The metaphor of 'translation' in multicultural writing by contemporary American women writers.

摘要

The invention of individual identities by contemporary immigrant and ethnic American women writers reveals the intricate complexities and possible patterns of self-invention through the metaphor of "translation." Their experience and writing give new meaning to, and deepen our understanding of, self-formative processes among immigrants, ethnics, and women.;These women/characters must "translate" themselves into their new settings--a reconstruction of identity that involves post-modern ethnographic oscillation, off-centeredness, ethnocritical review of otherness as well as "thinking through cultures" and "beyond culture." Like our concept of reality, individual identity is no longer fixed but in flux, constantly being re-invented, its new meanings conceptualized in new metaphors of self. "Translation" emerges as the "metaphor we live by" in the second half of the twentieth century.;In her autobiography, Eva Hoffman's "self-translation" is a balancing act between the losses inherent to immigrant experience and the gains of "backward and forward translation" of her disparate cultural and experiential concepts of self. Meena Alexander's autobiographical "translation" fills in the void of cultural and personal "fault lines" created by multiple migrations and definitions of ethnicity and the female body.;The sampling of autobiographical fictions by Bharati Mukherjee, Jamaica Kincaid, and Amy Tan explores different uses and attitudes the metaphor of "translation" offers when dealing with one's past/s. Mukherjee's Jasmine struggles to cut herself away from her Indian past and thus create a completely new identity for herself in America. Kincaid's Lucy first rejects and then creatively appropriates her post-colonial past, integrating it into her American identity. Tan's Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters strive to re-create the cultural, psychological, and generational continuity of their selves through multiple and multi-dimensional "translations" of their shared and separate pasts.;From the close study of the "translation" metaphor in the selected texts, the identity formation among contemporary American women may be seen as a complex balancing act of often contradictory processes of simultaneous disconnection and connection, destruction and invention, change, denial, transformation, and ultimate liberation of a woman's self as it exists and becomes in multicultural America.