Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Its Discursive Community

Abstract

Genre-Crossing: Kingston's The Woman Warrior and its Discursive Community Hsiu-chuan Lee This paper seeks to explore the potential of an individual's practice of writing/speaking to be politically ductive. Taking and culturally pro- Maxine Hong Kingston's controversial book The Woman I Warrior: Memoirs ofa Girlhood Amottg Ghosts (1976) as a case, will study the problematics of textual circulation dealt with in the book as well as the way in which it dramatically reflects the discursive transmission/ interpretation taking place around the book. There are two reasons to choose The of investigation: First, as one of the Woman Warrior as a text most widely read and talked about anthologized texts among contemporary literary works. The Woman Warrior's circulation enacts a discursive It is community cross- taught in courses ing the boundaries of genres/disciplines.^ and departments ranging from composition, American culture, ethnic studies, women's studies, and popular culture to postmodernism and serves as rhetorical model, autobiography, biography and even historiography. Second, not only does a multi-generic discursive community ensue from the reading and the transmission of The Woman Warrior; but the book itself is concerned with the problematics of textual circulation. In a sense, the telling and re-telling of stories in The Woman Warrior dramati- cally reflect the discursive transmission/interpretation taking place outside the book. While each the myth /story /memory in The Woman totaliz- Warrior branches into divergent interpretations, the narrative of book as a whole similarly leads not to a self-contained, ing authorship, but to a dialogical and historical cognition. Indeed, as the interpretive history of The Woman Warrior inscribed is by the development of contemporary feminist, ethnic, postmodern and, particularly, Chinese American aesthetic dis- courses, the multiple discursive voices inside the book are corre- lated with a Chinese immigrant history. As revealed in the trans- mission of the no-name woman story. The Woman Warrior em- bodies at least three different viewpoints of immigrant Chinese and /or Chinese Americans: the viewpoint of the Chinese left behind by their relatives and friends immigrating to the U.S., that