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Abstract
Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, although highly controversial, holds an exceptional seat of canon in Asian American literature. This paper firstly surveys how the work has instigated “the pen wars” in Asian American literature, and makes a comparison with Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, gender and ethnicity as crucial issues. It then takes a closer look at two of the five stories in The Woman Warrior, “No Name Woman” and “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” paying attention to the problematics of language and silence. It argues that the no name woman, the speaker’s aunt who jumped into the family well with a new-born illegitimate baby half a century ago in China, is not a subaltern who could not speak, but a suicide bomber who turned her (dead) body into a site of woman/writing, a speaker and warrior at once. In the final section it examines the life of an ancient woman poet Ts’ai Yen, a symbol of female gender that Spivak calls “the most global institution with the longest history.” While succumbing to a series of outrageous fates as wife and slave, she becomes a translator between “barbarians” and “barbarians,” and sings “a chant that could hardly be discerned from silence.”
Journal
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- 新潟国際情報大学国際学部紀要
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新潟国際情報大学国際学部紀要 3 29-39, 2018-04-01
新潟国際情報大学国際学部
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Details 詳細情報について
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- CRID
- 1050845763226556928
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- NII Article ID
- 120006495164
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- NII Book ID
- AA12723576
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- ISSN
- 21895864
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- NDL BIB ID
- 029127451
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- Text Lang
- en
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- Article Type
- departmental bulletin paper
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- Data Source
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- IRDB
- NDL
- CiNii Articles