Crossing Cultures: Creating Identity in Chinese and Jewish American Literature"In this important new study, Judith Oster looks at the literature of Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans in relation to each other. Examining what is most at issue for both groups as they live between two cultures, languages, and environments, Oster focuses on the struggles of protagonists to form identities that are necessarily bicultural and always in process. Recognizing what poststructuralism has demonstrated regarding the instability of the subject and the impossibility of a unitary identity, Oster contends that the writers of these works are attempting to shore up the fragments, to construct, through their texts, some sort of wholeness and to answer at least partially the questions Who am I? and Where do I belong?" --Book Jacket. |
Contents
11 | |
Seeking the Self | 34 |
Language and the Self | 58 |
The Bilingual Text | 84 |
Heaping Bowls and Narrative Hungers | 122 |
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Amy Tan Anzia Yezierska Asian American Asian American Literature autobiography become bicultural bilingual Brave Orchid Call It Sleep China Chinese American conflicts context Counterlife create culture daughter David discussion Donald dreams English ethnic Eva Hoffman example experience father feel fiction friends girl guage Hebrew hereinafter cited Hoffman hunger identity imagine immigrant interview Jade Peony Jewish American Jewish American Literature Jews Joy Luck Club Kingston Levinsky live look Lost Maxine Hong Kingston meaning memory metaphor mirror Mona mother narration narrative Nathan never novel one’s parents Philip Roth Polish protagonist question quoted reader realize Roth's Sau-ling Cynthia Wong seder seems share sounds speak story talk taonan teacher tell things tion told tradition translation understand University Press voice Woman Warrior words writing Yiddish York Zuckerman