Prospectus for Final Project

In my final project, I am going to compare the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lu Xun. Self-consciousness is one of the most apparent patterns in Emerson’s works. He expresses his view towards humans, exploring the inner core of Man Thinking. On the other hand, Lu Xun is one of the most famous modern Chinese writers, known by acute critics and irony towards modern Chinese society. He suggested that the lack of self-consciousness of Chinese civilians was so severe that it led to the lack of ethnic confidence. By comparing these works, I am going to identify the importance of self-consciousness in these works. I will start by introducing Emerson’s transcendentalism and interpretation of human mind. Then I will state how resentful Lu Xun was towards the mentally “ill” Chinese and and then analyze his reason.. It should be made clear that although there is a link between Emerson and Lu Xun, the relationship between their ideologies is one after the other but not a parallelism. The link can also be interpreted as presence vs. absence, which means what is the importance of the presence of self-consciousness and what danger emerges when it is absent. These analyses serve as a mean to interpret Man Thinking. In this way, the theme will move from the individual to the collective, that is, the role of self-consciousness in the ethnic community.