The Plot of Subjectivity: Emotional Loss and Narrative Language in the Short Stories of Grace Paley and Yuan Qiongqiong

This study focuses on the question of subjectivity in relation to female narrative strategies of two women writers after 1960: Grace Paley and Yuan Qiongqiong. Their works delineate the emotional world of the middle-class in contemporary urban life and also convey the linguistic differences between men and women as well as the cultural distinctions between American and Taiwanese literature. The common ground that Paley and Yuan share is their unique style of telling stories and their concentration on women's lives in their works. In order to find out how the subjects are revealed through plot, this study combines an investigation of unconscious emotional loss, the most recurrent theme of their short stories, with an analysis of the narrative language through which the characters try to survive. By exploring the nature of female subjects depicted in their short stories, the author analyzes the ways that language constructs genders and subjects. This study attempts to define the plot of subjectivity, the term the author initiates to describe some of the narrative strategies employed by Paley and Yuan. They do not only present women's emotional loss, but also create their responses to the loss. This very creative response is what the author calls the plot of subjectivity, the story through which they try to repair themselves. The final purpose is to determine how emotional loss can be recovered within the plot of subjectivity in the short stories of Paley and Yuan.