Since the Chinese translation of The Da Vinci Code was released in China in 2004, the "Dan Brown Craze" has swept across the country. All of Brown's novels have subsequently been translated into ...Chinese and sold millions of copies. No living foreign writer has generated so much media coverage and scholarship in China within such a short period of time; not even Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling. Brown's rendering of dichotomies, such as science and religion, humanity and divinity, good and evil, and liberty and privacy, resonates well with his Chinese readers because they feel that these issues are no longer irrelevant to them. They see an urgent need for a revision, if not an entire redefinition, of their existing beliefs and values. This book examines the plot, characterization, themes, setting, codes, knowledge, institutions, and techniques in his novels, and delivers a careful textual analysis, a selective dissemination of relevant information on different subjects, and a perceptive comparison between Brown and other Chinese and Western writers. As such, it shows how his thrillers have been appreciated and studied in China, and what kinds of discoveries, challenges, controversies, and insights have surfaced in the Chinese appreciation of Brown's novels. Furthermore, the book explores why the "Dan Brown Craze" has lasted this long and exerted a broad and far-reaching impact upon the reading, writing, studying, translating, publishing, and marketing of fiction in China.
As millions of readers worldwide react to Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code, so do many scholars. The novel has become a proxy debate for two compelling scholarly and social issues of our time: the ...feminist/post-feminist challenge to patriarchal authority; and the textual construction of meaning and value. Presenting the feminine as both dominant and sacred brings attention to every text which argues for dominance or divinity. Traditional scholars are being challenged to defend their discipline.
Is The Da Vinci Code True?1 Propp, William H C
Journal of religion and popular culture,
04/2013, Letnik:
25, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The guild of historical novelists, if there is such a thing, might debate his professional ethics; I am not sure, however, that they differ much from Shakespeare's or Alexandre Dumas's. ...the plot ...draws much of its "truthiness" from the perennial suspicion of Roman Catholics among Protestant, English-speaking Europeans and Americans. According to Baigent and colleagues, the Orthodox and later Catholic Churches have engaged in a 2,000-year cover-up of the fact that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he and his wife Mary Magdalene absconded from Judea and in the course of time bequeathed their hidden heritage to the Merovingian kings of France, the Knights Templar, assorted authors of medieval romance, the Freemasons, and so on-basically, everyone was in on it, but no one knew about it. ...it is not surprising that as young men surpass their mothers in strength and status, they feel a certain ambivalent guilt rooted in the early mother-son relationship.14 And it is not surprising that young women, no longer the equals of their male peers in size, social prestige, and power, imagine that once things were different. ...the book appears aimed more at teenage than adult readers, perhaps like the old Encyclopedia Brown detective series by the late Donald J. Sobol. 4.
This book is the most authoritative, arguably the definitive appraisal of some of the claims that are directly made or are imbedded in the incredibly successful work of popular fiction by Dan Brown, ...The Da Vinci Code; it is not an essentially partisan Christian rebuttal of The Da Vinci Code (as are virtually all the books currently available) but a truly historical assessment by a noted early Christian scholar. Brown's novel is unusual in that the author makes the statement up front that the historical information in the book is all factually accurate, and many readers presumably have taken the author at his word. Some of these "facts" are surprising and provocative, such as that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that this union produced an offspring whose holy lineage has been preserved down to today, that Emperor Constantine suppressed secret Gospels that attest to these stories, etc. Ehrman discusses the historical truth behind these claims from a scholar's perspective. His focus is on the historical Jesus, the historical Mary, the development of the early Christian church, the writings of the early Christian Gospels, and the role played by Constantine in the formation of what has come down to us as the beliefs and scriptures of the Christian religion. Ehrman writes: "I should stress that I am not objecting to Dan Brown's inventing claims about early Christian documents as part of his fictional narrative; the problem is that he indicates that his accounting of early Christian documents is historically accurate, and readers who don't know the history of early Christianity will naturally take him at his word. But there is more fiction than fact, not just in the plot of The Da Vinci Code, but also in its discussion of the early documentary record about Jesus."
The antithetical relation between pleasure and power in twentieth-century detective texts draws from the contention that the pleasure of the text derives from the disruption of authority and ...established forms of power. Two narratives that are representative of this oppositional relationship are Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. The Day of the Jackal, reflects a split within power structures, and defies the power of the detective/investigator representing social surveillance and state authority. Moreover, the death of the Jackal does not indicate the narrative intention of establishing social/penal expectations. In Angels and Demons, pleasure circulates with the possibility of narrative resistance to established power and social formations. To this end, the ideological conflicts reflected in the narrative opens up the problematic of authority and power.
Mexal discusses the debate over The Da Vinci Code, a novel, by Dan Brown. The debate over The Da Vinci Code has concerned not only literary quality and Christianity but also the production of history ...itself, that debate has revealed a deep and persistent alienation among vast swaths of the public. The desire for the comfort and security of a historical master narrative--and not a thousand wisps of disconnected information masquerading as small, fragmented histories--is perhaps rooted in a certain postmodern melancholy.
In this article the authors discuss the problems and prospects of engaging popular fiction in the academy, particularly in religious studies. Utilizing Dan Brown as the example par excellence, the ...authors argue that while Brown's novels, particularly The Lost Symbol, appeal to a culture of consumption, they nonetheless afford scholars a valuable opportunity to dialogue with audiences unfamiliar with the academic study of religion. When approached responsibly with the distinctive theories and methods of the discipline, popular fiction has the potential to serve as a productive pedagogical tool to promote religious studies as an intellectually stimulating and culturally relevant enterprise. Rather than ignore or inveigh against popular fiction because of its tendency toward misinformation, sensationalism, and superficiality, scholars of religion should harness the public enthusiasm that these works engender and redirect it toward constructive scholarly ends.
Roman Catholicism is the only church besides the Orthodox that provides full historical continuity from the beginnings of Christianity and that also, not coincidentally, possesses the most ...elaborately developed mechanisms for keeping its dogma consistent over the centuries. Other reasons for this ambiguous valorization may be found in the literary source of this fare, the Protestant anticlerical Gothic novels of the eighteenth century that initiated this enduring and endlessly reinvented genre into international popular culture. Here, Nelson explores Matthew Lewis's The Monk, belongs to the middle period of the original Gothic--with Horace Walpole and his Castle of Otranto marking the genre's beginning, followed by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, most notably The Mysteries of Udolpho. Like The Da Vinci Code two centuries later, The Monk created an international sensation and made its author an overnight celebrity. Like Brown, "Monk" Lewis, as he came to be known, was accused of copying other sources; by its fourth edition, The Monk had also been expurgated of some of its more scandalous sexual material.
Hoppenstand relates an event when a noted author, who delivered a lecture about his life as writer in Michigan State University, made a derogatory remark about Dan Brown's thriller The Da Vinci Code. ...He comments that the author's revelation entails that he was jealous of The Da Vinci Code's monumental commercial success; jealous that Dan Brown reaches an astonishingly wide readership; jealous that The Da Vinci Code has had more booklength studies written about it than has any other work of fiction published since World War II; and jealous that it has had more media attention on television and in newspapers than has any novel ever published.
Summer of Adaptations Johnson, David T.
Literature film quarterly,
07/2006, Letnik:
34, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Not only did a sizeable pre-existing audience wait anxiously for the film-it's been almost impossible to travel by plane the past few years without seeing a copy of Dan Brown's book tucked under ...someone's arm-but Sony Pictures and Imagine Entertainment, dreading any early tepid internet reception, eschewed the test screening process in favor of launching the film's first public screening at the Cannes Film Festival.
