Many works of literature are devoted to giving readers explicit or implicit instructions or teachings about a philosophy, an ideology, a craft, a lifestyle, or other ends. These works are supposed to entertain and teach and, accordingly, they are labeled as didactic literature. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (DVC) is a highly controversial novel that has been largely debated and discussed because of its content and intended message. In this novel, Brown intentionally presents an alternative understanding to Christianity which is received mostly as heretic and blasphemous. In many occasions, Brown avers that the visions he gave in his DVC are the findings of his research on Christian doctrines and institutions. Thus, they are accurate facts though they are written in a piece of fiction. He also emphasizes that he aims to share newly acquired knowledge with his audience through the pages of his work. This paper is an attempt to study Brown’s DVC as a didactic novel. It ultimately aims to show how Brown manipulated the didactic theory of sugar-coated pill in his DVC to teach Christians about the theology and history of their religion. Adopting a descriptive-analytic method, the study first tackles Brown’s Christian ideology. Then, it analyzes his DVC showing how he used different devices and techniques of didactic novels for the purpose of instructing his readers. The study concludes that DVC is not a mere piece of fiction but a didactic novel that used fiction as a cover to pass historical and theological teachings.
The concept of “Otherness” can be perceived in several European narrative writings. Despite the complications that the definition of the term might imply, most of the works presented have a deliberate emphasis on presenting the deleterious chauvinisms concerning the Orient. In Orientalist literature, one can notice the insistence on keeping the potentials and differences between the East and the West. The reader is presented with a variety of events that serve to indicate the Western superiority over the East in all aspects. In this conception, the social, philosophical and cultural structure of the Eastern societies is to be considered inferior to the Western one. Therefore, negation is viewed as the only way of comparison between the two. This study examines T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (SPW) as a typical orientalist text. Moreover, it sheds light on the conflicting powers in the personal identity of Lawrence himself. Through evidences and insights, it argues that though Lawrence contends that he has written a travel narrative in SPW, the novel is an autobiography of an Orientalist imperial agent, a White Man who continues the tradition of reductionism and stereotyping and technically rests on Orientalist strategies.
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