On The Intertextuality Of Novels By Li Yan,a New Immigrant Writer

With the rise of the “immigration waves” in the 1980 s,the creation of new immigrant literature has become increasingly active,which has not only expanded the scale of Chinese literature in the world,but also provided rich materials for the study of contemporary literature.Unlike the early immigrant writers who expressed the“driftless rootlessness” and the sighs due to difficulty to blend in with the Western cultures,the new immigrant writers had the determination to “take root” from the outset,so their writing attempts to explore the possibility of the integration of“heterogeneous culture” and “parental culture”,even though their works involve contradictions of ethnicity and gender,but they no longer emphasize the binary opposition of “the other” and “self” as the early immigrant writers did.At the same time,new immigrant writers have become calmer in their attitudes towards the history and culture of their home countries,and they are more open-minded than their mainland counterparts.In fact,they are no longer confined to the reflection upon their own history and culture,but are looking into other peoples and the reality under the dual influence of history and reality,China and the West,thus re-establishing their own cultural identity.Li Yan is an important member of Canada's new immigrant writers group,and is an early Chinese-American writer recognized in mainstream Canadian literature.She was born in the fifties of last century,grew up in the Cultural Revolution,and went to Canada to pursue a study in the 1980 s.Her rich experience in life provides unique conditions for her writing and leads to "intertextuality" created in her fiction.Intertextuality is the textual theory pioneered by Kristeva and enriched and interpreted by Roland Barthes,Gérard Fernette,and Jacques Derrida.It makes the relationship between text and text,text and society,history and folk culture affirmed and explained in theory.It is of positive significance for studying and answering a series of major issues in the field of literary arts.Although Li Yan herself has never flaunted the artistic features of her novels with intertextuality,the characters,plots,and structures of her novel's narratives all demonstrate intertextuality.Looking at Li Yan's works from the perspective of intertextuality,we can see that the intertextuality of the novel's creation is not only reflected in the intertextuality within her own works,but also reflected in the relationship with other classical texts,literary traditions,andhistorical cultures of China and Western countries.Li Yan's intertextual writings that link ancient and modern times and connect China and the West ha ve at least the following two positive aspects: to reconstruct the narrative significance of cultural identity and achieve aesthetic beauty in art form.For this reason,this article will employ text reading method to sort out the intertextuality technique s in Li Yan's novels in order to systematically explain the various relationships in h er novels,explore the connection between her novel creation and her unique Chinese and Western cultural background,and figure out the rich meaning hidden behind the tex t of their novels,so as to provide readers with a more comprehensive understanding of the content and style of Li Yan's literary creation to provide more ways and perspectives.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,this paper is divided into four parts: The first part mainly analyzes the intertextual phenomena in representative novels of Li Yan from the perspective of “intertextuality in texts”;The second part refines and summarizes the intertextuality features of Li Yan's entire novel creation from the perspective of "textual intertextuality".The third part mainly discusses the intertextual relationship between Li Yan's novels and Chinese classical novels,the literary tradition of the May Fourth national critique,and the Chinese and Western cultures from the perspective of “intertextual intertextuality with other texts”;the fourth part concludes and sums up the value and significance of Li Yan's intertextual writing.