《紫色》文献综述培训资料.doc

《紫色》文献综述

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II. Literature Review
A. A brief introduction of the author and the book
Alice Walker is one of the most prolific and world rewarding Afro-American writers. She has altogether published three collection of short stories, eight collections of poetry and eight novels. And she is most famous for her novels. The Color Purple ,which published in 1982, won the American Book Award and the Pulizter Prize, thus she became the first African American female writer to win the Pulizter Prize.
In The Color Purple, Alice Walker demonstrates the black women's living conditions under the double oppressions of both race and gender. She gives a concrete description of the growing progress of the protagonist, Celie—from her numbness to awakening. Walker shows female character's personality and pursuit of self-identity in struggling with men and the whole society.
B. Major perspectives of the academic studies on The Color Purple
Since the publication of The Color Purple in 1982, it has received many criticism in America and the outside world as well. For example, in The Nation, Dinitia Smith observed,"Walker has not turned her back on the southern fictional tradition. She has absorbed it and made it her own.By infusing the black experience into the south novel , she enriched both it and us"(Smith, 181). There are also enormous and various academic studies on this book. Here are some general perspectives.
1. Alice Walker's Womanism
The term womanist first appeared in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, which is used to distinguish black feminism from the white feminism. Sherley Williams once referred that in contrast to feminism, the womanism inquiry suggests that it can talk both productively and effectively about men. Walker gives a clear definition of what is womanism. She writes,"a womanist is a black feminist or feminist of color. Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willingful behavior. A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually...Womanism is to feminist as purple to lavender"(Walker,15).Womanism provides a new perspective of black women's double oppression under both race and gender and a solution how to get rid of of women's oppression to gain self-identity. The theory of womanism is contributed to the survival and wholesome of women, men and the whole human beings. In the novel, The Color Purple, Celie finally became reconciled with her husband and lived in a harmonious and happy new world, which further illustrates Walker's glorious ideal of demolishing the gap existed between men and women and struggling against prejudices in a concerted effort. However, compared to foreign scholars, Chinese critics were relatively slow in response to Alice Walker's works. Their attentions to The Color Purple focus on feminist approach, and few has realized the difference between feminism and the term "womanism" put forward by Alice Walker(Tang, 121).
2. Home Complex
The sense of home plays a very important role in helping colored people, especially those black who are deprived of freedom to protect themselves and speech rights, to gain self-confidence and identity. Being slaves in American, the black people lived a miserable life because of both racial and cultural discrimination in a white culture and society. From the moment when they were enforced to leave their land of Africa, they had lost their own home. The novel bears the home background obviously and starts with the conflicts among family members. Home by definition means that "place where one lives, especially with one's family; house or flat; district or country where one was born or where one has lived for a long time or to which one feels attached"(Hornby,711). Usually, scholars would likely to discuss home complex from both physical and spiritual home,so does this book.
3. Initiation story
An initiation story is a fiction in which the most important character in the book undergoes an experience that changes his life, and usually that character is a young person who becomes mature from the experience. It is used to describe such works that deal with the psychological grow of a central character from adolescence to maturity. Initiation story is originally associated with a small group of German novels written in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. The designation of it was first adopted by the critic Karl Morgenstern in lectures which was presented at the University of Dorpat in the 1820s. No matter in China or outside the world, there are quite a lot of people using this theory to interpret literature works. For example, a Chinese scholar named Gao Xiaohong once applied this theory to make an analysis of Alice Walker's The Color Purple which is very expressive and eloquent.
4. Female Bildungsroman
For the most part, women writing in literature tradition was dominated by male writer, which makes women writers feel that inferior and vulnerable. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the "anxiety of authorship."Therefore, they tries to created a different genre theory putting more emphasis on female position. Although bildungsroman genre is not specifically used to classify novels with the center character of any gender, the genre is actually borrowed from novels with male protagonists, which makes it impossible to be applied to any novel with female protagonists. It says "Even the broadest definition of the Bildungsroman presuppose a range of social options available only to men"(Abel,7). Therefore, it's necessary and urgent to make a new genre of writing and then female bildungsroman appears. What is more important, gender is taking into account which therefore determines the starting point of the development with regard to the protagonist of different ages. Usually, the bildungsroman protagonist is referred to a young child, whereas female bildungsroman protagonist is a small child but her development in the work begins later on in her life. In The Color Purple, we can see that Celie first appeard in the novel as an only fourteen years old girl, but she did't become mature until many years had passed.
5. Personal opinions about the above academic studies
It would be a pity for the readers and a tragedy for a book itself if there is complete identity of views about the book. Great works are always open for people’s criticism as well as praises. As I’ve listed above, people’s opinions about The Color Purple are different from each other, but they all agree on the importance of assuming self-identity by struggling against any form of oppression and women should love themselves as well as other women and men. Only when people understand the importance of uniting that they can lead a harmonious life.
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