On Chinese Cultural Symbols in The Joy Luck Club

DOI

10.2991/snce-18.2018.135How to use a DOI?

Keywords

The Joy Luck Club; Chinese culture; Symbols; Orientalism; Otherness

Abstract

In her first and famous novel The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, like many other Chinese American writers, creatively employs some striking Chinese cultural symbols to depict the characters, arrange the plots and disclose the development of conflicts. The paper first examines three basic types of Chinese academic comments on the novel, and then makes a summary for such major Chinese cultural symbols used in the novel such as Mahjong, Fengshui，astrology, the Five Elements and the spirit culture. Furthermore, based on Edward W. Said’s Oriental theory, the author pays more attention to investigate Orientalism and Anti-orientalism displayed in the novel’s text, and finally draw a conclusion that in The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan applies the Orientalist approach to the treatment of Chinese culture so as to attract her white readers, but she also reorganizes these Chinese culture symbols to construct their own Chinese American culture identity, to fight against Orientalism, and to pursue the co-existence of the East and the West. 

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yongkun Wan
PY  - 2018/05
DA  - 2018/05
TI  - On Chinese Cultural Symbols in The Joy Luck Club
BT  - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Network, Communication and Education (SNCE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 666
EP  - 670
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/snce-18.2018.135
DO  - 10.2991/snce-18.2018.135
ID  - Wan2018/05
ER  -