An Analysis Of Doris Lessing’s This Was The Old Chief’s Country From The Perspective Of Binary Opposition

Doris Lessing, known as Old Grandmother in Literature, was a worldwide famous modern female writer and the most important British female writer after Woolf, and also the eldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She had written many masterpieces which have caught many scholars’attention. This thesis will analyze Lessing’s collected African short stories This was the Old Chief’s Country from the perspective of the binary opposition.This thesis is divided into five parts:introduction, literature review, theoretical framework, binary opposition in Doris Lessing’s African stories and conclusion.The first part, introduction, mainly introduces the background, purpose, significance and structure of this thesis.The second part, literature review, is a brief introduction of Doris Lessing, her literary works as well as the studies both at home and abroad. Varieties of studies centered on Lessing’s works include researches on Lessing’s writing skills and techniques, literary criticism from a perspective of psychoanalysis, feminism, colonism, post-colonism, structure and theme, the writer Lessing herself and reviews of Doris Lessing’s profound academic achievement.The third part mainly introduces the literary theory of structuralism and the binary opposition. Originated in the linguistic theories, structuralism has played an important role in literature. The binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language in structuralism.Then the fourth part mainly analyses Doris Lessing’s This was the Old Chief’s Country from the perspective of binary opposition. And this part is divided into six sections:the opposition between the white and the black includes the unequal status between the white and the black and the oppression by the white of the black; the opposition between man and nature includes the opposition between human centrism and nature, the opposition between unreasonable agricultural activity and nature and the opposition between unreasonable industrial activity and nature; the opposition between men and women includes the sexual oppression by white men of black women and the gender discrimination of black men against white women; the opposition between one’s social position and one’s ideas; the opposition between the ideal world and the real world; and the last is the opposition between subversion and tradition. The analysis of the binary opposition expresses the wish to establishing a harmonious relationship between the white and the black, man and nature, men and women.And the last part is a conclusion. This part mainly summarizes the main idea of this paper. Through the analysis of the binary opposition in the paper, we can understand the implicit meaning of these works. That is, it is urgent to establish a harmonious relationship between the black and the white, man and nature, men and women. In short, it is important to establish a harmonious society at any time.