威尼斯商人中的幽默叙事手法
关键词 幽默 优越论 乖讹论 人物角色 语言特色
毕业论文外文摘要
Title The humorous narrative In the Merchant of Venice
Abstract
The merchant of Venice, created about in 1596-1597, is one of the most important works of Shakespeare. The comedy work praised, in an ironic humor way, the justice, friendship and love from the laughter. And of course, as a great irony comedy, the conflict plots combined with laugh and tears vividly reflected capitalism, the contradiction between commercial bourgeoisies and the usurers in the early period of Western capitalism. Through the romantic exaggeration art, Shakespeare vividly depicted the sarcastic humor effect of the play. This paper tries to explore how Shakespeare created comedy and produce humorous effect through the study of "the Merchant of Venice", and further makes reference to Shakespeare's writing style in humorous comedy.
Keywords Humor Superiority Theory Incongruity Theory Social Background Character Behavior Language Features
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature Review 2
2.1 Previous Studies on the Merchant of Venice 2
2.2 Previous Studies on Humor 3
3. Humor Language in the Merchant of Venice 4
3.1 The language humor in the construction of the characters 5
3.2 Language humor produced by Shakespeare Writing skill 5
3.2.1. Exaggeration and Humor5
3.2.2. Parallelism and Humor.6
3.2.3. The Metaphor and humor.6
3.2.4. Contract and humor . 6
4. Humor and Superiority theory in the Merchant of Venice . 7
5. Humor and the Incongruity theory 7
6.Conclusion 8
Acknowledgements 10
Reference 11
1. Introduction
Humor, according to its manifestation, can be pided into: language humor, behavior humor (e.g., mime, etc.), language humor and behavior humor (such as crosstalk drama, comedy, jokes, etc.) and so on. And the most common form one is language humor, and it has unique express characteristics in different language and culture. Language humor refers to using language tools to construct and express humor, and its coverage is very wide, including jokes, sarcasm, satire, wit, irony. In the Merchant of Venice, we will focus its language expression means to study the humor effect produced in this comedy.
There are three famous theories about humor, which tell us the causes and the principles of the humor. And the three classic theories about humor: superiority theory, Incongruity theory and release theory are from the study of philosophy, psychology and the perspective of psychoanalysis respectively. We hope we can make full use of these theories and conclude why the Merchant of Venice is a comedy and the effect principles behind the work, so this paper can help the readers understand the humor writing skills better and gives them some spirits in creating comedy works.
The superiority of humor regards the humor as a kind of civilized form of attack. The base view is: the people smiling are in a position of advantage, and the people laughed despised. Its main respective people are Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hegel, Darwin, etc. Plato's first proposed the "Schadenfreude theory" that funny character was a kind of character who lacked of self-knowledge, so the laugh caused by him contain both the pleasant sensation and the grief of schadenfreude, that is a laugh with critical ridicule or sneer. The reason why this laugh can give a sense of satisfaction is that the laugh can make you superior through the criticism of others. Humor is spite toward incompetent performance. In the Merchant of Venice, Shylock is regarded as a person in a position of disadvantage and incompetent, readers get lots of laugh from his fight against Antonio. We hate his greedy, stingy, ugly image, so we would laugh out of the malice to him. We will discuss the humor effect caused by superiority in the following chapter.