This paper examines the intertwining of realism and narrative history in Dan Brown's bestselling novel, "The Da Vinci Code." It discusses the cultural implications of the novel's representation of history and how it blurs the lines between fact and fiction, influencing public perception and discourse. By analyzing the reactions to the novel, including those from the Catholic Church and various critics, it highlights the vibrant debate surrounding historical representation in popular media and the emergent virtual public sphere where such discussions thrive.

2006

MA Thesis 1, 2007

The MA paper focuses on the problem of the genre of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. In the paper various concepts of the literary genre, especially the novel, in modern literary theory are presented and reviewed. All theories of the novel distinguish the following main genre constituents: plot, setting, character, thematic range, the narrator and point of view, intertextuality, and others. The analysis reveals that there are four subplots, apart from the main plot line; at some crucial moments, or in most dramatic scenes, the plotlines crisscross or merge. Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu are the protagonists of the novel; the Teacher-Teabing and Silas are the villains; and the minor characters are: Bezu Fache, Bishop Aringarosa, and others. The protagonists and the villains are psychological characters. The novel deals with a number of problems: love and family – the main problem is Christ’s marriage of Mary Magdalene and their posterity; the problem has been supposedly hidden in Leonardo da Vinci’s works, especially the fresco “The Last Supper”; the theme of art, the conflict between science and religion, etc. The research discovers that there is a fusion of several generic forms in The Da Vinci Code. It also shows that the novel can be placed in traditional and most recent literary culture.

Myth can often be seen to supply a response to the yearning of the world, and the legend of the Holy Grail is no exception. The latest version of the quest, Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, reveals the two sides of the coin that make a mythic symbol mysterious, unattainable, and yet so tantalisingly real. On the one hand, the goal must inspire us to reach beyond the everyday world toward a greater reality, where mystical qualities and moral certitude rest alongside abundance and healing. On the other, this very ‘sacred space’ cannot actually be realised in material terms, as the very nature of the mythic realm impels the goal to be continuously shifted beyond the grasp of we ordinary mortals. Sadly for readers whose interest may have been piqued by the plot of Brown’s telling of the age-old romance, this quest stumbles over itself in an attempt to over-subscribe to its facet as material fact, and is thereby dissolved of any real power in its other aspect, that of inspiration. For Brown’s premise, tying as it does the idea of the Grail to the specific historic moment of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus Christ, ultimately empties the quest of any real hope at all. Unless, that is, we are actually willing to believe not only that they shared wedlock and a child, but that their descendents may offer some kind of political challenge to an oppressively patriarchal religious regime on our behalf.

Public History Weekly, 2015

The reinterpretation of religious ideas and beliefs through literary works has become an established literary genre. While some of these works seek to challenge religious authority on historical grounds, others question the relevance of traditional religious beliefs in providing solutions to our existential problems. Two works in this genre, the well-known thriller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and the critically acclaimed book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago, exemplify these diverse tendencies in employing fiction to probe religion. In the former, the authenticity of religious facts is questioned while the latter utilizes fiction to show the inadequacy of religious beliefs in answering our deepest problems. This paper contends that the confrontation with religious dogma in these two works is an expression of intellectual movements and ideologies, The Da Vinci Code relying on New Age ideology while The Gospel According to ...

2007

Jesus of Nazareth is currently headline news, thanks at least in part to Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, and recent media attention regarding the so-called "Lost Tomb of Jesus." Often these attention-grabbing news stories are based on misconceptions-bad ideas-that can confuse those seeking to learn about the past. This heightened interest in these topics has generated a marvelous opportunity to talk about things that matter most, and therefore it is all good news. The purpose of this essay is to review several bad ideasmisconceptions-about issues that are currently being debated in and out of the Church regarding these topics. We will conclude on a positive note by highlighting some of the good news about the "Good News." Bad Idea Number 1. We can learn something about Jesus Christ and early Christianity from The Da Vinci Code. A surprising number of people claim they have learned something about Jesus Christ, the New Testament, and the history of the early Christian church through this novel. The Da Vinci Code has sold more than sixty million copies; therefore, the impact on many people's perception on these topics is great. However, we need to remember several facts about the book. First, The Da Vinci Code is a novel. Second, the author of The Da Vinci Code has no academic training that would suggest he is an expert on the New Testament and early Christianity.

One of the more controversial films of 2006 was the highly anticipated The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Most criticism focused on the historical and religious problems in both the novel and subsequent film, leading some to claim that the storyline represented a type of radical feminism in its presumed secret marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that led to “the greatest cover-up in history,” and ultimately the suppression of "the divine feminine" in the Catholic Church. Using insights derived from feminist theology and myth, this study examines this claim through a close analysis of both novel and film, focusing both on the mythic narrative and individual characters. It concludes that The Da Vinci Code does not present a feminist mythic narrative, but instead presents another version of the heroic quest myth that functions to reaffirm masculine power, under the guise of a faux feminism. Ultimately both novel and film fail to develop a truly transformative rhetoric but instead reinforce traditional beliefs about gender in the culture

2006

Western Journal of Communication, 2008

AI

2006

Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code has given forty million people a distorted version of Christian history. Millions more have been influenced by Ron Howard’s motion picture adaptation of this book, released in May, 2006. Even before the film came out, my students were asking questions about the concepts found in the book. Some people have dismissed concerns about its theological and historical errors by saying, “It’s just a work of fiction.” However, popular perceptions of the past are heavily influenced by the images the public has seen in “historical” motion pictures and dramatic television productions, as well as the mental images generated by reading popular historical novels. Furthermore, Dan Brown claims that The Da Vinci Code is more than just a work of fiction. Not only do the dialogues in the book imply that Brown has superimposed a made-up story on a framework of essential truth, but the author baldly asserts, “All descriptions of . . . documents in this novel are accurat...

Barisal University Journal, 2017

In The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown merges the theory of 'the sacred feminine' and the Holy Grail to create a hybrid narrative against the homogenized version approved by the Roman Catholic Church. As stratagems for his narrative, he reinterprets a stream of core historical symbols and images. This gives the readers a scope to look at history in a new light. The aim of this paper is not to prove that the author's endeavor is to help unveil a noble truth; on the contrary, with the help of various criticisms put forth by Lyotard, Barthes, and Foucault, it argues that Brown has taken advantage of controversies concerning these touching phenomena to celebrate pluralistic views. The paper reasons that instead of feeling veneration for grand canonical texts, Brown subverts history and revels in creating an extension to the known areas of knowledge to resist the authoritative power of orthodoxical discourse.

Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 2021

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.

Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code(2003) –henceforth DVC-has acquired a matchless reputation and it has been privileged with incomparable studies which have reached the utmost scope of controversy since it was supposed to rock the foundations of Christianity because of Jesus Christ's marriage and to none other Mary Magdalene (1) , the uprightness of the Holy Bible, and the deity of Jesus, which, the three topics, lie behind Jesus Christ's and Mary Magdalene's marriage. Such a controversy has led the researcher to investigate a number of expert historians' and documentary studies to shed light on the backbone of the present study: Did Brown break or repair taboos in his novel? Or, let us ask, what is his real purpose as regards the above three tabooed topics? The researcher has intended to analyze a number of extracts taken from the novel focusing on those related to the deity/humanity of Jesus and His alleged marriage to Magdalene. The analysis will be based upon the information, which is, as Brown claims, taken from pieces of "fact-based historical and scientific evidence ". These pieces are related to the sexuality of Christ and the assertions of His marriage to Magdalene. Thus, the study aims at answering the question whether Brown broke or repaired the three tabooed topics mentioned above. To answer these questions, the researcher has analyzed his, Brown's, pieces of evidence which he claims are "accurate, true and well-researched" for they are completely taken from actual documents and sources. The analysis will be linguistic-religious. It aims to ascertain whether this evidence is accurate or erroneous, and subsequently, to judge whether Brown had broken or repaired the taboos in his novel.

2007

This paper gives an evangelical critique of the best selling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The Portrayal of Truth in "The DaVinci Code": A Pragmastylistic Analysis, 2020

The present study aims at conducting a pragmastylistic analysis of the portrayal of truth in The DaVinci Code. In other words, the current study attempts to identify the pragmatic strategies utilized in depicting the notion of truth in the data under perusal and detect the prevailing ones so as to pinpoint the style that distinguishes the writer. Additionally, the study sheds light on the role of interaction between pragmatics and stylistics as two linguistic approaches that influence the interpretation of literary texts. In this regard, it is proposed that pragmatics and stylistics have much in common.

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