in such a postmodern age.Texts are generated in certain historical and social backgrounds and are products of certain culture.The surrounding culture and former culture imposes influence on texts and texts in return mirror cultures in synchronic and diachronic dimensions.The exploration of Chinese Americans' changing ideologies and their misery and suffering under western power renders cultural intertextuality between Bone and Everything I Never Told You bubble to the surface.The above three-aspect intertextual interpretation for Bone and Everything I Never Told You concludes that Chinese Americans are confronted with the inherent and constant western hegemony,cultural bias,racial and gender discrimination.This thesis holds that Nira Yuval-Davis' transversal politics,“rooting” and “shifting” helps Chinese Americans walk out of the confusion of “who I am”.Combining different versions of intertextuality,this comparative study touches upon a new field of studies on Bone and Everything I Never Told You,enriching the study of Chinese American literature and expanding the application of the intertextual theories,and also arouses Chinese Americans' awareness that the only way to cope with the dual identity in two different cultures is to root in collective culture and shift in host culture rather than resort to completely assimilation into American culture.