The Joy Luck Club conflict and reconciliation of Chinese and Western cultures答辩陈词

Good afternoon, all the appraiser committee members. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to attend the oral defense. I am Xieyuan from the 2012 transferred students and my supervisor is Lihui.

With her sincere and intellectual guidance, for nearly six month's hard work, I have finished my paper. I will briefly introduce my thesis and welcome any suggestion.

The title of my paper is The Joy Luck Club - c onflict ? reconciliation of Chinese and Western cultures. I choose this as my topic due to the following reasons.

Firstly, I am a fan of 俞飞鸿, who is one of the main actors of the movie The Joy Luck Club. It is just the wonderful movie that makes me interested in the original work.

Secondly, I’m interested in the differences between Chinese and Western culture, which shows a lot in this movie and the original novel.

Last but not the least, in recent years, Tan’s novels are analyzed from the angle of the pure literature—thesis, narration method, character’s personality etc. But in my opinion, cultural researching should become an important topic.

For the above facts, I select the subject of conflict and reconciliation of Chinese and Western Cultures in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club as the title of my paper.

This paper is divided into five parts.

First of all, this paper introduces the author Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club, as well as research background.

Secondly, it illustrates the cultural conflicts reflected in The Joy Luck Club. In The Joy Luck Club, the main conflicts are individualism versus collectivism and the misunderstanding of traditional Chinese culture.

Thirdly, it illustrates the cultural reconciliation in The Joy Luck Club from mutual understanding between mothers and daughters to belongingness of Chinese culture.

Fourthly, it discusses about the causes of cultural conflict and reconciliation.

Finally, it is concluded that with the diversified cultures developing constantly, we should look at the Western culture in a rational way to treat culture conflicts properly.

I hope by studying this novel we can know that, today, with the accelerating pace of globalization, if we want to make international communications more harmonious, we should try to improve the understanding between each other, and respect each other's tradition and culture.

In the global environment, we should find a balance in different cultures and treat the cultural conflict with a rational attitude, also do not easily deny mother culture, and spread traditional Chinese culture when we learn the excellent cultures from all over the world.