| dc.description.abstract | In 1943, the English version of The Little Prince – originally written in French by Saint-Exupéry, a French pilot-writer, during World War II – was published in New York in the United States. About one month later, the French version was subsequently published at the same place. The publication of this bestseller for Saint, even for French literature, was closely related to the atmosphere and circumstances of war at that time.
In nowadays, the flames of War have been eliminated, but the appeal of The Little Prince has still existed. The ways of reading is changing constantly in the forms of musical plays, DVD, merchandise as well as websites. Most people regard this book as an adult fairy tale that reflects interior innocence in them; however, such “reflection” seems to become the only interpretation of this literature. His context of the War is disregarded and simplified by readers. Such cliché like interpretation of The Little Prince seems to makes it embarrassed in the advanced research of literature. Nevertheless, how does a “simple” fairy tale with a hackneyed interpretation can become popular and well-known for more than half century? Our motivation and purpose in this research are finding another way to reread The Little Prince and interpret his merchandising phenomenal. That is a sort of reading pleasure, in addition to the pleasure from diverse modes of the literature. Based on analyses of the phenomenal in the society at the time of War through the perspective of play-element by Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), a historian as well as a philosopher, we discovered not only a new direction to read the literature and his merchandising phenomenal, but also a perspective that is closely relative to the War.
In the first chapter of this study, we explained the characteristics of the “play”. In addition, we also treated some critics of Huizinga about the society in the World War II and the customs in the traditional age. The characteristics of the “play”, which is a key to access to the world of The Little Prince, are mainly deduced from Homo Ludens (1938) written by Huizinga and Les jeux et les hommes (1958) written by his successor, Roger Caillois (1913-1978). In the second chapter, we explored different relations and types of the play – play without ambiance, stiff play, and harmonious play in the literature. In the third chapter, because of the ambiguous limit among the author, the characters and the readers, our study field about the play-element was extended from the text to the reception of readers. This section includes the rules of play and the dedication, the life of the author, the impacts of the truth of Saint’s death and the diversity of merchandise. We collected in France resources regarding the life of Saint-Exupéry during the Second World War because of their shortage in Taiwan. And the research about the merchandise covers the merchandise and the reports on Internet.
The rich play-element that discussed in this thesis exists in the society today too. However, for The Little Prince and its author, we understood a sense close to that time —we have concluded in the thesis — what we realized is maybe the sight for the disappearance of some harmonious relations of civilization in Saint-Exupéry’s era. | en_US |