Abstract
This paper spotlights one of the most influential Chinese American novels, ‘The Joy Luck Club’. Broadly adhering to the principles and orientations of Eco-discourse analysis and using Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as a framework of analysis, this study uncovers ideologies pointing to an asymmetrical power structure between the mother and the daughter and discusses the underlying Chinese philosophy of mother, which helps daughter find her genuine identity. This paper concludes with revealing the true contradiction behind the conflict of mother-daughter, i.e., the two distinct value systems, and expect people to think and act ecologically, promoting the development of eastern eco-ideology.
Highlights
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War
Whether and how narrative tense can be transferred from the source text to the target text should be critically factored into the translation process, which bears much on the rhetorical effect of fictions
Three examples regarding “underreading” of the narrator‟s unreliability and two examples regarding the flexible use of narrative tense will be selected and examined from these two aspects in detail, guided by two research questions: (1) At the discourse level, to what extent are the stylistic markers of the two narrative techniques reproduced in the two translated versions?
Summary
The Moon and Sixpence was written by the renowned British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) and published in 1919, right after the First World War. The story is narrated by the first-person homodiegetic narrator “I”, a biographer, who records the protagonist‟s life via recalling his only a few encounters with him as well as interviewing the persons who once came into contact with him, in an attempt to determine his real nature and unveil his ultimate motivation of the painter dream In this novel, Maugham touches upon the theme of inexplicable human nature and soul searching, an epitome of the postwar social instability as well as the uncertainty of human cognition. In order to effectively interweave these themes with the story plot and characterization, the author ingeniously adopts two distinctive narrative techniques, namely, unreliable narration and a flexible use of narrative tense. He successively translated a wide range of classic works like The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince (the only official Chinese version approved by the Foundation Saint-Exupéry of France in 2015), most of which seem to be positively embraced by the younger generation
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