The Reception Process Of The Story Of The Stone In The View Of Reception Aesthetics

Reception aesthetics deems that a literary work is full of "blanks" and every reader musthave a certain horizon of expectations before he reads it. During the reading process, everyreader has his own interpretation of the source text and fills in the "blanks". It is also thefusion process of different horizon of expectations. Reception aesthetics attaches importanceto readers while former literary criticism values texts.The Story of the Stone is the representative translation work of David Hawkes. Thisthesis analyzes its reception process and probes into three aspects: the translator, the sinologyresearchers and the common readers. His version gains the general recognition of thesinology researchers and universal approval of common readers. Although Hawkes’translation is controversial for a long time, it turns out to be a successful version which isinfluential among target language readers.The thesis analyzes the reception process of The Story of the Stone in the view ofreception aesthetics. Firstly, the thesis studies the Hawkes’ reception process of the sourcetext, which is the precondition of the reception process of the target language readers.Hawkes’ reception processes of selecting and interpreting the source text are the basic steps.The process of recreating the source text can be seen as the continuation and elevation of theprevious two processes and gives a new life to the original work.Secondly, the thesis probes into the reception process of sinology researchers. The earlyprocess confronted certain obstacles. Due to the flaws of early versions by other translators,Hawkes’ version received little attention of sinology researchers. With the strengthening ofcultural exchange and efforts of the translators and China Redology researchers, the versionreceives general agreement of sinology researchers.Finally, the thesis discusses the reception process of common readers. They lacksinology researchers’ professional knowledge and the researching motivation, so theirreception process demands more contribution of the translators and researchers. Hawkesmade great contributions to enhance the readability of the translation and researchers’ attention on the translation caused a wider range of social concerns, which led to the fusion ofexpectation between common readers and translator’s version. The Story of the Stone obtainsuniversal approval of common readers.