Table Of Content

BLOOM'S EDITION MODERN AMY TAN CRITICAL VIEWS Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African-American George Orwell Miguel de Cervantes Poets: Volume I G.K. Chesterton Milan Kundera African-American Gwendolyn Brooks Nathaniel Hawthorne Poets: Volume II Hans Christian Norman Mailer Aldous Huxley Andersen Octavio Paz Alfred, Lord Tennyson Henry David Thoreau Paul Auster Alice Walker Herman Melville Philip Roth American Women Hermann Hesse Ralph Waldo Emerson Poets: 1650–1950 H.G. Wells Ray Bradbury Amy Tan Hispanic-American Richard Wright Arthur Miller Writers Robert Browning Asian-American Homer Robert Frost Writers Honoré de Balzac Robert Hayden The Bible Jamaica Kincaid The Brontës James Joyce Robert Louis Carson McCullers Jane Austen Stevenson Charles Dickens Jay Wright Salman Rushdie Christopher Marlowe J.D. Salinger Stephen Crane C.S. Lewis Jean-Paul Sartre Stephen King Dante Aligheri John Irving Sylvia Plath David Mamet John Keats Tennessee Williams Derek Walcott John Milton Thomas Hardy Don DeLillo John Steinbeck Thomas Pynchon Doris Lessing José Saramago Tom Wolfe Edgar Allan Poe J.R.R. Tolkien Toni Morrison Émile Zola Julio Cortázar Tony Kushner Emily Dickinson Kate Chopin Truman Capote Ernest Hemingway Kurt Vonnegut Walt Whitman Eudora Welty Langston Hughes W.E.B. Du Bois Eugene O’Neill Leo Tolstoy William Blake F. Scott Fitzgerald Marcel Proust William Faulkner Flannery O’Connor Margaret Atwood Franz Kafka Mark Twain William Gaddis Gabriel García Mary Wollstonecraft William Shakespeare Márquez Shelley William Wordsworth Geoffrey Chaucer Maya Angelou Zora Neale Hurston Bloom’s Modern Critical Views A M y TA N New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities yale University Editorial Consultant, Laurie Champion Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan—New Edition Copyright ©2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New york Ny 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amy Tan / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Blooms’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-179-6 ((hardcover: alk. paper) : alk. paper) 1. Tan, Amy—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—21st century. 4. Chinese American women in literature. 5. Chinese Americans in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. PS3570.A48Z525 2008 813’.54—dc22 2008028039 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New york at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. you can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the United States of America Bang BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom (Mis) Reading The Joy Luck Club 3 Melanie McAlister Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club 17 Marina Heung Patriarchy, Imperialism, and Knowledge in The Kitchen God’s Wife 37 Judith Caesar “Sugar Sisterhood”: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon 49 Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong A Womanist Production of Truths: The Use of Myths in Amy Tan 85 Wenying Xu Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife 95 M. Marie Booth Foster vi Contents Americanization and Hybridization in The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan 113 Lina Unali Feng Shui, Astrology, and the Five Elements: Traditional Chinese Belief in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club 121 Patricia L. Hamilton The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan 141 Yuan Yuan “Chinese and Dogs” in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses: Ethnicizing the Primitive à la New Age 155 Sheng-Mei Ma The Silencing Effect of Canonicity: Authorship and the Written Word in Amy Tan’s Novels 169 Lisa M. S. Dunick Chronology 185 Contributors 189 Bibliography 191 Acknowledgments 197 Index 199 Editor’s Note My introduction admires what still seems to me the best of Amy Tan: “Two Kinds” in The Joy Luck Club. Melanie McAlister attempts to provide political contexts for The Joy Luck Club, while Marina Heung invokes mother-daughter relationships. The Kitchen God’s Wife provokes Judith Caesar to meditation on imperialism, after which Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong locates Tan in her readership’s situation. Myth in Tan is Wenying Xu’s subject, while M. Marie Booth Foster brings us back to the mother-daughter agon. The burden of Americanization in The Hundred Secret Senses is taken up by Lina Unali, after which Patricia L. Hamilton discourses on astrology in Amy Tan. yuan yuan contrasts Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, while Shen-Mei Ma finds new age imagery relevant to Tan. Shadows of the canonical are elaborated by Lisa M. S. Dunick in regard to all of Tan to date. vviiii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction amy tan (1952– ) I have written about Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” before and return to it in this rather brief introduction because it is a kind of paradigm-passage in what is still a very early phase of an emerging Chinese-American literature. The passage haunts me because it could fit equally well into the early Jewish American literature of my youth, two-thirds of a century ago. She yanked me by the arm, pulled me off the floor, snapped off the TV. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me toward the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up and onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased I was crying. “you want me to be someone I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!” “Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!” “Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. I felt like worms and toads and slimy things were crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. “Too late to change this,” said my mother shrilly. 11

Description:

The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife are two of the important works by this popular novelist. This title, Amy Tan, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of Amy Tan through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition