Please take a moment to complete this survey below
Library's collection Library's IT development CancelRudyard Kipling who is known for his skillful ability of writing most successfully for children and also for his great British Nationalism wrote a simple novel, Captains Courageous which conveys the America?s atmosphere and characters. Yet, I see Captains Courageous is not simply a children classic as it has significant underlying meanings projected in the two settings of the novel, the sea and the land. Adhering to this fact, my analysis upon this novel focuses in finding out the construction of meanings of the sea and the meanings of the land as I see them portrayed throughout the story. In doing so, I apply the use of semiotics, the study of signs, in which I perceive these two settings, the sea and the land, as signs that possess certain signified meanings in each of them. Besides the application of semiotics in my analysis, I will also apply other supporting theories such as certain theories of sociolinguistics and Alfred Adler?s theory of superiority complex. These theories are very helpful for me in revealing and proving analytically that the construction of the meanings of the sea and the meanings of the land displayed in binary oppositions are: the sea/the land being unsophisticated/sophisticated, genuine/pretentious, intimate/distant, and broad minded/narrow-minded. The binary oppositions performed in this analysis, exposing the contrast between its two constituents, show that the emphasis is put
on the meanings of the sea rather than those of the land. Still, although the qualities of the sea seemingly towers above the qualities of the land, it is worth observing that actually the emphasis is put more on the meanings of the land than
those of the sea.