A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Cultural Power In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer who enjoys high reputation around the world and her works are mostly characterized by exploring the relationship between mothers and daughters.The Joy Luck Club is regarded as the masterpiece of Amy Tan,and this book rediscovers the cultural power differences in many respects by describing the emotional conflicts between mothers and daughters.This thesis interprets the cultural power and cultural differences in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club by applying the approach of CDA(Critical Discourse Analysis)in order to dig out the cultural power and cultural ideology hidden in language.Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discursive analysis is applied in this thesis based upon M.A.K.Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar to illustrate the cultural power between mothers and daughters.Five chapters constitute the whole thesis.The first chapter briefly introduces Amy Tan’s life experiences and the main plots in the novel.The body parts of this thesis range from chapter two to chapter four and these three chapters are designed under the outline of Fairclough’s three-dimensional view of discursive analysis,namely text analysis,discursive practice and social practice.The critical discourse analysis of cultural power from these three dimensions realizes the scientific analysis from micro-linguistic function to macro-social reality.Text analysis probes into the function that language performs in the interpersonal relationships.The discursive practice analysis focuses on the production and interpretation of texts so as to penetrate cultural focus during the creation of texts.The social practice analysis aims to explore the social background for the emergence of cultural power and therefore explains the change of concepts and attitudes in culture between mothers and daughters.Chapter five is the conclusion of this thesis including the significance,limitation,and some suggestions for the future study of this thesis.Based upon Systemic Functional Grammar and Critical Discourse Analysis,the thesis provides a newly rich appreciative perspective and a heuristic analytic method to present the conflicts in culture between mothers and daughters.