The Journey to the West (西游记) is one of the masterworks of classic Chinese fiction. It was written by Wu Cheng‘en (吴承恩) in the 16th century CE. Many of the scholars, both Chinese and Western, who have studied the narrative of this Ming era (1368-1644) novel, have considered it to be an epic of myth and fantasy, heavily laden with allegorical meaning. Most scholars have chosen to interpret the novel by means of an encompassing framework of meaning rooted in the convergence of the teachings of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. I propose to look at the Journey’s narrative structure as a heroic adventure or monomyth of the kind proposed by Joseph Campbell, following the insights of Carl Jung on the nature of the collective unconscious. To analyze the component parts of the quest story that forms the bulk of the novel‘s narrative, I shall turn to Vladimir Propp‘s categorization of the functioning of elements of plot and character in his morphology of folktales. I shall also argue that the Journey is not an allegory that serves the beliefs and practices of a number of religions and philosophies, but a specifically Buddhist allegory. The Journey is seen as intentionally composed of symbols, images, and codes that function to project a heroic adventure with a complex pattern of meaning, primarily representing the eternal human struggle for identity and a fully realized existence, that are Buddhist in nature.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-03T11:52:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-09-25Bitstream added on 2015-03-03T12:07:09Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000809585.pdf: 421227 bytes, checksum: 94ac2b41022c3cd995d477425914014d (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / A semiótica greimasiana iniciou seu percurso teórico com a proposição de uma semântica gerativa, geral e discursiva. Logo desenvolveu a sua base inicial: o percurso gerativo de sentido. No âmbito do percurso, o nível narrativo se tornou o mais desenvolvido, até a década de 1980, momento em que os estudos se voltaram para o desenvolvimento da semiótica das paixões e do nível discursivo. Neste trabalho, empreendemos um estudo desse desenvolvimento que se inicia com as influências estruturais e formalistas, passa pela consolidação do modelo de aplicação da semiótica narrativa e, então, culmina com as mudanças que fazem com que a semiótica dos anos 1980 não seja mais a mesma da década de 1960. Buscamos na Historiografia Linguística a metodologia para nos respaldar nesse percurso que foi traçado em três etapas: a primeira, sobre as origens da semiótica narrativa, com a retomada dos estudos de V. Propp e de Lévi-Strauss; a segunda etapa, sobre a cronologia das obras greimasianas partindo da Sémantique structurale (1966) até Du Sens II (1983); e a terceira etapa, na qual buscamos compreender os impasses da teoria em pelo menos três questões levantadas e discutidas pelo filósofo P. Ricoeur: (1) sobre a lógica das conversões entre os níveis profundo e superficial, (2) a questão da temporalidade e (3) sobre a semiótica ser uma teoria interpretativa, ou seja, não somente explicativa, mas também compreensiva. Dessa forma, compreendemos que Greimas partiu dos estudos narratológicos de Propp e dos estudos do mito de Lévi-Strauss e definiu os elementos que tornaram a semiótica narrativa um paradigma científico. Esse paradigma, no entanto, não permanece restrito às suas características iniciais. E é a partir das questões ricoeurianas que correspondem a alguns dos impasses que o paradigma apresentou que pudemos compreender seu percurso de desenvolvimento e mudança / Generative Greimassian semiotics began its theoretical path with the proposal of a generative, general and discursive semantics. Its pillar was soon developed: the generative trajectory of meaning. With its complexification, the narrative level became the most developed, until the 1980s, when the focus of study shifted to the development of the Semiotics of passions and of the discursive level, and beyond the trajectory. We carried out a study of this path of development, which begins with the structural and formalist influences, taking in the consolidation of the model of application of narrative semiotics, and culminating with the changes that have led to Semiotics of the 1980s being different from what it was in the 1960s. We adopted the Linguistic Historiography and methodology as bases of this path, outlined in three stages: the first one, on the origins of narrative semiotics, with the return to the studies of V. Propp and Lévi-Strauss; the second stage about the chronology of the Greimassian works, starting with Sémantique structurale (1966) until Du Sens II (1983); and the third stage, in which we sought to understand the impasses of the theory in at least three questions raised and discussed by the philosopher P. Ricoeur: (1) the logic of the conversions among the deep and the surface levels; (2) the “temporalization” and (3) Semiotics as an interpretive theory, i.e. not merely explanatory, but also comprehensive. Thus, we understand that Greimas started from Propp’s narratological studies and the studies on the myth, by Lévi-Strauss, defining the elements that made the narrative semiotics one scientific paradigm. This paradigm, however, does not remain restrict to its initial characteristics. Therefore, from the ricoeurian questions, which correspond to some impasses showed by the paradigm, we could understand its path of development and change / FAPESP: 12/21220-6