Lies that Tell the Truth: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Authors

Keywords:

Maxine Hong Kingston, Lies, Autobiography, Life writing, Self-narration

Abstract

This paper aims at showing the different forms that an autobiographical, and more generally speaking, a life writing text, can take. Through the analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in 1976, and the numerous reactions it triggered, the definition of the autobiographical genre will be called into question, especially in regard to the presence of lies in autobiographical texts. This paper will eventually suggest a renewal and a more adapted definition of the life writing genre.

Author Biography

Christelle Ha Soon, Université de Rouen Normandie

Christelle Ha Soon is currently a Ph.D student in American Literature at Rouen University (ERIAC Research Laboratory), France. She worked for two years on the works of Toni Morrison under the direction of Pierre-Yves PETILLON. She obtained her Master’s Degree in English in 2010 at La Sorbonne University (Paris IV), before passing the French Teaching Exam (CAFEP-CAPES) in English the following year. She currently teaches at Bossuet Notre-Dame High School in Paris.

She has started her Ph.D in American Literature under the supervision of Anne-Laure TISSUT (Rouen University) while teaching at the same time in a secondary school. She presented her works during the AFEA Graduate Student Symposium in 2015 and took part in several international conferences, such as the 33rd International Conference on Psychology and the Arts in Reims (July 2016), and the Conference on Silence in Dijon (March 2017). She published an article entitled “Surviving Vulnerability, or the Perverted Empowerment of a Community in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” in Leaves, the Université Bordeaux Montaigne’s double-blind peer-reviewed online journal in February 2017.

Her research interests mainly focus on the construction of identity in ethnic American literature. Her Ph.D dissertation, on Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston, aims at showing the way Kingston uses various forms of transgression as a way to play with the notions of frontiers and limits in order to create and define new ones.

Leaves n°8 : Le Mensonge / Lying

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Published

2019-07-12

How to Cite

Ha Soon, C. (2019). Lies that Tell the Truth: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Leaves, (8). Retrieved from https://revues.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/leaves/article/view/327

Issue

No. 8 (2019): Lying

Section

Literary lies

License

Copyright (c) 2019 Christelle Ha Soon

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.