A Morally Oriented Crusoe From the West to the East: Brain Text and the Formation of a World Literature Canon

• Main Author: Hui, Haifeng
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: brain text; literary canon; moral function; Robinson Crusoe
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss39/14; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1993/viewcontent/KK_2039_2C_202022_2013_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Ethical_20Literary_20Criticism_2C_20Brain_20Text_2C_20and_20New_20Readings_20of_20World_20Literature_20_28Part_20II_29_20__20Hui.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Robinson Crusoe is a world classic that has well transcended national and historical boundaries. Yet, its popularity with Anglophone and Chinese readers does not imply a similar interpretation of the protagonist and its moral lessons. From the perspective of readers’ reading expectations and interpretations, the brain text of a literary work functions as a negotiating agent in the interplay among the real author, the implied author, the implied reader, and the actual reader in the sense that it both projects prior understanding based on secondhand knowledge about the text and the framework of interpretation in the cognitive dimension during the actual reading experience of the text. This paper1 attempts to adopt the critical concept of the brain text from a narratological lens to explore how the moral lesson of this world classic is negotiated, accepted, and distorted when traveling from its western cultural and historical atmosphere to China, where it is understood and appreciated on somewhat different ground. However, the differences in interpretation, reception, and literary taste interestingly attest to the same obsession in the west and China with the moral values of a literary canon and the intriguing traveling of its brain text.