To The Depth Of Primitive National Spirit

This paper gives a narrative semiotic interpretation to Chinese Creation Myth—Pangu and try to find out the ideology implied in the mythical text. The generation of universe and human are two of the permanent themes of cultural and scientific studies. And Creation myth, as one of the indispensable parts of myth system, has always been attracting wide attention because of its mysterious features. Different countries, regions and nations throughout the world all contain their own creation myth to explain the origin of the world and their nation. The description and meditation of the creation of the world in Myths implies the origin of culture, of ancient people's world view, and the world view passed down implicitly. The narrative semiotics introduced by A·J·Greimas aims in constructing a multi-layered meaning interpretation method by setting up a transforming rules. This method can be used to find out the deep values and ideas of the text.There are 5 chapters in all in this thesis, their organization is as follows:In the first chapter, the reason why to study creation myth was studied; Myth is the thinking of primitive human beings itself. The creation myth was their viewpoint on the world. The interpretation of Myth will help to get a better understanding of the origin of national spirit and in turn better understanding of ourselves. Also in this chapter, the feasibility and advantages of interpret creation myth with narrative semiotics.The second chapter is literature review in which the studies have been done on myth and the Chinese Creation Myth Pangu is summarized in a panorama way. This part shows that though there are many researches, interpretations in particular on myth, but few has been done on the linguistic perspective of Chinese Myth. This is another reason for doing this study.The theory and analyzing method is introduced in the third chapter. First, Greimas simplified Propp's seven'sphere of action'or roles elaborated from a study of Russian folk-tales in to six actant and set up a narrative schema. He also used semiotic square to reveal the deep structure of a text, semiotic square is the common operator for every text, be it scientific, sociological, or artistic, etc. The main task of text analysis is to find the right and put them in to semiotic square. And an interpretation of the narrative schema and semiotic square will reveal the values and ideas of the text.In the fourth chapter, a thorough narrative semiotic interpretation was given to the Myth Pangu. Through a surface to deep interpretation of the myth we can see first, the words tend to be simple with lots of repetition because of the limited information primitive people directly observed and experienced back then. Second, this Myth is weak in storiness, or narrativity which is reflected on the narrative level, the whole story used a single narrative schema—the disjunctive one with the object-value transferred from sender to receiver. The object-value—existence or being keeps the same too in every narrative schema. Finally by analyzing the semiotic square, the thesis picked out two models in the Myth—chaos and order, human and universe, they are the models that guided primitive people in observe and conceive the world, also they repeatedly appeared models appeared later in every aspects of life. Myth, with long-lasting national spirited implies in it, has great influence on the whole nation all over the history.The last chapter is a short summarization of the whole thesis, and gives a sight to the prospect of narrative semiotics in discourse analysis. The narrative semiotic method is not only effective in the figuring out narrative structure, but also works well in discussing deep value and ideology of a text.