A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And Western Value Orientations Embodied In The Characterizations Of Sun Wukong And Achilles

After the world entered the new millennium, highly advanced technology and communicative media have brought forth deeper and wider globalization, which has accelerated intercultural communications. Although all the economic growth and social development is coming forth with it, globalization is a two-edged sword for the reason that it also increased the possibility of conflicts in cultural exchanges. Thus the related research on the culture has been nourished and prosperous.Research on culture has been going on for hundreds of years, but recent years witness the high tide of it. More and more scholars devote to this promising field and harvest spectacular achievement. Among them, In 1980, one of the most prestigious scholar Hofstede ascertains five pairs of dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity vs. femininity, individualism vs. collectivism and long-short term orientation) along which the dominant value systems in different countries can be arrayed. These dimensions are accepted far and wide and have been used by a great number of researchers to interpret and compare cultural groups.In this thesis, value orientation is the subject. And among the five dimensions above, the author chooses individualism vs. collectivism and power distance as the two perspectives to study. By adopting the method of case study, the author selects the two most prestigious myths in eastern and western cultures–A Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en and Illiad by Homer as the material source for the contrastive study of value orientations embodied in the characterizations of the main heroes, Sun Wukong and Achilles in these two mythologies.Throughout the whole thesis, the author tries to identify where the two heroes stand, individualism or collectivism, or in between? On the other hand, the author intends to examine whether Hofstede's theory is impeccably right. The conclusion is that Sun Wukong is a bi-cultural figure, who is born individualistically and boasts the spirit of anti-authority and counter-tradition at first, and later identifies himself with collective value due to the powerful influence through socialization during the journey to the west. On the other hand, Achilles is an individualistic hero; however, there are few collectivistic features on him such as his high value of the ingroup member Patriclus. Therefore, this paper displays the limitations of Hofstede's bipolar system. Neither a person nor a culture is purely individualistic or collectivistic. There must be overlaps of the two values, the key to judge is to measure which one is predominant. Thus the author proposes to introduce the pluralism into the Hofstede's theory and into the research on culture as well, in order to nourish a deeper and better development of the intercultural communication research.This dissertation consists five chapters: first, the introduction part which offers the background, objective, overall structure and methodology of the study; then literature review which presents the definitions of the predominant terms and the related previous study; the third part is the main body which depicts the data analyses of a comparison between the two main characters; then comes the results and discussion part which explains why collectivism is overwhelmingly important in China and individualism in the west; and the last chapter is the conclusion.