Beschreibung
What is a Chinese American? A Chinese? An American? Or both? Or neither? These seemingly easy questions are hard to answer in terms of history, culture, ethnicity, and literature. In order to provide an answer to these questions, Chinese American writers transform a historical discourse into a historicist one to review history, an intrapersonal discourse into an interpersonal one to redefine autobiography, and a mythological discourse into a mythopoetical one to rewrite mythology, so as to transform an American Orientalist discourse into a Chinese American one for the reading and writing of Chinese American literature. As a consequence, the question «What is a Chinese American?» is transformed into an affirmation of what a Chinese American is.
Autorenportrait
The Author: Joan Chiung-huei Chang is Associate Professor in the English Department at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Oregon. Her articles on Chinese American literature have been published in several conference proceedings and literary collections.
