Ethical Narration And Narrative Ethic In Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels

Maxine Hong Kingston(1940-),whose representative works are The woman warrior,China Men,Tripmaster Monkey and The Fifth Book of Peace,is one of the most important writers for Chinese American Literature in American literary world.Among them,The woman warrior won the non fiction category of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976.In 1981 China Men won the non fiction National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Award nomination.Her works were selected into the classic anthology of Norton American Literature and entered the middle school textbooks.In 2008,Maxine Hong Kingston also won the National Book Award for outstanding literary award,which is a great affirmation of her literary achievements.Maxine Hong Kingston's distinctive writing style,double identity of femininity and minorities and multiple themes of works,make her highly respected and a hot writer in the United States and Chinese critics.In the past forty years,domestic and foreign scholars on Kingston's novels are most concerned about the woman warrior and ChinaMen.It mainly focuses on three aspects:theme,character image and artistic form,especially the study of narrative art and cultural identity.However,they have not been studied from the perspective of ethical narrative and narrative ethics.Therefore,this paper will be based on the perspective of ethical narrative and narrative ethics using the Post-Classical narratology Criticism,Close Reading Criticism,New Historicism Criticism,Post-Colonial Criticism and other criticism methods,and will be studied from ethical narrative,narrative ethics and the reason of the narrative ethics in Maxine Hong Kingston's novels.The ultimate aim is to strengthen the interpretation of the ethical ideas and narrative art of Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels from Ethnics,Thematics and Narratology.The following is to grasp Maxine Hong Kingston's ethical value orientation by comparing The woman warrior,China Men and Tripmaster Monkey,The Fifth Book of Peace.In addition,this paper compares the ethical narration and narrative ethics in the novel and other Chinese American novelists in the same period.This thesis consists of three parts:the introduction,the text and the conclusion.Among them,the body part is divided into three chapters.The introduction part starts from four aspects:the reasons for choosing the topic,the research status at home and abroad,the significance of the topic,the research methods and the interpretation of main terms.The first chapter analyzes the ethical narration of Maxine Hong Kingston's novels.It is analyzed from three perspectives:family,history and existing.The ethics of family presents the state of deconstruction and reservation of Chinese family morality.It consists of three aspects:the deconstructed patriarchal discourse in father-son ethical narration,from estrangement to identification in mother-daughter ethical narration,a shock to the traditional conception about marriage and love in marriage ethical narration;Historical ethical narration presents a state of reconstruction in imagination.In the women warrior,Maxine Hong Kingston narrates using the method of deconstructing history,and in China Men,the family immigration history is mainly constructed by imagination.In the two text,the writer adopts the individual perspective to explore the individual's life experience in the historical situation;The ethical narration of survival shows that the survival of immigrants in foreign countries has experienced from immigrant hunger narrative,Immigrant culture struggle narrative to identification of self-cultural identity.The second chapter analyzes the narrative ethics of Maxine Hong Kingston's novels.Maxine Hong Kingston is a writer who has the consciousness of the literary form.In her two masterpieces the woman warrior and China Men,the writer uses the narrative skills and narrative form to convey his ethical implication and thought emotion.As a result,the narrative ethics will be discussed from two aspects:narrative subject and narrative text.Specifically,the ethical significance of narrative subject is analyzed from intervention of narrator,narrative perspective and the narrative reliability;the ethical significance of narrative text is considered from the ethical functions of narrative time-space,narrative voice and narrative genre.The third chapter analyzes the main reasons of narrative ethics in Maxine Hong Kingston's novels.It is discussed from Social-historical reasons and personal reasons.The social-historical reason is mainly affected by the survival history of Chinese immigrants under immigration policy,World War II,the American civil rights movement and the feminist movement;Personal reasons are the writer's own life experience-and the writer's thinking and confusion about the ethical issues.In the course of Maxine Hong Kingston's personal growth,the conflict between Chinese and western ethical culture is an unavoidable problem.And then it can be accompanied by three ethical thinking and confusion:the possibility of the ethical status of immigrants,sex and morality,individual and history.The conclusion part discusses the ethical value orientation of Kingston's narration in the novel.It is discussed mainly from the following two aspects:Firstly,comparing The woman warrior and China Men with Maxine Hong Kingston's the other two novels Tripmaster Monkey and The Fifth Book of Peace,we can grasp the ethical value orientation of Maxine Hong Kingston as a whole;Secondly,comparing ethical narrative and narrative ethics in Maxine Hong Kingston's Novels with other contemporaneous Chinese American novelist,we can explore the unique value of Kingston's ethical choice in comparison.