A Comparative Study on Naturalism on the Call of the Wild and Wolf Totem---开题报告

Since The Call of the Wild is popularity by lots of people, there have seen many explanations which written by different scholars in the past dozens of years. Joseph Campbell once written in his book The Hero with A thousand Faces said that the general myth pattern is “separation-sufferings-transformation”. In Zhao Qian’s thesis Analysis of the Mythological Prototype of Buck as in The Call of the Wild, he remarked that Buck as the hero of The Call of the Wild, which lost his paradise at first, and finished his transformation until underwent much suffering. The experience of Buck is just accord with Campbell’s general myth pattern. Another thesis Philosophy in The Call of the Wild asserted that the story reflects four kinds of philosophical ideas: Darwin’s evolutionism, Spence's social theory of evolution, Nietzsche’s “superman” theory and Marxism. Liu Liang-jun and Chen Yan-li in their thesis said that the hero Buck transformed from civilization to barbarism in the process completed the regression of the beast. However, this is not the degenerate of a species; it’s an inevitable result and sublimation. There are also many scholars from the other perspectives to study The Call of the Wild, such as the multiple themes of the novel, the ecological criticism of the novel, London’ s prophylaxes of life and so on. 

From different aspects of studies on the Wolf Totem in the ages, it could be roughly categorized as several directions, such as the image of the Chinese, the transformation of concept, the conflict between the history and culture, the ecological element in the novel and so on. In the thesis “Papa” and “Son”: Addressing the Issue in Translating Assumed Kinship Terms in Wolf Totem, Wang Yingchong from the direction of translation to analyze the novel, he pointed out that terms of address reflect a nation’s customs, and assumed kinship terms in particular are rich with pragmatic implications and social significance.” Another thesis Wolf Totem: Ecological Value Showed in the Conflict between History and Culture exactly illustrated the directions which this thesis has mentioned before. The author of the thesis said that “it is not limited in the field of ecological criticism. From the description of the characters of grassland wolves and the conversion process of wolf totem, from holiness to common customs, the thesis reveals that spiritual belief and value have great influences in nature and ecology. When wolves appear as cultural and ecological hero, they express the ecological features in the conflict of history and culture as well as the reality of ecological variation in the grassland.”

In the thesis An Interpretation of Environmental ethics in Wolf Totem and The Call of the Wild, Zhang Jia-sheng analyzed The Call of the Wild from the perspective of the environmental ethics, attracting a wide readership and critical attention. Besides, he said that the Chinese novel Wolf Totem not only is famous for its unique description of interaction between man and wolves on Inner Mongolian grassland, but also is a famous masterpiece of Eco-criticism. By a comparative study, he endeavored to seek the environmental ethics in the two novels, and found the moral ethics in the development of relationships among human-human, human-animal and human-nature. Apart from the environment ethics, ecological criticism and some other aspects in the two novels, naturalism becomes more and more familiar to the students in recent years and this thesis A Comparative Study on Naturalism in The Call of the Wild and Wolf Totem is just site on the theory of naturalism. 

Contents

1. Introduction

1.1 A brief introduction to the thesis

1.2 Introduction to the Naturalism

2. Summary of two works

2.1 Summary to The Call of the Wild

2.2 Summary to The Wolf Totem

3. Comparative research on Naturalism of the two works 

3.1 Jack London’s naturalism in The Call of the Wild

  3.1.1 Buck’s survival

  3.1.2 Survival of the fittest

3.2 Jiang-rung’s naturalism in Wolf Totem

3.2.1 Nature selection

 3.2.2 Environment awareness

3.3 Comparative study on the two works

  3.3.1 Mercilessness and greediness

  3.3.2 The theme of naturalism

4. Conclusion

5. References

References

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[2]]Jack. London. The Call of the Wild [M]. New York: Airmont Publishing Co.Inc, 1964.

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