Abstract

Literary texts are used by theorists to examine and explore the social beliefs and assumptions embedded in societies. The notion of the representative nature of literary texts provides interesting insights into the milieu and culture of the societies from which they emerge. This article examines the representation of values and assumptions in the literary texts of two distinctly diverse societies: Greece and India. The textual analysis of the Greek play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and “The Mother Who Married Her Own Son,” an Indian folktale by A. K. Ramanujan, focuses on the representation of faith in divine intervention, orientation to human relationship in different cultures related to the concept of destiny, and the importance of structures as values in the texts. These representations are analyzed using Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck’s theory of value orientation and Geert Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions. The article attempts to map these cultural communication theories to the literary representations in the texts and deduces inferences on the validity of cultural representations. The notions of being and becoming as human activity and the idea of uncertainty avoidance as a societal norm are explored in the representations within the literary texts.