An Interpretation Of Individualism And Collectivism In Journey To The West And The Lord Of The Rings

Since Hofstede’s original study in cross-cultural field in the year of1980, a lot of researchers have focused their attention on individualism and collectivism value dimension. This value dimension therefore became a hot topic and showed great influence in the field of cross-cultural study around the world. Kagitcibasi in1990even pointed out that the ten years in the1980’s belong to the study of individualism and collectivism. In the subsequent research, many scholars follow Hofstede’s way and consider individualism and collectivism as a bipolar dimension, with individualism on one hand and collectivism on the other. While other scholars turn to other directions and reconsider the concept of individualism and collectivism from different aspects. After30years study, the American scholar Triandis found that individualism and collectivism are not things of a single cultural dimension, but a comprehensive synthesis that consists of many facets. In addition, he also emphasized on the diversities within culture, founding that the tendencies toward individualism and collectivism exist not only between different cultures, but also within each culture, society and individual.Culture and literature enjoy a close relationship. By reading literature from different countries, we can easily find the cultural differences behind them. The two novels Journey to the West and The Lord of the Rings are magnum opus, they occupy an important position in world literature. Journey to the West is from China, the dominate element is collectivism in its culture. The Lord of the Rings is from Great Britain,the thoughts and social behaviors of British people all have the characteristics of individualism. Although the two novels were created in different periods of time, they share a lot of similarities, such as the theme, the plot, the ending etc. Some readers even hold a view that The Lord of the Rings is the western Journey to the West. In the previous studies, many scholars have made a considerable research on the two works from different perspectives, such as translation, religion, and protagonists etc. However, no academic papers or journals deal with the two novels from the perspective of individualism and collectivism. Therefore, with the guidance of Triandis’ theory, the aim of the author is to investigate individualism in Journey to the West and collectivism in The Lord of the Rings, thus proving the correctness of Triandis’ theory.