Personal narratives of non-belonging

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation in the context of their particular concern and problematization of the role of memory and language in the conception of self and reality. With the help of close textual analysis, the specific textual strategies of these two examples of immigrant autobiography make it possible to lay bare the taken for granted capacity of the two cultures between which these writers -who are children of immigrant parents- experience self. My focus of study is the manner in which these writers represent their own experience through their unique translation of the two cultures that they are a part of. The act of translation is the act of non-belonging. The difficult position that their simultaneous concern for the impossibility of representing these cultures in their entirety puts them paradoxically provides them with an ever-changing, multi-perspective vision that transcends all other forms of self dictated by both cultures. The capacity of autobiography to make the past and the present coexist is instrumental in enabling the autobiographers with the experience of a self across the boundaries of two cultures.