The European Cultural Influence in the Western Literary for the Reader: The Study of the Literary Reception
Yogyakarta State University
ABSTRACT
The stories about the grandeur of the European culture has been widely presented in the literature. This article aims to present the European cultural trendsetter constructed as the western world through the literature. The subject of this article is the western literary works of Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, published in America by Anchor Books in 2003. Data collection on the European history classified and analysed by reading repeatedly with the descriptive qualitative techniques. In this novel, Paris, Rome and London are constructed as cities that have a sense and taste of high art with a long European history. The results of this article showed that the reader is familiar with the history of European culture, especially the culture of the church in Europe with all its dynamics can bring out to the more open public, not just based on stereotypes in the general view of Europe. With the better understanding, the reader is expected to be more tolerant of the European culture, in this case the culture of the church, which is also against the more extreme sort of paganism or atheism. Thus, the reading of this kind is becoming more open, both in the outlook and in the attitude.
KEYWORDS
European culture, cultural construction, western literature