From Text To Context

Both American female writer Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness were published in the same year (1899), falling into English literary classic works despite different thematic concerns. In their centenary critical reception, different critical approaches to the two texts concerned convey different literary principles and methods, different philosophical thoughts, and even different meanings generated from respective readings. For that reason only, the chronological interpretative history of one single text sheds light on the development of literary theory and criticism at different stages.This thesis is to select the two novels as text models and to juxtapose them both in formalist criticism and in cultural criticism. By making a scrutiny and investigation into the text models, this thesis is intended to explore and argue how the transition from literary criticism to cultural criticism is conceptualized in particular texts and why such transition has been possible, or in other words, the inevitability of the transition.The body of the thesis is composed of the introduction, four chapters, and the conclusion.The introduction makes clear the studying contents and purpose and gives further explanations concerning studying methods.Chapter One makes a general survey of the history of criticism on The Awakening and Heart of Darkness respectively. While highlighting rereading and reconsideration, this chapter puts emphasis upon critical periods of formalist criticism and cultural criticism, within which feminist criticism on The Awakening and postcolonial criticism on Heart of Darkness are to be included. It also indicates the extent to which the novels studied have been recognized and canonized with the development of critical approaches.Chapter Two discusses The Awakening in formalist criticism and feminist criticism. To be exact, this chapter chooses several critical essays from both formalist criticism approach and feminist approach to The Awakening and makes a detailed analysis of the critical features shared by those essays that are approaching text from the same or similar theoretical perspective. It ends with an elaboration on how and why textual criticism has transferred to contextual criticism.Chapter Three involves putting Heart of Darkness in formalist criticism and postcolonial criticism. As Chapter Two does, this chapter also makes comments on the chosen essays on Heart of Darkness and inducts the common characteristics involving the similar critical approaches. Some differences, however, lie in that the critical assessments on the text have been accompanied by debates all along due to the complicated narrative structure and ambiguous language of the text itself. Therefore investigation into the academic debates on literary appreciation and moral judgment becomes an unavoidable concern in this chapter.Chapter Four serves as maintaining the structural balance for the whole thesis. It makes a synchronic approach to both the texts by juxtaposing them in critical periods, formalist criticism first and cultural criticism followed. Critical featuresshared by the two novels are to be illustrated to its best, from which it is argued that under the cultural turn, critical features of individual texts embody presentations and inevitability of such turn, and the texts themselves, therefore, are given legitimacy and a sufficient reason to be existing all along.In the conclusion of this thesis, main points dealt with in above chapters are to be reiterated. A brief introduction to domestic reviews and study on The Awakening and Heart of Darkness would be given, and an elaboration on the process of the critical reception of one text would be made through an assumption and an extended metaphor. And room is also left for pointing out the limitation of the study and for indicating the future possibilities in academic pursuits both for others and the writer herself.