文学语用学视域下小说《花鼓歌》中的华裔人物正面形象分析

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
1.1.1 An Introduction to C. Y. Lee & The Flower Drum Song
The Chinese American writer C. Y. Lee, one of “The Lee’s Eight Elites”, wasborn in a family of academics in Hunan, China, in 1917. He received his B.A. fromthe National Southwest Associated University, Kunming, China, in 1940. He came tothe United States in 1943 and attended Yale University, graduating in 1947 with hisM.F.A. in playwriting. In San Francisco, he worked as city editor for the newspapersChinese World and Young China, as well as a feature program writer for Radio FreeAsia. Lee has published a number of novels, and his stories and articles have appearedin The New Yorker, Theatre Arts, Writer’s Digest, and Ellery Queen’s MysteryMagazine, among others. He has worked as a scriptwriter for Twentieth Century Fox.His honors include a California Commonwealth Club Gold Medal Fiction Award, aSan Francisco Press Club and Union League Annual Award, a Writer’s Guild AnnualAward for Writing Achievement, a Box Office Blue Ribbon Award, and the key to theCity of San Francisco. A C. Y. Lee Archive has been established at BostonUniversity’s Mugar Memorial Library.
The Flower Drum Song, which was published in 1957, attracted so many readersin English world and made the author of the novel well-known in Western literaryworld. C. Y. Lee has abundant works, but it was his first work and masterpiece, TheFlower Drum Song, that brought him great fame as well as controversy.
This novel told a story about China Town of San Francisco in the early 1950s,and it had three inter-developing clues. The first clue was the conflict between thefather, Wang Chi-yang, and his two sons, especially between him and his elder son,Wang Ta. The second clue was Wang Ta’s love affaires and marriage — his emotionalentanglements with three Chinese American girls in China Town: Linda Tung, HelenChao and May Li. And the third clue was the hardships that Wang Ta had to face withas he went into the American society.
Based on the life experience of a traditional Chinese-American family, TheFlower Drum Song not only presented the collision and the friction between Chinaand West, the two distinct cultures, but also expressed the hardships and the confusionthat were faced by those Chinese Americans in the intersection of the two cultures.What’s more, the novel revealed the great changes in moral ideas of ChineseAmericans in an alien environment.
1.1.2 Stereotype Images of Chinese Americans before The Flower Drum Song
Characters are the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work. Theirimages are interpreted by the readers as being endowed with particular moral,intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and theirdistinctive ways of saying it — the dialogue — and from what they do — the action.1
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1.2 Research Purpose
As an alumnus of the National Southwest Associated University, C. Y. Lee is amaster of language who is good at using conversations and dialogues to show uniquepersonalities of different characters. Since he makes the characters come alive byusing his distinctive language art, and since he creates positive image of the ChineseAmerican in The Flower Drum Song, we can appreciate the novel through theconversational analysis from the perspective of Cooperative Principle in LiteraryPragmatics.
On the one hand, Literary Pragmatics is a new interdisciplinary subject thatintegrates pragmatic theories with literary theories. With CP as one of its essentialtheories, LP found the linkage between literature and linguistics which is of lastingimportance for both of the subjects. On the other hand, Chinese American literature isan essential part of American literature, and it is one product of the Americanmulticultural society that attracts more and more attention in academia. Therefore,though the criticisms on C. Y. Lee’s The Flower Drum Song are very few both athome and abroad, as one of the masterpieces of Chinese American literature, it isnecessary to interpret and appreciate it, especially to expose the change of ChineseAmericans’ images from negative to positive underlying the novel from theperspective of Cooperative Principle, one of the key notions in the newinterdisciplinary subject of Literary Pragmatics.

1.3 Research Questions
Based on the research background as mentioned above, this thesis focuses on howCooperative Principle in the theory of Conversational Implicature proposed by PaulGrice in 1975 is applied to the interpretation of the positive images of ChineseAmericans in C. Y. Lee’s The Flower Drum Song, and, hence, to create the value in appreciating this “forgotten novel with the world-famous title”.1
As the basic foundation, the following are two specific questions to be discussedin this thesis.
1. How do Cooperative Principle in the theory of conversational implicatureinterpret the conversations and dialogues in the novel The Flower Drum Song; howcan the positive images of those male and female Chinese Americans be formed,according to the analyses of their flouting and observing the four maxims of CP?
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 International Studies
2.1.1 International Studies on LP & CP
For the studies on LP, Van Dijk (1976) and Pratt (1977) were among the first toshow the usefulness of pragmatic theories to the study of literary text. And apreliminary discussion of literary pragmatics is Michael Hancher’s (1978) attempt inusing Grice’s implicature in interpreting literature. Hancher was from the Departmentof English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. At the Twentieth Annual Meetingof Midwest Modern Language Association held 2-4 November, 1978, in Minneapolis,Minnesota, he read his paper entitled “Grice’s ‘implicature’ and literary interpretation:background and preface”.
Leech and Short (1981) mentioned that examining the language of a literary textcan be one of the useful means to a fuller understanding and appreciation of thewriter’s artistic achievement. They said that the great novelists of the Englishlanguage have been, arguably without exception, also great artists in the use of words,so they took the direction from the “new stylistics” that has applied techniques andconcepts of modern linguistics to the study of literature. They introduced the languageand the fictional world by showing the way in which language conceptualizes thefiction, the way in which language presents the fiction in linear, textual form, and theways in which language represents the fiction through the social dimension oflanguage use: through the relation between writer and reader, and more indirectly,through the participation in literary discourse of fictional speakers and hearers.
Toolan (1996) concerned the most grammatically established ways available towriters for conveying the speech or the thoughts of the inpiduals who feature intheir stories. He explained the writers’ choices of different ways to express the speechand thoughts of characters, and he grouped Speech and Thought together as“Discourse”, yielding “macro” categories of Direct Discourse, Indirect Discourse,Free Indirect Discourse and so on. In this way, he enabled people to have a fullerinward understanding of the choices that the writers have had to make over the formsof representation. Toolan also set out a simple categorization of the four mostfundamental types of “speech move” that to be found in all transactional speech. Hesaid that all active turns of talk fall into one of four mutually-defining classes: offers,requests, informs, and questions. And, by noting whether the character is repeatedlymaking offers or receiving informs in the case of transitivity or process andparticipant analysis, much can be revealed about the character and the dynamics of awork.
Since Hancher, there have appeared numerous discussions. Among the manygood sources of pragmatic analysis of literary works is Roger D. Sell’s (1991)Literary Pragmatics. Jacob L. Mey (1999) has also composed a book on literarypragmatics, and a special issue of the journal Language and Literature is edited byAdrian Pilkington. It is devoted to the Relevance Theory and literary studies.
Watts (1991) said that the field of research — Literary Pragmatics — is bound torun into a kind of definitional problem. LP concerns with textual meanings beyond thelinguistic structure of the literary text itself, either in the inward-looking way (such asthe study of deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts and aspects of discoursestructure) or outward-looking way (such as the aspects of the socio-cultural affiliationof authors/readers and the complexities of literary communication beyond simplisticassumptions of message transference by means of a code through a channel from asender to a receiver). Therefore, LP must be able to encompass both methods ofconsidering the relationships between the linguistic structures of the literary text, the“users” of those texts, and the contexts in which the texts are produced andinterpreted.
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2.2 Domestic Studies
2.2.1 Domestic Studies on LP& CP
For the studies on LP, the research on LP in our China started not very long ago.The first article introduced the theory of LP was “Pragmatics” that was published onthe third issue of Foreign Linguistics (Hu Zhuanglin,1980). According to theviewpoint of Van Dijk, Hu Zhuanglin introduced the vital content in literary fieldwhich attracts pragmatics. He also showed the relevance between CooperativePrinciple and literary discourse, and said, “Pragmatics of linguistics is a powerfulmeans to study the features of literary language.”
The first research paper by using the theory of LP on literary text in China was“On Cooperative Principle in the Dialogues between Hamlet and Polonius” (ShaoZhihong, 1990). It is said that in the dialogues between Hamlet and Polonius, Hamletflouted CP, especially its maxims, several times to create conversational implicatures.Whereas, Polonius obeyed CP blindly in their dialogues and he couldn’t realize theimplicatures of Hamlet’s words. So Polonius was controlled by Hamlet’s ways tospeak, and thought that Hamlet was very “wise” just because he was so “crazy”.
Feng Zongxin(1997) discussed the relationship among pragmatics, stylistics andliterary study, analyzed the reasons that broke literary study and linguistic study andsummarized the history and the development of this discipline of LP. He said that ifpeople want to interpret the deeper meaning of a literary text, they should considerboth the macro and micro elements in literary communication. Only to integrate thestudy of pragmatics, stylistics and literature, can people catch the essence of literarycommunication.
Wang Xin(2002) argued that Historical Pragmatics, Diachronic Pragmatics andLiterary Pragmatics are three new disciplines which belong to one another in the fieldof Applied Linguistics. These disciplines have developed for a few years only. Thepaper tried to trace the origin of these disciplines, introduced briefly the objects, scopeand methods of their studies, showed the situation of their development at home andabroad, and forecasted the achievements of these new disciplines.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework ....................................................... 18
3.1 A Brief Introduction to Literary Pragmatics ....................................................18
3.2 Conversational Implicature ......................................................19
3.3 Cooperative Principle.....................................................20
3.3.1 Conversational Maxims in CP...............................................21
3.3.2 Flouting the Maxims of CP ..............................................23

Chapter 4 Exemplified Analyses of the ChineseAmericans’ Positive Images in The Flower Drum Song

4.1 Positive Images Generated by Uncooperativeness andCooperativeness
Based on the framework that has been stated in the previous chapter, this chapteris to carry out a detailed analysis of some typical conversations excerpted from TheFlower Drum Song. And, in terms of flouting or observing (especially flouting) themaxims of CP, which also can be called as uncooperativeness and cooperativeness,special attention is to be paid to how these conversations contribute to thecharacterization that forms the positive images of the Chinese Americans. Thus, theaim of these pragmatic analyses is to explore the characterization of several mainmale and female characters in this novel. The main male Chinese Americans includeOld Master Wang, Wang Ta, Chang Ling-yu and Old Man Li; the main femaleChinese Americans contain May Li, Madam Tang and Helen Chao.4.1 Positive Images Generated by Uncooperativeness andCooperativenessBased on the framework that has been stated in the previous chapter, this chapteris to carry out a detailed analysis of some typical conversations excerpted from TheFlower Drum Song. And, in terms of flouting or observing (especially flouting) themaxims of CP, which also can be called as uncooperativeness and cooperativeness,special attention is to be paid to how these conversations contribute to thecharacterization that forms the positive images of the Chinese Americans. Thus, theaim of these pragmatic analyses is to explore the characterization of several mainmale and female characters in this novel. The main male Chinese Americans includeOld Master Wang, Wang Ta, Chang Ling-yu and Old Man Li; the main femaleChinese Americans contain May Li, Madam Tang and Helen Chao.
4.1.1 Flouting and Observing the Quantity Maxim in CP
To fulfill the maxim of Quantity, theoretically, people should give the properamount of the information and not give more than or less than what is necessary.Hence, the speakers are supposed to take turns smoothly or give answers positively.The real conversations in our daily lives, however, often flout this maxim in someways, such as tautology, overstatement and understatement. In order to show thepositive images of the Chinese Americans in The Flower Drum Song, this part willgive the analyses, respectively, on how the male and the female characters flout andobserve the quantity maxim in CP in some typical conversations.
4.1.1.1 Male Chinese Americans in The Flower Drum Song
Chang Ling-yu
Chang Ling-yu was one of the most important male characters in this novel. Thereaders could get so many social essences behind the phenomena in Chinatown fromhis remarks directly. Compared with most other Chinese Americans at that time,Chang was very talkative, spirited and straightforward that could be easily seen in hisvery long remarks. What’s more, he could be rational when facing troubles and beadaptable when living in new environments. Since he was so different from thosetraditional Chinese Americans who always clung to the old standards and refused toadjust themselves to the new environment, his positive image became therepresentative of the new generation of the Chinese Americans.
Chang and Wang Ta were close friends at University of California where Changhad got his Ph.D degree in political. After having received his Ph.D degree, Changhad left for Los Angeles. As the very people who often used the words that more thanrequirement in the conversations of this novel, Chang Ling-yu always flouted themaxim of Quantity in CP. According to C. Y. Lee, Chang was the real philosopherabout life in the novel; therefore, his philosophy of life was always reflected in theconversations between him and Wang Ta.
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Chapter 5 Conclusion

5.1 Major Findings
Conversational implicatures are engendered by either directly observing orostentatiously flouting the maxims of Cooperative Principle. Observance andnon-observance of Cooperative Principle reveals speakers’ intention which implicitlyreflects the characteristics of the speakers and also shapes images of the speakers.This thesis explores the effectiveness of applying Cooperative Principle intoappreciating the characters’ images of the novel. By analyzing a great amount oftypical conversations in The Flower Drum Song, it examines how the theory works,and what makes the theory pragmatically effective in this novel. The conversationsexcerpted from the novel have been studied from the perspective of flouting andobserving (mainly flouting) the four maxims of CP. The research finds that theemployment of CP in shaping the characters’ personalities is very significant todecipher their images, because their flouting or the observing the maxims of CPresulted from their different moods, values, pursuits, perceptions and personalities.And above all, these factors influence their choice of the words and, in turn, constructtheir images at the same time.
Through applying CP, this thesis interprets The Flower Drum Song and furtherproves the significance and effectiveness of LP on studying literary texts. Based onthe respective studies on the conversations of the male and the female ChineseAmericans, it explores the characteristics of each of them by analyzing theirobserving or flouting the four maxims in CP. Then, it draws the conclusion that almostall of the Lee’s characters in The Flower Drum Song were the brand-new positiveimages of Chinese Americans. It also uncovers that Lee’s creation for these positiveimages implicitly refuted those depictions of the stereotypes of Chinese Americanswhich were written by the westerners before. And, forming these positive images isalso Lee’s special and powerful writing back to the hegemony discourse in themainstream culture of America.
As such, whether by design or happenstance, The Flower Drum Song representsthe birth of a new literary genre, one which has since blossomed into a vital andprospering form. Therefore it became a bestseller and was translated into populardramatic forms. And the impact of this novel upon American culture, as well as on anascent Asian American consciousness, can hardly be ignored.
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参考文献（略）