A Discourse Analysis Of Black Humor In Catch-22

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the generation mechanism of black humor in Heller's Catch-22 from the perspective of discourse analysis.In the theoretical framework of this thesis, the author first introduces the past research of black humor in such areas as literature, sociology and psychology, etc. The author points out that the analysis of black humor should be carried out from the viewpoint of discourse analysis, which plays an important part in linguistic analysis. The reason is that any form of humor that falls into the concerns of linguists can not be divorced from the whole discourse. Therefore, the author introduces cohesion theory, speech acts and conversational principles, as well as cultural context.As a new linguistic expression, black humor emerges in the United States in 1960s. Since then, the phenomenon of black humor has attracted extensive attention from scholars. But so far, no one can give a satisfactory definition of black humor. At present a more consistent view is that: black humor is a kind of"apocalyptic humor,""gallows humor,""desperate comedy", which combines with fear and despair. This paper argues that black humor is a form of comedy which makes people laugh desperately towards the ridiculous and meaningless life.Next the paper briefly describes the object of this article - Catch-22.The main part of the thesis applies the theories of discourse analysis into the analysis of the novel, which can be generally divided into two parts. The first part explores the use of semantic devices to achieve the effect of black humor. The second section discusses how black humor is generated through the violation of such pragmatic devices as the maxims of speech act theory, cooperative principle and politeness principle and how black humor can be better appreciated in the cultural context.The analysis of Catch-22 shows that the effect of black humor can be created through the form level, the contents level, as well as cultural context level of the discourse, making the readers think about the miserable situation of human beings after laughter.The author believes that the approach of discourse analysis has an interpretation force for the generation mechanism of black humor, and that the study is worth further carrying out.