F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night vividly presents us a picture of western world in 1917-1930. In the book, Dick’s fall, incestuous behaviors and war’s effects on people all show that western world is occupied by irrationality and rationality is confronted with irrationality. This phenomenon arouses us to rethink about western civilization, even human nature and hurries us to best ourselves.
Identity construction is always the motif of Chinese American literature. Many critical theories are adopted to analyze this issue. Homi K. Bhabha’s “the third space” is one of them. It refers to a place where it is not a combination of different positions, rather, it is “neither the One nor the Other but something else besides”. Eat a Bowl of Tea by Chinese American writer Louis Chu presents such Third Space. This paper first discusses the homogeneous old Chinatown culture which is patriarchal and impotent in Eat a Bowl of Tea and explains how Mei Oi causes the cultural split from this homogeneous culture by her independence and adultery. And then this paper discusses how the old Chinatown undergoes the cultural negotiation and finally realize its transformation. This paper points out that in this process of transformation, the characters construct their Third Space, which offers them hybrid identity and the sense of belonging.
Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is written by American writer Lorrie Moore. It tells a mother's experience in hospital after her son's diagnosis with Wilms' tumor. Arthur W Frank presents the concept of "medical colonization" and proposes that in the narrative of medical colonization, patients would question their place in the medical colonization and find their identities. In "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk", Mother constructs the counter story to counter the narrative of medical colonization and further to undermine the diagnostic identity in the ideological work of medicine and thus establish mother's new identity.
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