Academic literature on the topic 'Australian wit and humor History and criticism'

Charles Lamb (1775–1834), English author, who became famous for his informal, personal essays and literary criticism, is presented here in his vocational role as accounting clerk. Lamb's long years of experience in and out of London's counting-houses permitted him to capture the early nineteenth-century business and accounting life in some of his renowned essays and letters to friends. His unique wit, humor, and warm humanity bring to life one of the most interesting periods in accounting history.

Stand-up is a global phenomenon. It is Australia’s most significant form of advocatorial theatre and a major platform for challenging stigma and prejudice. In the twenty-first century, Australian stand-up is transforming into a more culturally diverse form and extending the spectrum of material addressing human rights. Since the 1980s Australian stand-up routines have moved beyond the old colonial targets of England and America, and Indigenous comics such as Kevin Kopinyeri, Andy Saunders, and Shiralee Hood have gained an established following. Additionally, the turn to Asia is evident not just in trade agreements and the higher education market but also in cultural exchange and in the billing of emerging Asian stand-ups at mainstream events. The major cultural driver for stand-up is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF), Australia’s largest cultural event, now over 30 years old, and an important site for dissecting constructs of democracy and nationhood. As John McCallum has observed, popular humour in post-World War II Australia drew on widespread feelings of “displacement, migration and otherness—resonant topics in a country of transplanted people and a dispossessed indigenous population arguing over a distinct Australian identity” (205–06). This essay considers the traditional comic strategies of first and second generation immigrant stand-ups in Australia and compares them with the new wave of post 9/11 Asian-Australian and Middle-Eastern-Australian stand-ups whose personas and interrogations are shifting the paradigm. Self-identifying Muslim stand-ups challenge myths of dominant Australian identity in ways which many still find confronting. Furthermore, the theories of incongruity, superiority, and psychological release re-rehearsed in traditional humour studies, by figures such as Palmer (1994) and Morreall (2009), are predicated on models of humour which do not always serve live performance, especially stand-up with its relational dependence on audience interaction.Stand-ups who immigrated to Australia as children or whose parents immigrated and struggled against adversity are important symbols both of the Australian comedy industry and of a national self-understanding of migrant resilience and making good. Szubanski and Berger hail from earlier waves of European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Szubanski has written eloquently of her complex Irish-Polish heritage and documented how the “hand-me-down trinkets of family and trauma” and “the culture clash of competing responses to calamity” have been integral to the development of her comic success and the making of her Aussie characters (347). Rachel Berger, the child of Polish holocaust survivors, advertises and connects both identities on her LinkedIn page: “After 23 years as a stand-up comedian, growing up with Jewish guilt and refugee parents, Rachel Berger knows more about survival than any idiot attending tribal council on reality TV.”Anh Do, among Australia’s most famous immigrant stand-ups, identifies as one of the Vietnamese “boat people” and arrived as a toddler in 1976. Do’s tale of his family’s survival against the odds and his creation of a persona which constructs the grateful, happy immigrant clown is the staple of his very successful routine and increasingly problematic. It is a testament to the power of Do’s stand-up that many did not perceive the toll of the loss of his birth country; the grinding poverty; and the pain of his father’s alcoholism, violence, and survivor guilt until the publication of Do’s ironically titled memoir The Happiest Refugee. In fact, the memoir draws on many of the trauma narratives that are still part of his set. One of Do’s most legendary routines is the story of his family’s sea journey to Australia, told here on ABC1’s Talking Heads:There were forty of us on a nine metre fishing boat. On day four of the journey we spot another boat. As the boat gets closer we realise it’s a boatload of Thai pirates. Seven men with knives, machetes and guns get on our boat and they take everything. One of the pirates picks up the smallest child, he lifts up the baby and rips open the baby’s nappy and dollars fall out. And the pirate decides to spare the kid’s life. And that’s a good thing cos that’s my little brother Khoa Do who in 2005 became Young Australian of the Year. And we were saved on the fifth day by a big German merchant ship which took us to a refugee camp in Malaysia and we were there for around three months before Australia says, come to Australia. And we’re very glad that happened. So often we heard Mum and Dad say—what a great country. How good is this place? And the other thing—kids, as you grow up, do as much as you can to give back to this great country and to give back to others less fortunate.Do’s strategy is apparently one of genuflection and gratitude, an adoption of what McCallum refers to as an Australian post-war tradition of the comedy of inadequacy and embarrassment (210–14). Journalists certainly like to bill Do as the happy clown, framing articles about him with headlines like Rosemary Neill’s “Laughing through Adversity.” In fact, Do is direct about his gallows humour and his propensity to darkness: his humour, he says, is a means of countering racism, of “being able to win people over who might have been averse to being friends with an Asian bloke,” but Neill does not linger on this, nor on the revelation that Do felt stigmatised by his refugee origins and terrified and shamed by the crippling poverty of his childhood in Australia. In The Happiest Refugee, Do reveals that, for him, the credibility of his routines with predominantly white Australian audiences lies in the crafting of himself as an “Aussie comedian up there talking about his working-class childhood” (182). This is not the official narrative that is retold even if it is how Do has endeared himself to Australians, and ridding himself of the happy refugee label may yet prove difficult. Suren Jayemanne is well known for his subtle mockery of multiculturalist rhetoric. In his 2016 MICF show, Wu-Tang Clan Name Generator, Jayemanne played on the supposed contradiction of his Sri Lankan-Malaysian heritage against his teenage years in the wealthy suburb of Malvern in Melbourne, his private schooling, and his obsession with hip hop and black American culture. Jayemanne’s strategy is to gently confound his audiences, leading them slowly up a blind alley. He builds up a picture of how to identify Sri Lankan parents, supposedly Sri Lankan qualities such as an exceptional ability at maths, and Sri Lankan employment ambitions which he argues he fulfilled in becoming an accountant. He then undercuts his story by saying he has recently realised that his suburban background, his numerical abilities, his love of black music, and his rejection of accountancy in favour of comedy, in fact prove conclusively that he has, all along, been white. He also confesses that this is a bruising disappointment. Jayemanne exposes the emptiness of the conceits of white, brown, and black and of invented identity markers and plays on his audiences’ preconceptions through an old storyteller’s device, the shaggy dog story. The different constituencies in his audiences enjoy his trick equally, from quite different perspectives.Diana Nguyen, a second generation Vietnamese stand-up, was both traumatised and politicised by Pauline Hanson when she was a teenager. Hanson described Nguyen’s community in Dandenong as “yellow Asian people” (Filmer). Nguyen’s career as a community development worker combating racism relates directly to her activity as a stand-up: migrant stories are integral to Australian history and Nguyen hypothesises that the “Australian psyche of being invaded or taken over” has reignited over the question of Islamic fundamentalism and expresses her concern to Filmer about the Muslim youths under her care.Nguyen’s alarm about the elision of Islamic radicalism with Muslim culture drives an agenda that has led the new generation of self-identified Muslim stand-ups since 9/11. This post 9/11 world is described by Wajahat as gorged with “exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslim [. . . ] and perpetuated by negative discrimination and the marginalisation and exclusion of Muslims from social, political, and civic life in western societies.” In Australia, Aamer Rahman, Muhamed Elleissi, Khaled Khalafalla, and Nazeem Hussain typify this newer, more assertive form of second generation immigrant stand-up—they identify as Muslim (whether religious or not), as brown, and as Australian. They might be said to symbolise a logical response to Ghassan Hage’s famous White Nation (1998), which argues that a white supremacism underlies the mindset of the white elite in Australia. Their positioning is more nuanced than previous generations of stand-up. Nazeem Hussain’s routines mark a transformation in Australian stand-up, as Waleed Aly has argued: “ethnic comedy” has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption, about “minstrel characters” [. . .] but Hussain interrogates his audiences in every direction—and aggravates Muslims too. Hussain’s is the world of post 9/11 Australian Muslims. It’s about more than ethnic stereotyping. It’s about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights, where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded.Understandably, a prevalent theme among the new wave of Muslim comics, and not just in Australia, is the focus on the reading of Muslims as manifestly linked with Islamic State (IS). Jokes about mistaken identity, plane crashes, suicide bombing, and the Koran feature prominently. English-Pakistani Muslim, Shazia Mirza, gained comedy notoriety in the UK in the wake of 9/11 by introducing her routine with the words: “My name’s Shazia Mirza. At least that’s what it says on my pilot’s licence” (Bedell). Stand-ups Negin Farsad, Ahmed Ahmed, and Dean Obeidalla are all also activists challenging prevailing myths about Islam, skin colour and terrorism in America. Egyptian-American Ahmed Ahmed acquired prominence for telling audiences in the infamous Axis of Evil Comedy Tour about how his life had changed much for the worse since 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed was the alias used by one of Osama Bin Laden’s devotees and his life became on ongoing struggle with anti-terrorism officials doing security checks (he was once incarcerated) and with the FBI who were certain that the comedian was among their most wanted terrorists. Similarly, Obeidalla, an Italian-Palestinian-Muslim, notes in his TEDx talk that “If you have a Muslim name, you are probably immune to identity theft.” His narration of a very sudden experience of becoming an object of persecution and of others’ paranoia is symptomatic of a shared understanding of a post 9/11 world among many Muslim comics: “On September 10th 2001 I went to bed as a white American and I woke up an Arab,” says Obeidalla, still dazed from the seismic shift in his life.Hussain and Khalafalla demonstrate a new sophistication and directness in their stand-up, and tackle their majority white audiences head-on. There is no hint of the apologetic or deferential stance performed by Anh Do. Many of the jokes in their routines target controversial or taboo issues, which up until recently were shunned in Australian political debate, or are absent or misrepresented in mainstream media. An Egyptian-Australian born in Saudi Arabia, Khaled Khalafalla arrived on the comedy scene in 2011, was runner-up in RAW, Australia’s most prestigious open mic competition, and in 2013 won the best of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Devious. Khalafalla’s shows focus on racist stereotypes and identity and he uses a range of Middle Eastern and Indian accents to broach IS recruitment, Muslim cousin marriages, and plane crashes. His 2016 MICF show, Jerk, was a confident and abrasive routine exploring relationships, drug use, the extreme racism of Reclaim Australia rallies, controversial visa checks by Border Force’s Operation Fortitude, and Islamophobia. Within the first minute of his routine, he criticises white people in the audience for their woeful refusal to master Middle Eastern names, calling out to the “brown woman” in the audience for support, before lining up a series of jokes about the (mis)pronunciation of his name. Khalafalla derives his power on stage by what Oliver Double calls “uncovering.” Double contends that “one of the most subversive things stand-up can do is to uncover the unmentionable,” subjects which are difficult or impossible to discuss in everyday conversation or the broadcast media (292). For instance, in Jerk Khalafalla discusses the “whole hating halal movement” in Australia as a metaphor for exposing brutal prejudice: Let me break it down for you. Halal is not voodoo. It’s just a blessing that Muslims do for some things, food amongst other things. But, it’s also a magical spell that turns some people into fuckwits when they see it. Sometimes people think it’s a thing that can get stuck to your t-shirt . . . like ‘Oh fuck, I got halal on me’ [Australian accent]. I saw a guy the other day and he was like Fuck halal, it funds terrorism. And I was like, let me show you the true meaning of Islam. I took a lamb chop out of my pocket and threw it in his face. And, he was like Ah, what was that? A lamb chop. Oh, I fucking love lamb chops. And, I say you fool, it’s halal and he burst into flames.In effect, Khalafalla delivers a contemptuous attack on the white members of his audience, but at the same time his joke relies on those same audience members presuming that they are morally and intellectually superior to the individual who is the butt of the joke. Khalafalla’s considerable charm is a help in this tricky send-up. In 2015 the Australian Department of Defence recognised his symbolic power and invited him to join the Afghanistan Task Force to entertain the troops by providing what Doran describes as “home-grown Australian laughs” (7). On stage in Australia, Khalafalla constructs a persona which is an outsider to the dominant majority and challenges the persecution of Muslim communities. Ironically, on the NATO base, Khalafalla’s act was perceived as representing a diverse but united Australia. McCallum has pointed to such contradictions, moments where white Australia has shown itself to be a “culture which at first authenticates emigrant experience and later abrogates it in times of defiant nationalism” (207). Nazeem Hussain, born in Australia to Sri Lankan parents, is even more confrontational. His stand-up is born of his belief that “comedy protects us from the world around us” and is “an evolutionary defence mechanism” (8–9). His ground-breaking comedy career is embedded in his work as an anti-racism activist and asylum seeker supporter and shaped by his second-generation migrant experiences, law studies, community youth work, and early mentorship by American Muslim comic trio Allah Made Me Funny. He is well-known for his pioneering television successes Legally Brown and Salam Café. In his stand-up, Hussain often dwells witheringly on the failings and peculiarities of white people’s attempts to interact with him. Like all his routines, his sell-out show Fear of the Brown Planet, performed with Aamer Rahman from 2004–2008, explored casual, pathologised racism. Hussain deliberately over-uses the term “white people” in his routines as a provocation and deploys a reverse racism against his majority white audiences, knowing that many will be squirming. “White people ask me how can Muslims have fun if they don’t drink? Muslims have fun! Of course we have fun! You’ve seen us on the news.” For Hussain stand-up is “fundamentally an art of protest,” to be used as “a tool by communities and people with ideas that challenge and provoke the status quo with a spirit of counterculture” (Low 1–3). His larger project is to humanise Muslims to white Australians so that “they see us firstly as human beings” (1–3). Hussain’s 2016 MICF show, Hussain in the Membrane, both satirised media hype and hysterical racism and pushed for a better understanding of the complex problems Muslim communities face in Australia. His show also connected issues to older colonial traditions of racism. In a memorable and beautifully crafted tirade, Hussain inveighed against the 2015 Bendigo riots which occurred after local Muslims lodged an application to Bendigo council to build a mosque in the sleepy Victorian town. [YELLING in an exaggerated Australian accent] No we don’t want Muslims! NO we don’t want Muslims—to come invade Bendigo by application to the local council! That is the most bureaucratic invasion of all times. No place in history has been invaded by lodging an application to a local council. Can you see ISIS running around chasing town planners? Of course not, Muslims like to wait 6–8 months to invade! That’s a polite way to invade. What if white people invaded that way? What a better world we’d be living in. If white people invaded Australia that way, we’d be able to celebrate Australia Day on the same day without so much blood on our hands. What if Captain Cook came to Australia and said [in a British accent] Awe we would like to apply to invade this great land and here is our application. [In an Australian accent] Awe sorry, mate, rejected, but we’ll give you Bendigo.As Waleed Aly sees it, the Australian cultural majority is still “unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness.” Hussain exposes “a binary world where there’s whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not” (Aly). Hussain certainly speaks as an insider and goes so far as recognising his coloniser’s guilt in relation to indigenous Australians (Tan). Aly well remembers the hate mail he and Hussain received when they worked on Salam Café: “The message was clear. We were outsiders and should behave as such. We were not real Australians. We should know our place, as supplicants, celebrating the nation’s unblemished virtue.” Khalafalla, Rahman, Elleissi, and Hussain make clear that the new wave of comics identify as Muslim and Australian (which they would argue many in the audiences receive as a provocation). They have zero tolerance of racism, their comedy is intimately connected with their political activism, and they have an unapologetically Australian identity. No longer is it a question of whether the white cultural majority in Australia will anoint them as worthy and acceptable citizens, it is a question of whether the audiences can rise to the moral standards of the stand-ups. The power has been switched. For Hussain laughter is about connection: “that person laughs because they appreciate the point and whether or not they accept what was said was valid isn’t important. What matters is, they’ve understood” (Low 5). ReferencesAhmed, Ahmed. “When It Comes to Laughter, We Are All Alike.” TedXDoha (2010). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxDoha-Ahmed-Ahmed-When-it-Co>.Aly, Waleed. “Comment.” Sydney Morning Herald 24 Sep. 2013."Anh Do". Talking Heads with Peter Thompson. ABC1. 4 Oct. 2010. Radio.Bedell, Geraldine. “Veiled Humour.” The Guardian (2003). 8 Aug. 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/apr/20/comedy.artsfeatures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other>.Berger, Rachel. LinkedIn [Profile page]. 14 June 2016 <http://www.linkedin.com/company/rachel-berger>.Do, Anh. The Happiest Refugee. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010. Doran, Mark. "Service with a Smile: Entertainers Give Troops a Taste of Home.” Air Force 57.21 (2015). 12 June 2016 <http://www.defence.gov.au/Publications/NewsPapers/Raaf/editions/5721/5721.pdf>.Double, Oliver. Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.Filmer, Natalie. "For Dandenong Comedian and Actress Diana Nguyen The Colour Yellow has a Strong Meaning.” The Herald Sun 3 Sep. 2013.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of a White Supremacy in a Multicultural Age. Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998.Hussain, Nazeem. Hussain in the Membrane. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.———. "The Funny Side of 30.” Spectrum. The Age 12 Mar. 2016.Khalafalla, Khaled. Jerk. Melbourne International Comedy Festival, 2016.Low, Lian. "Fear of a Brown Planet: Fight the Power with Laughter.” Peril: Asian Australian Arts and Culture (2011). 12 June 2016 <http://peril.com.au/back-editions/edition10/fear-of-a-brown-planet-fight-the-power-with-laughter>. McCallum, John. "Cringe and Strut: Comedy and National Identity in Post-War Australia.” Because I Tell a Joke or Two: Comedy, Politics and Social Difference. Ed. Stephen Wagg. New York: Routledge, 1998. Morreall, John. Comic Relief. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Neill, Rosemary. "Laughing through Adversity.” The Australian 28 Aug. 2010.Obeidalla, Dean. "Using Stand-Up to Counter Islamophobia.” TedXEast (2012). 16 June 2016 <http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxEast-Dean-Obeidalla-Using-S;TEDxEast>.Palmer, Jerry. Taking Humour Seriously. London: Routledge, 1994. Szubanski, Magda. Reckoning. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2015. Tan, Monica. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Allahu Akbar! Nazeem Hussain's Bogan-Muslim Army.” The Guardian 29 Feb. 2016. "Uncle Sam.” Salam Café (2008). 11 June 2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeQPAJt6caU>.Wajahat, Ali, et al. "Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Center for American Progress (2011). 11 June 2016 <https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2011/08/26/10165/fear-inc>.

Western notions of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), as expressed within copyright law, maintain a potentially fraught relationship with a range of philosophical and theoretical positions on writing and authorship that have developed within contemporary Western thinking. For Roland Barthes, authorship is compromised, de-identified and multiplied by the very nature of writing: ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (142). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari follow a related line of thought in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency’ (11). Similarly, in Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘Writing is that forgetting of the self, that exteriorization, the contrary of the interiorizing memory’ (24). To the extent that these philosophical and theoretical positions emerge within the practices of creative writers as remixes of appropriation, homage and/or pastiche, prima facie they problematize the commercial rights of writers as outlined in law. The case of Kathy Acker often comes up in such discussions. Acker’s 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School, for example, incorporates techniques that have attracted the charge of plagiarism as this term is commonly defined. (Peter Wollen notes this in his aptly named essay ‘Death [and Life] of the Author.’) For texts like Acker’s, the comeback against charges of plagiarism usually involves underscoring the quotient of creativity involved in the re-combination or ‘remixing’ of the parts of the original texts. (Pure repetition would, it would seem, be much harder to defend.) ‘Plagiarism’, so-called, was simply one element of Acker’s writing technique; Robert Lort nuances plagiarism as it applies to Acker as ‘pseudo-plagiarism’. According to Wollen, ‘as she always argued, it wasn’t really plagiarism because she was quite open about what she did.’ As we shall demonstrate in more detail later on, however, there is another and, we suggest, more convincing reason why Acker’s work ‘wasn’t really plagiarism.’ This relates to her conscious interest in calligraphy and to her (perhaps unconscious) appropriation of a certain strand of Chinese philosophy. All the same, within the Western context, the consistent enforcement of copyright law guarantees the rights of authors to control the distribution of their own work and thus its monetised value. The author may be ‘dead’ in writing—just the faintest trace of remixed textuality—but he/she is very much ‘alive’ as in recognised at law. The model of the author as free-standing citizen (as a defined legal entity) that copyright law employs is unlikely to be significantly eroded by the textual practices of authors who tarry artistically in the ‘de-authored territories’ mapped by figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida. Crucially, disputes concerning copyright law and the ethics of remix are resolved, within the Western context, at the intersection of relatively autonomous creative and legal domains. In the West, it is seen that these two domains are related within the one social fabric; each nuances the other (as Acker’s example shows in the simultaneity of her legal/commercial status as an author and her artistic practice as a ‘remixer’ of the original works of other authors). Legal and writing issues co-exist even as they fray each other’s boundaries. And in Western countries there is force to the law’s operations. However, the same cannot be said of the situation with respect to copyright law in China. Chinese artists are traditionally regarded as being aloof from mundane legal and commercial matters, with the consequence that the creative and the legal domains tend to ‘miss each other’ within the fabric of Chinese society. To this extent, the efficacy of the law is muted in China when it comes into contact with circumstances of authorship, writing, originality and creativity. (In saying this though, we do not wish to fall into the trap of cultural essentialism: in this article, ‘China’ and ‘The West’ are placeholders for variant cultural tendencies—clustered, perhaps, around China and its disputed territories such as Taiwan on the one hand, and around America on the other—rather than homogeneous national/cultural blocs.) Since China opened its system to Western capitalist economic activity in the 1980s, an ongoing criticism, sourced mainly out of the West, has been that the country lacks proper respect for notions of authorship and, more directly, for authorship’s derivative: copyright law. Tellingly, it took almost ten years of fierce negotiations between elements of the capitalist lobby in China and the Legislative Bureau to make the Seventh National People’s Congress pass the first Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China on 7 September 1990. A law is one thing though, and adherence to the law is another. Jayanthi Iyengar of Asia Times Online reports that ‘the US government estimates that piracy within China [of all types of products] costs American companies $20-24 billion a year in damages…. If one includes European and Japanese firms, the losses on account of Chinese piracy is in excess of $50 billion annually.’ In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that more than 99% of all music files in China are pirated. In the same year, Cara Anna wrote in The Seattle Times that, in desperation at the extent of Chinese infringement of its Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Microsoft has deployed an anti-piracy tactic that blacks out the screens of computers detected running a fake copy of Windows. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has filed complaints from many countries against China over IPRs. Iyengar also reports that, under such pressure, the State Intellectual Property Office in Beijing has vowed it will continue to reinforce awareness of IPRs in order to better ensure their protection. Still, from the Western perspective at least, progress on this extremely contentious issue has been excruciatingly slow. Such a situation in respect of Chinese IPRs, however, should not lead to the conclusion that China simply needs to catch up with the more ‘morally advanced’ West. Rather, the problematic relations of the law and of creativity in China allow one to discern, and to trace through ancient Chinese history and philosophy, a different approach to remix that does not come into view so easily within Western countries. Different materialisms of writing and authorship come into play across global space, with different effects. The resistance to both the introduction and the policing of copyright law in China is, we think, the sign of a culture that retains something related to authorship and creativity that Western culture only loosely holds onto. It provides a different way of looking at remix, in the guise of what the West would tend to label plagiarism, as a practice, especially, of creativity. The ‘death’ of the author in China at law (the failure to legislate and/or police his/her rights) brings the author, as we will argue, ‘alive’ in the writing. Remix as anonymous composition (citing Barthes) becomes, in the Chinese example, remix as creative expression of singular feelings—albeit remix set adrift from the law. More concretely, our example of the Chinese writer/writing takes remix to its limit as a practice of repetition without variation—what the West would be likely to call plagiarism. Calligraphy is key to this. Of course, calligraphy is not the full extent of Chinese writing practice—not all writing is calligraphic strictly speaking. But all calligraphy is writing, and in this it influences the ethics of Chinese writing, whether character-based or otherwise, more generally. We will have more to say about the ‘pictorial’ material aspect of Chinese writing later on. In traditional Chinese culture, writing is regarded as a technical practice perfected through reproduction. Chinese calligraphy (visual writing) is learnt through exhaustively tracing and copying the style of the master calligrapher. We are tempted to say that what is at stake in Chinese remix/calligraphy is ‘the difference that cannot be helped:’ that is, the more one tries, as it were, to repeat, the more repetition becomes impossible. In part, this is explained by the interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). Now, the order of the characters—Qing 情 (‘feelings’) before Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’)—suggests that Qing creates and supports Yun. To this extent, what we have here is something akin to a Western understanding of creative writing (of the creativity of writing) in which individual and singular feelings are given expression in the very movement of the writing itself (through the bodily actions of the writer). In fact though, the Chinese case is more complicated than this, for the apprenticeship model of Chinese calligraphy cultivates a two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’). More directly, the ‘composed body movements’ that one learns from the master calligrapher help compose one’s own ‘feelings’. The very repetition of the master’s work (its remixing, as it were…) enables the creativity of the apprentice. If this model of creativity is found somewhat distasteful from a Western perspective (that is, if it is seen to be too restrictive of originality) then that is because such a view, we think, depends upon a cultural misunderstanding that we will try to clear up here. To wit, the so-called Confucian model of rote learning that is more-or-less frowned upon in the West is not, at least not in the debased form that it adopts in Western stereotypes, the philosophy active in the case of Chinese calligraphy. That philosophy is Taoism. As Wing-Tsit Chan elucidates, ‘by opposing Confucian conformity with non-conformity and Confucian worldliness with a transcendental spirit, Taoism is a severe critic of Confucianism’ (136). As we will show in a moment, Chinese calligraphy exemplifies this special kind of Taoist non-conformity (in which, as Philip J. Ivanhoe limns it, ‘one must unweave the social fabric’). Chan again: ‘As the way of life, [Taoism] denotes simplicity, spontaneity, tranquility, weakness, and most important of all, non-action (wu-wei). By the latter is not meant literally “inactivity” but rather “taking no action that is contrary to Nature”—in other words, letting Nature take its own course’ (136). Thus, this is a philosophy of ‘weakness’ that is neither ‘negativism’ nor ‘absolute quietism’ (137). Taoism’s supposed weakness is rather a certain form of strength, of (in the fullest sense) creative possibilities, which comes about through deference to the way of Nature. ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ illustrates this aspect of Taoism in its major philosophical tract, The Lao Tzu (Tao-Te Ching) or The Classic of the Way and its Virtue (section 35, Chan 157). The guiding principle is one of deference to the original (way, Nature or Tao) as a strategy of an expression (of self) that goes beyond the original. The Lao Tzu is full of cryptic, metaphoric expressions of this idea: ‘The pursuit of learning is to increase day after day. / The pursuit of Tao is to decrease day after day. / It is to decrease and further decrease until one reaches the point of taking no action. / No action is undertaken, and yet nothing is left undone’ (section 48, Chan 162). Similarly, The female always overcomes the male by tranquility, / And by tranquility she is underneath. / A big state can take over a small state if it places itself below the small state; / And the small state can take over a big state if it places itself below the big state. / Thus some, by placing themselves below, take over (others), / And some, by being (naturally) low, take over (other states) (section 61, Chan 168). In Taoism, it is only by (apparent) weakness and (apparent) in-action that ‘nothing is left undone’ and ‘states’ are taken over. The two-way interplay of Qing 情 (‘feelings’) and Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’), whereby the apprentice copies the master, aligns with this key element of Taoism. Here is the linkage between calligraphy and Taoism. The master’s work is Tao, Nature or the way: ‘Hold fast to the great form (Tao), / And all the world will come’ (section 35, Chan 157). The apprentice’s calligraphy is ‘all the world’ (‘all the world’ being, ultimately in this context, Qing 情 [‘feelings’]). Indeed, Taoism itself is a subtle philosophy of learning (of apprenticeship to a master), unlike Confucianism, which Chan characterises as a doctrine of ‘social order’ (of servitude to a master) (136). ‘“Learn not learn”’ is how Wang Pi, as quoted by Chan (note 121, 170), understands what he himself (Chan) translates as ‘He learns to be unlearned’ (section 64, 170). In unlearning one learns what cannot be taught: this is, we suggest, a remarkable definition of creativity, which also avoids falling into the trap of asserting a one-to-one equivalence between (unlearnt) originality and creativity, for there is both learning and creativity in this Taoist paradox of pedagogy. On this, Michael Meehan points out that ‘originality is an over-rated and misguided concept in many ways.’ (There is even a sense in which, through its deliberate repetition, The Lao Tzu teaches itself, traces over itself in ‘self-plagiarising’ fashion, as if it were reflecting on the re-tracings of calligraphic pedagogy. Chan notes just how deliberate this is: ‘Since in ancient times books consisted of bamboo or wooden slabs containing some twenty characters each, it was not easy for these sentences… to be added by mistake…. Repetitions are found in more than one place’ [note 102, 166].) Thinking of Kathy Acker too as a learner, Peter Wollen’s observation that she ‘incorporated calligraphy… in her books’ and ‘was deeply committed to [the] avant-garde tradition, a tradition which was much stronger in the visual arts’ creates a highly suggestive connection between Acker’s work and Taoism. The Taoist model for learning calligraphy as, precisely, visual art—in which copying subtends creativity—serves to shift Acker away from a Barthesian or Derridean framework and into a Taoist context in which adherence to another’s form (as ‘un-learnt learning’) creatively unravels so-called plagiarism from the inside. Acker’s conscious interest in calligraphy is shown by its prevalence in Blood and Guts in High School. Edward S. Robinson identifies this text as part of her ‘middle phase’, which ‘saw the introduction of illustrations and diagrams to create multimedia texts with a collage-like feel’ (154). To our knowledge, Acker never critically reflected upon her own calligraphic practices; perhaps if she had, she would have troubled what we see as a blindspot in critics’ interpretations of her work. To wit, whenever calligraphy is mentioned in criticism on Acker, it tends to be deployed merely as an example of her cut-up technique and never analysed for its effects in its own cultural, philosophical and material specificity. (Interestingly, if the words of Chinese photographer Liu Zheng are any guide, the Taoism we’re identifying in calligraphy has also worked its way into other forms of Chinese visual art: she refers to ‘loving photographic details and cameras’ with the very Taoist term, ‘lowly’ 低级 [Three Shadows Photography Art Centre 187].) Being ‘lowly’, ‘feminine’ or ‘underneath’ has power as a radical way of learning. We mentioned above that Taoism is very metaphoric. As the co-writer of this paper Cher Coad recalls from her calligraphy classes, students in China grow up with a metaphoric proverb clearly inspired by Lao Tzu’s Taoist philosophy of learning: ‘Learning shall never stop. Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What could this mean? Before answering this question with recourse to two Western notions that, we hope, will further effect (building on Acker’s example) a rapprochement between Chinese and Western ways of thinking (be they nationally based or not), we reiterate that the infringement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China should not be viewed only as an egregious denial of universally accepted law. Rather, whatever else it may be, we see it as the shadow in the commercial realm—mixed through with all the complexities of Chinese tradition, history and cultural difference, and most particularly of the Taoist strand within Confucianism—of the never-quite-perfect copying of calligraphic writing/remixing. More generally, the re-examination of stereotypical assumptions about Chinese culture cues a re-examination of the meaning behind the copying of products and technology in contemporary, industrialised China. So, ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ What is this ‘more than the blue of black’? Or put differently, why is calligraphic writing, as learnt from the master, always infused with the singular feelings of the (apprentice) writer? The work of Deleuze, Guattari and Claire Parnet provides two possible responses. In On the Line, Deleuze and Guattari (and Deleuze in co-authorship with Parnet) author a number of comments that support the conception we are attempting to develop concerning the lines of Chinese calligraphy. A line, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, is always a line of lines (‘Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight’ [57]). In the section of On the Line entitled ‘Politics’, Deleuze and Parnet outline the impossibility of any line being just one line. If life is a line (as it is said, you throw someone a life line), then ‘We have as many entangled lines in our lives as there are in the palm of a hand’ (71). Of any (hypothetical) single line it can be said that other lines emerge: ‘Black comes from blue, but is more than the blue.’ The feelings of the apprentice calligrapher (his/her multiple lines) emerge through the repeated copying of the lines and composed body movements of the master. The Deleuzean notion of repetition takes this idea further. Repetitive Chinese calligraphy clearly indexes what Claire Colebrook refers to as ‘Deleuze’s concept of eternal return. The only thing that is repeated or returns is difference; no two moments of life can be the same. By virtue of the flow of time, any repeated event is necessarily different (even if different only to the extent that it has a predecessor)’ (121). Now, it might be objected that Chinese calligraphic practices, because of the substantially ideographic nature of Chinese writing (see Kristeva 72-81), allow for material mutations that can find no purchase in Western, alphabetical systems of writing. But the materiality of time that Colebrook refers to as part of her engagement with Deleuzean non-repetitious (untimely) repetition guarantees the materiality of all modes of writing. Furthermore, Julia Kristeva notes that, with any form of language, one cannot leave ‘the realm of materialism’ (6) and Adrian Miles, in his article ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing,’ sees the apparently very ‘unmaterial’ writing of hypertext ‘as an embodied activity that has its own particular affordances and possibilities—its own constraints and local actualisations’ (1-2). Calligraphic repetition of the master’s model creates the apprentice’s feelings as (inevitable) difference. In this then, the learning by the Chinese apprentice of the lines of the master’s calligraphy challenges international (both Western and non-Western) artists of writing to ‘remix remix’ as a matter—as a materialisation—of the line. Not the line as a self-identical entity of writing that only goes to make up writing more generally; rather, lines as a materialisation of lines within lines within lines. More self-reflexively, even the collaborative enterprise of this article, co-authored as it is by a woman of Chinese ethnicity and a white Australian man, suggests a remixing of writing through, beneath and over each other’s lines. Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) expresses and maximises Qing 情 (‘feelings’). Taoist ‘un-learnt learning’ generates remix as the singular creativity of the writer. Writers get into a blue with the line—paint it, black. Of course, these ideas won’t and shouldn’t make copyright infringement (or associated legalities) redundant notions. But in exposing the cultural relativisms often buried within the deployment of this and related terms, the idea of lines of lines far exceeds a merely formalistic practice (one cut off from the materialities of culture) and rather suggests a mode of non-repetitious repetition in contact with all of the elements of culture (of history, of society, of politics, of bodies…) wherever these may be found, and whatever their state of becoming. In this way, remix re-creates the depths of culture even as it stirs up its surfaces of writing. References Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Anna, Cara. ‘Microsoft Anti-Piracy Technology Upsets Users in China.’ The Seattle Times. 28 Oct. 2008 ‹http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2008321919_webmsftchina28.html›. Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author.’ Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142-148. Chan, Wing-Tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. On the Line. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. ‘Recording Industry Steps Up Campaign against Internet Piracy in China.’ ifpi. 4 Feb. 2008 ‹http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/20080204.html›. Ivanhoe, Philip J. ‘Taoism’. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 787. Iyengar, Jayanthi. ‘Intellectual Property Piracy Rocks China Boat.’ Asia Times Online. 16 Sept. 2004 ‹http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FI16Ad07.html›. Kristeva, Julia. Language: The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lort, Robert. ‘Kathy Acker (1944-1997).’ Jahsonic: A Vocabulary of Culture. 2003 ‹http://www.jahsonic.com/KathyAcker.html›. Meehan, Michael. ‘Week 5a: Playing with Genres.’ Lecture notes. Unit ALL705. Short Stories: Writers and Readers. Trimester 2. Melbourne: Deakin University, 2013. Miles, Adrian. ‘Virtual Actual: Hypertext as Material Writing.’ Studies in Material Thinking 1.2 (April 2008) ‹http://www.materialthinking.org/papers/29›. Robinson, Edward S. Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present. New York: Editions Rodopi, 2011. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre. ‘Photography and Intimate Space Symposium.’ Conversations: Three Shadows Photography Art Centre’s 2007 Symposium Series. Ed. RongRong, inri, et al. Beijing: Three Shadows Press Limited, 2008. 179-191. Wollen, Peter. ‘Death (and Life) of the Author.’ London Review of Books 20.3 (5 Feb. 1998). ‹http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-author›.

Introduction Within wellness circles, there has been growing concern over an increasing focus on Alternative Right (or Alt-right) conspiracy (see Aubry; Bloom and Moskalenko). Greene, referring to a definition provided by the Anti-Defamation League, defines the Alt-right as a loose political network characterised by its rejection of mainstream conservatism, embrace of white nationalism, and use of online platforms (33). The “wellness revolution”, on the other hand, which marked a split from the health care sector in which “thought leaders” replaced medical experts as authorities on health (Pilzer, qtd. in Kickbusch and Payne 275), combines New Age practices with ideological movements that emphasise the “interdependence of body, mind and spirit” (Voigt and Laing 32). It has been noted that there is overlap between the circulation of conspiracy theory and New Age mysticism (see Ward and Voas; Parmigiani). Influencers following the Paleo diet, or Palaeolithic diet, such as Australian celebrity chef and Paleo diet guru Pete Evans, have also come under fire for sharing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience (see Brennan). Johnson notes that the origins of the Paleo diet can be traced back to 1975, with the publication of Dr Walter Voegtlin’s book The Stone Age Diet. This text, however, has been largely disavowed by Paleo leaders due to Voegtlin’s “white supremacist, eugenicist, and generally unpalatable politics”. Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider how white nationalism and conspiracy theory may overlap within the wellness space. A specific example occurred in 2020, when Pete Evans shared an Alt-right conspiracy meme to his Facebook account. The ‘butterfly-caterpillar meme’ contained the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3). Though Evans later commented that the sharing of the hate symbol was unintentional, and that he misunderstood the symbol, this case raised questions about the ability of wellness influencers to amplify white nationalist messaging. This essay is concerned with the question: what makes the wellness industry a target for the spreading of white nationalist ideas? It argues that the wellness industry and far-right ideology possess a pre-occupation with bodily purity which makes it more likely that white nationalist material carrying this message will be spread via wellness networks. Through a critical examination of the media surrounding Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme, this case study will examine the ideological aspects of the Paleo diet and how they appeal to a white nationalist agenda. Focussing on the Australian context, this essay will theorise the spreadability of memes in relation to white nationalist symbolism. It contends that the Paleo diet positions foods that are not organic as impure, and holds a preference for positive messaging. Alt-right propaganda packaged in a positive and New Age frame poses a danger in that it can operate as a kind of contagion for high-profile networks, exponentially increasing its spreadability. This is of particular concern when it is considered that diet can have an impact on people’s actions outside of the online space: it impacts what people consume and do with their bodies, as evidenced by calls for eating disorders created by algorithmic repetition to be considered a ‘cyber-pathy’. This creates the conditions for the wellness industry to be targeted using memes as recruitment material for white nationalist groups. The Paleo Diet and the Sharing of a Neo-Nazi Meme Pete Evans is a famous Australian TV Chef from the hit series My Kitchen Rules, a show that ran from 2010-2020. The show followed pairs from different households as they cooked for Evans and his co-host Manu Feildel. During the show’s run, Evans also became known for spruiking the Paleo diet, producing several cookbooks and a documentary on the topic. According to Catie Gressier, who conducted a study of Paleo dieters in Melbourne, Paleo’s aim is “to eat only those foods available prior to the agricultural revolution: meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds and a small amount of fruit” and that this framed as a more “authentic” diet (3). This is seen as an ideological diet as opposed to others which may consist of rules or eating restrictions. The Paleo diet stresses “real foods” or “organic foods as close to their real state as possible” (Ramachandran et al.). Studies find that the paleo diet can be very nutritious (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). However, it is important to note that the presence of multiple influencers and thought leaders in the field means that there can be several variations in the diet. This article will limit its examination to that of the diet promoted by Evans. A common rationale is that the human body is incompatible with certain mass-produced foods (like grains, pulses, and dairy products, sugar, salt, and modification practices (like food processing), and that these are the cause of many modern conditions (Cambeses-Franco et al. 2021). While growing concerns over unnatural additives in foods are warranted, it can be observed that in Evans’s case, the promotion of the Paleo diet increasingly blurred the line between pseudoscience and conspiracy. In his Paleo diet book for toddlers, Evans emphasised the importance of the ideological diet and suggested that parents feed their toddlers bone broth instead of breast milk, prompting a federal investigation by the health department (Brennan). This escalated in 2020 during the global pandemic. In January, Evans promoted the work of a prominent anti-vaccine advocate (Molloy). In April, his Biocharger device, which he claimed could cure coronavirus, earned him a hefty fine from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (White). In November, several months after My Kitchen Rules was cancelled, Evans posted an Alt-right political cartoon with the image of a black sun, a symbol equated with the swastika (Goodrick-Clarke 3), to his Facebook account (Gillespie). In later news reports, it was also pointed out that the black sun symbol was emblazoned on the backpack of the Christchurch shooter (see Sutton and Molloy) who had targeted two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people and injuring 40. Initially, when a user on Facebook pointed out that the meme contained a black sun, Evans responded “I was waiting for someone to see that” (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). Evans eventually recanted the image, writing: sincere apologies to anyone who misinterpreted a previous post of a caterpillar and a butterfly having a chat over a drink and perceived that I was promoting hatred. I look forward to studying every symbol that have ever existed and research them thoroughly before posting. Hopefully this symbol ❤️ resonates deeply into the hearts of ALL! (Evans, qtd. in Gillespie). The post was later deleted. In December of 2020, Evans’s Facebook page of around 1.5 million followers was removed due to its sharing of conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus (Gillespie). However, it should be noted that the sharing of the caterpillar-butterfly meme was different from the previous instances of conspiracy sharing, in that Evans stated that it was unintentional, and it included imagery associated with neo-Nazi ideology (the black sun). Evans’s response implies that, while the values of the Paleo diet are framed in terms of positivity, the symbols in the butterfly-caterpillar meme are associated with “promoting hatred”. In this way, Evans frames racism as merely and simplistically an act of hatred, rather than engaging in the ways in which it reinforces a racial hierarchy and racially motivated violence. According to Hartzell (10), white nationalists tend to position themselves as superior to other races and see themselves as protectors of the “white race”. “White” in this context is of European descent (Geary, Schofield and Sutton). There are conspiracy theories associated with this belief, one of which is that their race is under threat of extinction because of immigration from ‘undesirable’ countries of origin. This can also be observed in the Alt-right, which is a white nationalist movement that was created and organised online. According to Berger, this movement “seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies”. This is characterised by anti-immigrant sentiment, conspiracy theories, and support for former US President Donald Trump. It can be argued, in this case, that the symbol links to a larger conspiracy theory in which whiteness must be defended against some perceived threat. The meme implies that there is an ‘us’ versus ‘them’, or ‘good’ versus ‘evil’, and that some people are ‘in the know’ while others are not. Spreadable Memes An important aspect of this case study is that this instance of far-right recruitment used the form of a meme. Memes are highly spreadable, and they have very complex mechanisms for disseminating ideas and ideology. This can have a dramatic impact if that ideology is a harmful one, such a white supremacist symbol. While the digital meme, an image with a small amount of text, is common today, Richard Dawkins originally used the term meme to describe the ways in which units of culture can be spread from person to person (qtd. in Shifman 9). These can be anything from the lyrics of a song to a political idea. Jeff Hemsley and Robert Mason (qtd. in Shifman) see virality as a “process wherein a message is actively forwarded from one person to other, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, resulting in a rapid increase in the number of people who are exposed to the message” (55). This also links to Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s notions of spreadability (3-11), a natural selection process by which media content continues to exist through networked sharing, or disappears once it stops being shared. Evans’s response indicates that he merely shared the image. Despite the black sun imagery, a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat is clearly present. A political presence, and one that is associated with white nationalism, is present despite Evans’s attempts to frame the meme in the language of innocence and positivity. This is not to say Evans is extremist or supports a white nationalist agenda. However, in much the same way that sharing of imagery may not necessarily indicate agreement with its ideological messaging, this framing creates a way in which wellness influencers may avoid criticism (Ma 1). Furthermore, the act of sharing the meme, regardless of intention, amplifies its message exponentially. The Paleo Diet, the Far Right and Purity This overlap between wellness and white nationalist ideology is not new. In Jules Evans’s exploration of why QAnon is popular with New Age and far-right followers, she points to the fact that many Nazi leaders – Hitler, Hess, Himmler – “were into alternative medicine, organic and vegetarian diets, homeopathy, anti-vaxxing, and natural healing”. Similarly, Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc argue that a natural diet which focussed on food purity was favoured by the Nazis (421). In their examination of the German neo-Nazi YouTube channel Balaclava Küche they argue add that “present-day extreme right views on environment and diet are often close to positions found in contemporary Green movements and foodie magazines” (422). Like neo-Nazi preoccupations with food, the Paleo diet’s ideology has its basis in the concept of purity. Gressier found that the Paleo diet contains an “embedded moralism” that “filters into constructions of food as either pure or polluting” (1). This is supported by Ramachandran et al.’s study, which found that the diet “promoted ‘real food’ – or the shift to consuming organic whole foods that are as close to their natural state as possible, with an avoidance of processed foods”. This framing of the food as real creates a binary – if one is real, the other must not be. Another example can be seen in Pete Evans’s Webpage, which lists about 33 Paleo recipes. The Butter Chicken recipe states: the paleo way of life is not meant to be restrictive, as you can see from this lovely butter chicken recipe. All the nasties have been replaced with good-quality ingredients that make it as good, if not better, than the original. I prefer chicken thighs for their superior flavour and tenderness. The term “nasties” here can be seen to create a dichotomy between real and fake, the west and the east. We see these foods are associated with impurity, the foods that are not “real foods” are positioned as a threat. It can be seen as an orientalist approach, othering those not associated with the west. As can be observed in this Butter Chicken recipe that is “getting rid of the nasties”, it appropriates and ‘sanitises’ ingredients. In her article on the campaign to boycott Halal, Shakira Hussein points out that “ethnic food” presents as multiculturalism in the context of white chefs and homecooks, but the opposite is true if the roles are switched (91). Later in her essay “Halal Chops and Fascist Cupcakes”, she discusses the “weaponisation of food” and how specific white nationalist groups express disgust at the thought of consuming Muslim food. This ethnocentric framing of butter chicken projects a western superiority, replacing traditional ingredients with ‘familiar’ ingredients, making it more palatable to nationalistic tastes. Spreading Consumption I have established that the Paleo diet, with its emphasis on ‘real foods’, is deeply embedded with nationalist ideology. I have also discussed how this is highly spreadable in the form of a meme, particularly when it is framed in the language of positivity. Furthermore, I have argued that this is an attempt to escape criticism for promoting white nationalist values. I would like to turn now to how this spreadability through diet can have an impact on the physical actions of its followers through its digital communication. The Paleo diet, and how to go about following it as described by celebrity influencers, has an impact on what people do with their bodies. Hanganu-Bresch discusses the concept of orthorexia, a fixation with eating proper foods that operates as a cyber-pathy, a digitally propagated condition targeting media users. Like the ‘viral’ and ‘spreadable’ meme, this puritanical obsession with eating can also be considered both a spreadable condition and ideology. According to Hanganu-Bresch, orthorexia sees this diet as a way to overcome an illness or to improve general health, but this also begins to feel righteous and even holy or spiritual. This operates within the context of neoliberalism. Brice and Thorpe talk about women’s activewear worn in everyday settings, or ‘athleisure’, as a neoliberal uniform that says, ‘I’m taking control of my body and health’. To take this idea a step further, this uniform could be extended out into digital spaces as well in terms of what people post on their profiles and social media. This ideological aspect operates as not only a highly spreadable message, but one that is targeted at the overall health of its followers. It encourages not only the spreading of ideology, in this case, white nationalist ideology, but also the modification of food consumption. If this were then to be used as a vehicle to spread messages that encourage white nationalist ideology, it can be seen to be not only a kind of contagion but a powerful one at that. White nationalist iconography that is clearly associated with white supremacist propaganda has the potential to spread extremism. However, neoliberal principles of discipline and bodywork operate through “messages of empowerment, choice, and self-care” (Lavrence and Lozanski, qtd. in Brice and Thorpe). While racist extremism does not necessarily equate to neoliberal and ethnocentric values, a frame of growth, purity, and positivity create an overlap that allow extremist messaging to spread more easily through these networks. Conclusion The case of Pete Evans’s sharing of the butterfly-caterpillar meme exemplifies a concerning overlap between white nationalist discourse and wellness. Ideologically based diets that emphasise real foods, such as the Paleo diet, have a preoccupation with purity and consumption that appeals to white nationalism. They also share a tolerance for the promotion of conspiracy theory and tendency to create an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. Noting these points can provide insight into a potential targeting of the wellness industry to spread racist ideology. As research into spreadability shows, memes are extremely shareable, even if the user does not grasp the meaning behind the symbolism. This article has also extended the idea of the cyberpathy further, noting a weaponisation of the properties of the meme, for the purposes of radicalisation, and how these are accelerated by celebrity influence. This is more potent within the wellness industry when the message is packaged as a form of growth and positivity, which serve to deflect accusations of racism. Furthermore, when diet is combined with white nationalist ideology, it may operate like a contagion, creating the conditions for racism. Those exposed may not have the intention of sharing or spreading racist ideology, but its amplification contributes to the promotion of a racist agenda nevertheless. As such, further investigation into the far-right infiltration of the wellness industry would be beneficial as it could provide more insight into how wellness groups are targeted. 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There are various approaches to the explanation of humor in the field of humor research. Some of these theories, while providing interesting insight into the phenomenon known as humor, remain limited in their ability to account for how humor is recognized. Others do not even address the issue. This thesis compares five different theories in humor research by analyzing the humorous short story "My Watch" by Mark Twain. These theories are: 1. a typological approach to humor, 2. a social- functional model, 3. incongruity theory, 4. Grice's Cooperative Principle taken from linguistic pragmatics, and 5. the General Theory of Verbal Humor devised by V. Raskin and S. Attardo. The comparative analysis, following an extensive review of the literature, first interprets the humor in the short story in the light of each theoretical model. During the course of the analysis, the limitations inherent in each theories' treatment of humor are illustrated and these argue and provide evidence for the adoption of the General Theory of Verbal Humor because of its greater sophistication in building a model of humor recognition. Furthermore, in analyzing Twain's short story this thesis establishes the generalizability of this more sophisticated theory to at least some types of literary humor, specifically the tall tale. Finally, further research implications and general connections between the theoretical approaches discussed in this thesis and the teaching of the English language to non-native speakers highlight the practicality of applying insights from humor research to the field of teaching.

From 1958 to 1959, Mishima Yukio published a series of satirical essays titled Lessons in Immorality, in the magazine Weekly Morningstar. Lessons in Immorality was made into a television series, a stage play, and a film. Famous in the West for writing serious novels, Mishima's work as a humor writer is largely unknown. In these essays Mishima writes in a very comic style, making liberal use of hyperbole, burlesque, and travesty, in order to parody and satirize contemporary Japanese morality. Mishima uses humor to create a world in which Mishima Yukio, iconoclastic author and pop-culture figure, is an arbiter of his own honest and just morality that runs counter to the norms that Japanese at that time considered to be honest and just. Additionally, Mishima used Lessons in Immorality as a forum to discuss some of the serious concerns that are central to his famous novels. Because Mishima was writing for young men and women, he wrote about his complex philosophical and aesthetic ideals in a very humorous and accessible style. Thus, in addition to displaying Mishima's talent as a humor writer, these essays also give the reader fresh perspectives on Mishima's serious literature. In this paper, I will present the writing styles, rhetorical tools, and philosophical discussions from Lessons in Immorality that I believe make the series essential reading for anyone interested in Mishima or postwar Japanese literature.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2003.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: At the start of the twentieth century Afrikaans humour was researched quite intensively. Since then, however, such research has been relatively sporadic and has concentrated on related sub-genres of humour, such as satire, irony and wit. This dissertation investigates anew the phenomenon of humour as manifested in Afrikaans short story texts, from the dual starting points of a current context and of the extensive theoretical studies done by other researchers worldwide. In the process, humour is viewed as a communicative strategy, a combination of codes which writers utilize within a specific socio-political context in order to create humorous effects and elicit resultant reactions from readers. One of the primary aims of this investigation into the codes and strategies employed by Afrikaans writers in the humorous short story genre, is to determine whether they coincide with universal tendencies or whether they have certain unique features. After a broad exposition of the historical background and of the evolution of the continually changing concept humour, attention is paid to theories regarding its nature and effect. The creative interaction between related modi, like comedy, satire, irony, wit, burlesque, travesty, parody, caricature, grotesque, absurd and black humour and their contribution to one's experience of humour are all researched. Initially, the Afrikaans humour-tradition is set against its historical background. Following this, a more detailed investigation considers strategies of humour selected from Afrikaans short story texts from 1884 to 2001. These are selected for their variety of types of humour and according to criteria relating to structure, style and convention. The major emphasis is placed on short stories of the past two decades, in an attempt to measure the era-relatedness of humour and the interaction with the prevailing socio-political context. These various stylistic strategies are contextualized in writers' deliberate attempts to create a humorous outcome. Along with generally universal characteristics - like the interaction of humorous and non-humorous texts, with time-bound trends (in common with other literatures) - it is concluded that the Afrikaans humorous short story is strongly ancho.ed both in relevance and contextuality. Humour remains a vibrant aspect of the Afrikaans short story and, by keeping this tradition alive, it also remains popular with the reading public.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Nadat daar aan die begin van die twintigste eeu betreklik intensiewe navorsing oor humor in Afrikaans gepubliseer is, het sedertdien slegs sporadiese studies verskyn oor verwante humormodi soos satire, ironie en geestigheid. Hierdie proefskrif wil gevolglik vanuit 'n huidige konteks, en na aanleiding van die uitgebreide teoretisering en navorsing elders ter wêreld, die verskynsel humor opnuut ondersoek, soos gemanifesteer in Afrikaanse kortverhaaltekste. Humor word in die proses benader as 'n kommunikatiewe strategie, 'n versameling kodes wat skrywers binne 'n bepaalde sosio-politieke konteks aanwend, met die oogmerk om humoristiese effekte te bewerkstellig en bepaalde reaksies by lesers uit te lok. Dié studie wil veral vasstel watter kodes en strategieë Afrikaanse humoristiese kortverhaalskrywers hierby gebruik, of dit ooreenstem met breë tendense elders of eie is aan Afrikaans. Na 'n oorsigtelike uiteensetting van die historiese grondslae en die evolusie van die steeds veranderende begrip humor, word aandag bestee aan teorieë oor die aard en effek daarvan. Die vrugbare interaksie tussen verwante modi soos die komedie, satire, ironie, geestigheid, die burleske, travestie, parodie, karikatuur, die groteske, die absurde en swart humor, asook die bydrae daarvan tot die humorbelewing, word vervolgens ondersoek. Die Afrikaanse humortradisie word eers oorsigtelik histories nagespeur, waarna nadere ondersoek ingestel word na humorstrategieë aan die hand van Afrikaanse kortverhaaltekste wat dateer van 1884 tot 2001, geselekteer op grond van sowel verskeidenheid met betrekking tot die tipe humor as kriteria soos struktuur, styl en konvensie. Die klem val op kortverhale uit die afgelope twee dekades, ten einde aspekte soos die tydgebondenheid van humor en die interaksie met die heersende sosiopolitieke konteks te probeer bepaal. Die verskillende stylstrategieë wat geïdentifiseer is, word in verband gebring met die skrywers se berekende opset om 'n humoristiese uitkoms te bewerkstellig. Naas meer universele kenmerke, soos die wisselwerking tussen humor en erns in dié tipe tekste en tydspesifieke neigings (in ooreenstemming met ander letterkundes), soos die toename in groteske en absurde tipe verhale, word bevind dat die Afrikaanse humor- en humoristiese verhaal sterk kontekstueel veranker is. Humor in die Afrikaanse kortverhaal word steeds op 'n lewenskragtige wyse beoefen deur skrywers en bly gewild by lesers.

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2004.
Full text to be digitised and attached to bibliographic record.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The following thesis develops a theory of parody as a multifunctional practice in relation to selected works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Tom Stoppard. The study discusses parody as a mode of generic engineering (rather than a genre itself) with ideological ramifications. Based on an understanding of literary and non-literary genres as social institutions, this thesis describes the practice of parody as one of engineering generic or discursive incongruity with a particular cultural purpose in mind. In refiguring generic conventions, the parodist simultaneously reworks their implicit ideological premises. Parody hence comes to serve as a means of negotiating with "the world" through generic modification, and the notions of parodic social agency and cultural work are consequently central to this thesis. Focusing on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest respectively, Chapters Two and Three discuss Wilde's use of parody, and especially parodic "word-masks", for subverting the aesthetic and social conventions of Victorian England, and covertly propagating a gay subculture through parodic injokes. Word-masks - central to Wildean parody - entail the duplicitous use of an object text / genre as a cover under which a parodist hides other meanings. If Wildean parody might be described as claiming a covert agency, Joycean parody must, in contrast, be acknowledged as expressing deep-seated political ambivalence. Chapters Four and Five of this thesis discuss Joyce's Ulysses with specific reference to his use of parody to conflate, relativize and problematize the dominant aesthetic and Irish nationalist discourses of the early twentieth-century. Joycean parody also demonstrates parodic ambivalence and this is especially evident in what might be called his "parodic patriotism". In contrast to Wilde's and Joyce's use of parody for the expression of subversive or progressive political views, Stoppard's parodies confirm conservative English values not only in their reification of the English canon but also in terms of the ideological premises with which they invest their hypotexts. Chapters Six and Seven examine how parody can serve as one of the ways in which modem artists have managed to come to terms with tradition. Focusing on Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Travesties respectively, these chapters explore parody's capacity to function as tribute or homage to the writers of the past being parodied. Ultimately this thesis aims to demonstrate the continuum of parodic cultural work or effects of which parody, as a mode of generic engineering, is capable.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis word daar - met verwysing na geselekteerde werke van Oscar Wilde, James Joyce en Tom Stoppard - 'n teorie van parodie as multi-funktionele praktyk ontwikkel. Parodie word bespreek as 'n vorm van generiese manipulasie (eerder as 'n genre op sigself) met ideologiese implikasies. Op die basis van 'n vertolking van literêre en nie-literêre genres as sosiale instellings, beskryf hierdie tesis die praktyk van parodie as die bewerkstelling van generiese en diskursiewe ongelyksoortigheid met 'n besondere kulturele oogmerk in gedagte. In die herfigurering van generiese konvensies is die beoefenaar van parodie terselfdertyd besig om hulle geïmpliseerde ideologiese aannames te herbewerk. Parodie word dus 'n metode om met behulp van generiese modifikasie in omgang met "die wêreld" te verkeer; en die idee van die sosiale agentskap en kulturele aksie van parodie staan dus ook sentraal tot hierdie tesis. Hoofstukke Twee en Drie fokus onderskeidelik op The Picture of Dorian Gray en The Importance of Being Earnest. In hierdie twee hoofstukke word Wilde se gebruik van parodie bespreek, met besondere aandag aan sy parodiese "woordmaskers" om die estetiese en sosiale konvensies van Victoriaanse Engeland te ondermyn, asook sy bedekte propagering - deur middel van parodiese binne-grappe -- van 'n gay subkultuur. Sentraal tot Wilde se parodie is woordmaskers wat 'n dubbelsinnige gebruik van teks en genre inspan as 'n dekmantel waaronder die beoefenaar van parodie ander betekenisse verskuil hou. As Wilde se parodie beskryfkan word as bedekte bemiddeling oftussenkoms (covert agency), moet Joyce se parodie - as teenstelling - identifiseer word as 'n uitdrukking van diepliggende politiese ambivalensie. In Hoofstukke Vier en Vyf word Joyce se Ulysses bespreek met spesifieke verwysing na sy gebruik van parodie om dominante estetiese en Ierse nasionalistiese diskoerse van die vroeë twintigste eeu saam te voeg, te relativiseer en te bevraagteken.. Joyce se parodie illustreer ook parodiese ambivalensie - 'n aspek wat duidelik blyk uit wat sy "parodiese patriotisme" genoem kon word. In teenstelling met Wilde en Joyce se gebruik van parodie as uitdrukking van ondermynende of pregressiewe gesigspunte, bevestig Stoppard se parodie konserwatiewe Engelse waardes nie net in hulle vergestalting van Engelse kanoniese tekste nie, maar ook in terme van die ideologiese aannames wat hulle aan hul hipotekste toeskryf. Hoofstukke Ses en Sewe ondersoek hoe parodie kan dien as een van die weë waarlangs moderne kunstenaars daarin geslaag het om hulleself te versoen met tradiese. In Hoofstukke Ses en Sewe - waar daar onderskeidelik op Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead en Travesties gefokus word - word ook aandag geskenk aan die vermoë van parodie om te funksioneer as huldeblyk of eerbetoon aan skrywers wie se werke geparodieer word. Hierdie tesis poog om die kontinuum van parodiese kulturele werk te illustreer waartoe parodie, as 'n vorm van generiese manipulasie, in staat is.

Celebrities such as Halle Berry, Dave Chappelle, Kathy Griffin, and Don Imus have recently evoked public ire for making what some people have seen as tasteless jokes. Their notorious humorous communication shares two notable qualities: the discourse was mass mediated and the “jokes” were all premised on stereotypes. This two-part dissertation addresses the complicated subject of understanding the meanings viewers co-create with humorous mediated communication that is premised on racial stereotypes. I focus on Chappelle’s Show as my primary text of analysis, but the findings here have applicability to the wider genre of humorous mediated communication that is premised on stereotypes. In the first part of the dissertation I survey humor theory and humor criticism, noting weaknesses in the ways that communication scholars have previously studied humorous mediated texts. I then suggest that humor scholarship can be improved through two principal methods: 1. humor scholars of various academic disciplines need to use a unified set of terms that refer to the humor stimulus, humor motivation, and the possible effects of the humor, and 2. critics of humorous mediated texts need to approach them as a unique genre, with a critical lens that accounts for the polysemy inherent in many humorous texts. In the next part of the dissertation, I model a multi-methodological approach to mining the mélange of meanings in Chappelle’s Show. My in-depth case study of racial stereotype-based humor in Chappelle’s Show incorporates textual analysis of a dozen sketches, qualitative analysis of viewer opinions about the show, and a quantitative analysis of viewing behaviors as well as the relationship between viewing the show and prejudice. This multi-methodological approach helps better mine the polysemic meanings of the text because it explores the spectrum of the communication model from stimulus to receiver. I conclude that Chappelle’s Show can both encourage and reduce prejudice. While inconclusive conclusions are an anomaly in media criticism, I advocate the pursuit of such conclusions in humor criticism. Stereotype-based mediated comedic texts demand an exploration of their multiple meanings, not a definitive statement about how they should be interpreted or how they affect an audience.
text

幽默是人類社會的一種普遍現象，是人們言語交際的一部分，在日常生活中無處不在。研究者們對幽默的研究涵蓋了心理學、哲學、社會學、人類學、神學、文化學等不同的領域。幽默被認為是最難研究的課題之一，翻譯幽默更是難上加難。我們至今對言語幽默的文本語言特徵、對言語幽默的譯文的文本語言特徵、對涉及言語幽默的翻譯過程知之不多。在言語幽默的翻譯中，有時候原文的幽默信息在譯文中完全保留，有時候則不能，原因何在，有關這方面的研究至今不多見；以漢語幽默文本的英譯為語料建立單向平行語料庫，探討漢語言語幽默英譯的一般及特殊規律的研究，尚無人做過，這正是本研究的目的所在。
本研究以錢鍾書的小說《圍城》及其英譯本為語料，運用言語幽默概論的理論框架，建立原文和譯文對照的雙語單向平行語料庫，采用語料庫檢索的方法，對語料進行描寫與分析，得出了“譯文要傳遞原文幽默信息需要保留或轉換原文的表層及深層參數特徵，特別是深層參數的腳本對立、表層參數的修辭手段及語言中的本源概念的研究結論。
主要研究結果有三：
一是展示了言語幽默翻譯的一般規律，即“譯文需要保留原文中的腳本對立；
二是展現了漢語言語幽默翻譯的特殊規律，即“要保留原文中的腳本對立，就需要轉換漢語所特有的修辭手段和漢語本源概念；
三是顯示了漢語言語幽默的文本語言特徵，即，漢語言語幽默具有表層和深層的參數特徵。表層參數的核心是修辭手段，深層參數的核心是腳本對立；表層參數具有“相似性之奇特統一、“語言要素之巧妙轉移和“不和諧邏輯間之和諧三大特徵；深層參數具有“真實的與非真實的語境對立、“正常的與非正常的語境對立、“合理與不合理的語境對立三大特徵，反映了現實與經驗、話語現實與語言經驗、話語邏輯與正常邏輯的矛盾衝突。
Humour is regarded as a universal human phenomenon, and funny situations, funny stories, even funny thoughts occur everyday to virtually everybody (Raskin 1985: 1). Humour represents a multidisciplinary and fertile research field. So is Translation Studies. Both draw from linguistics, psychology and sociology, among other disciplines, for their descriptions and their theoretical models and constructs (Zabalbeascoa 2005: 185). What is surprising is that the link between translation and humour has not received sufficient attention from scholars in either field (ibid).
This research attempts to explore how Chinese humorous texts are transferred into English and what factors affect humour transference in the target text, with a focus on the universality of the translation process, by tapping on fresh methodologies of modern Translation Studies such as bilingual corpora and the General Theory of Verbal Humor. The bilingual corpus for the research is from Wei Cheng (Fortress Besieged) (1947/1991/2003), a humorous fiction by the Chinese writer Ch’ien Chung-shu (1910-1998) and its English translation by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao (1979/2003). Adopting the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) (Attardo & Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 2001) as the theoretical framework, the research makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the samplings from the corpus and obtains some encouraging findings as follows:
(a) Transference of humour in the source text to the target text needs transference of the Script Opposition embedded in the deep parameters of the source text, which shows the universality of translating Chinese verbal humour into English;
(b) More specifically, transference of the Script Opposition embedded in the deep parameters requires transference of specific Chinese rhetoric devices and socioculturally-bound Chinese alien sources in the target text;
(c) Chinese verbal humour has three features in the surface parameters and three features in the deep parameters, which shows the textual characteristics of Chinese verbal humour. The surface parameters show the features of similarity among quite different things, transference among quite different linguistic elements and congruity among incongruous logical elements. The deep parameters show the following three features: opposition between real and unreal situations; opposition between normal and abnormal situations, opposition between possible, plausible and fully or partially impossible or much less plausible situations.
The research draws a conclusion that verbal humour may travel from one culture to another via translation if the target text successfully transfers the Script Opposition embedded in the deep parameters of the source text, the Rhetorical Device in the surface parameters and the alien concepts hidden in the Language Parameter.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
Detailed summary in vernacular field only.
戈玲玲.
Sumitted date: 2011年12月.
Sumitted date: 2011 nian 12 yue.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-319)
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstracts in Chinese and English.
Ge Lingling.
摘要 --- p.i
前言 --- p.vi
目錄 --- p.vii
圖表目錄 --- p.x
Chapter 第一章 --- 導論 --- p.1
Chapter 1.1 --- 研究目的 --- p.2
Chapter 1.2 --- 原文及作者簡介 --- p.7
Chapter 1.3 --- 《圍城》的外文譯本 --- p.14
Chapter 1.4 --- 對《圍城》及其英譯本的研究 --- p.16
Chapter 1.5 --- 論文結構 --- p.20
Chapter 第二章 --- 幽默評述及研究 --- p.22
Chapter 2.1 --- 詞典中對幽默的定义 --- p.22
Chapter 2.2 --- 前人對幽默的評述與研究 --- p.27
Chapter 2.2.1 --- 西方的評述與研究 --- p.27
Chapter 2.2.2 --- 中國的評述與研究 --- p.31
Chapter 2.2.2.1 --- 林語堂、錢鍾書論幽默 --- p.32
Chapter 2.2.2.2 --- 其他評述與研究 --- p.34
Chapter 2.3 --- 言語幽默的可譯性 --- p.37
Chapter 2.4 --- 小結 --- p.42
Chapter 第三章 --- 理論框架 --- p.44
Chapter 3.1 --- 語義腳本理論 --- p.44
Chapter 3.2 --- 言語幽默概論 --- p.48
Chapter 3.2.1 --- 六個參數 --- p.50
Chapter 3.2.1.1 --- 四個必要參數 --- p.51
Chapter 3.2.1.2 --- 兩個可選參數 --- p.59
Chapter 3.2.2 --- 六個參數的層級排列：言語幽默相似度測量系統 --- p.65
Chapter 3.3 --- 言語幽默概論運用於幽默翻譯研究：Attardo（2002） --- p.70
Chapter 3.4 --- 理論框架的延伸 --- p.73
Chapter 3.4.1 --- 漢語特有的修辞手段 --- p.74
Chapter 3.4.2 --- 言語幽默語段的表層參數和深層參數 --- p.76
Chapter 3.4.2.1 --- 表層參數 --- p.78
Chapter 3.4.2.2 --- 深層參數 --- p.84
Chapter 3.5 --- 小結 --- p.87
Chapter 第四章 --- 《圍城》中幽默語段及其英譯本的雙語平行語料庫 --- p.89
Chapter 4.1 --- 抽樣過程 --- p.90
Chapter 4.1.1 --- 《圍城》及其英譯本讀者問卷調查 --- p.90
Chapter 4.1.2 --- 理論參數 --- p.91
Chapter 4.2 --- 建立語料庫 --- p.92
Chapter 4.3 --- 標注漢英對應文本 --- p.94
Chapter 4.3.1 --- 技術性標注 --- p.94
Chapter 4.3.2 --- 理論參數標注 --- p.95
Chapter 4.3.3 --- 本源概念及其翻譯策略的標注 --- p.97
Chapter 4.4 --- 檢索漢英對應文本 --- p.99
Chapter 4.4.1 --- 檢索編程 --- p.100
Chapter 4.4.2 --- 檢索功能 --- p.102
Chapter 4.5 --- 標注的誤差測定 --- p.114
Chapter 4.6 --- 小結 --- p.117
Chapter 第五章 --- 原文中言語幽默語段的分析 --- p.118
Chapter 5.1 --- 原文幽默語段的表層特徵 --- p.118
Chapter 5.1.1 --- 表層特徵一：相似性之奇特統一 --- p.119
Chapter 5.1.2 --- 表層特徵二：語言要素之巧妙轉移 --- p.129
Chapter 5.1.3 --- 表層特徵三：不和諧邏輯間之和諧 --- p.138
Chapter 5.2 --- 原文幽默語段的深層特徵 --- p.143
Chapter 5.3 --- 不規範的參數類型 --- p.149
Chapter 5.4 --- 表層與深層特徵的對應關係 --- p.160
Chapter 5.5 --- 小結 --- p.169
Chapter 第六章 --- 英譯本分析 --- p.171
Chapter 6.1 --- 英譯本的表層特徵 --- p.172
Chapter 6.1.1 --- 譯文表層特徵一：相似性之奇特統一 --- p.172
Chapter 6.1.2 --- 譯文表層特徵二：語言要素之巧妙轉移 --- p.182
Chapter 6.1.3 --- 譯文表層特徵三：不和諧邏輯間之和諧 --- p.186
Chapter 6.2. --- 英譯本的深層特徵 --- p.186
Chapter 6.3 --- 不規範的參數類型 --- p.194
Chapter 6.4 --- 譯文表層與深層特徵的對應關係 --- p.212
Chapter 6.5 --- 小結 --- p.222
Chapter 第七章 --- 譯文、原文對比分析 --- p.224
Chapter 7.1 --- 譯文、原文總體對比 --- p.224
Chapter 7.2 --- 譯文、原文分類對比 --- p.226
Chapter 7.2.1 --- 同型轉換 --- p.227
Chapter 7.2.2 --- 異型轉換 --- p.229
Chapter 7.3 --- 譯文、原文表層參數與深層參數的異同對比 --- p.231
Chapter 7.4 --- 譯文、原文表層與深層特徵對比 --- p.234
Chapter 7.5 --- 譯文、原文參數的層級排列對比 --- p.235
Chapter 7.5.1 --- 參數層級排列與原文的參數排列對比 --- p.235
Chapter 7.5.2 --- 參數層級排列與譯文的參數排列對比 --- p.237
Chapter 7.5.3 --- 譯文、原文中六個參數的層級排列對比 --- p.239
Chapter 7.6 --- 小結 --- p.241
Chapter 第八章 --- 《圍城》中言語幽默的英譯策略 --- p.243
Chapter 8.1 --- 同型轉換時的翻譯策略 --- p.244
Chapter 8.2 --- 異型轉換時的翻譯策略--譯文仍然是幽默語段 --- p.259
Chapter 8.3 --- 異型轉換時的翻譯策略--譯文不是幽默語段 --- p.267
Chapter 8.4 --- 小結暨討論 --- p.282
Chapter 第九章 --- 結論 --- p.286
Chapter 9.1 --- 研究結果 --- p.286
Chapter 9.2 --- 研究局限 --- p.291
Chapter 9.3 --- 研究前景 --- p.292
附錄一 --- p.294
參考文獻 --- p.307