Human-Nature-Ecology---Eco-critical Analysis Of Margaret Laurence’s The Loons

The Analects, which records Confucius and his disciples’s sayings and deeds, as well as the discussions they held, is the representative work of Confucianism. It is an epitome of the Confucian political thought, moral ideas and educational principles, which has a far-reaching impact on Chinese society. As early as the end of1579, the first Latin version of The Analects was appeared and the study of The Analects’ translations has never ceased in the next four hundred years. Today, The Analects has been already translated into dozens of foreign languages whose general impression is higher than any other best seller and only next to the Bible. By now, there are more than50English translation versions, from which we can see its great influence in the world.Most of the previous studies on The Analects mainly focused on the micro level, for example, the analysis of the sentence structure, the translation strategies and methods and the comparison of different versions, but seldom did the studies touch upon the macro level. Therefore, this thesis adopts a cultural transmission theory--the memetics to analyze the translation and transmission process of The Analects in English-speaking countries.Memetics, which takes meme as the smallest unit of the imitation, is an evolution theory of the universal Darwinism from the perspective of human culture. Based on the memetic theory, the thesis redefines the translation and hypothesizes that Chinese classics’ translation process is Chinese culture’s transmission process. Additionally, the thesis also attempts to analyze the transmission of Confucian memes through the translation medium from the perspective of memetics in detail.This thesis is composed of five parts:Part one gives a brief introduction to the background information of the research, research significance, research methodology and the structure of the thesis; Part two deals with the literature review which includes a brief introduction of Confucius and The Analects, then summarizes previous studies on The Analects both at home and abroad; Part three provides a theoretical framework. This part makes a brief introduction of the memetic theory through introducing the definition of meme, features of meme, stages of meme transmission and general memetic selection criteria, etc. Moreover, in this part, the relationship between memetics and translations is also analyzed; Part four is the core part of the thesis which attempts to apply memetic theory to explain the translation and cultural transmission of The Analects in the English world. It depicts a schema and presents a systematic analysis of Confucianism’transmission from the memetic point of view. Based on the schema, the author makes a detail analysis of the transmission of Confucian memes and summarizes that the transmission process of Confucian memes follows the rules of cultural evolution. During the transmission process, Confucian memes continuously vary themselves to adapt to the dynamic cultural environment. Just because of their adaptability, the translation of The Analects presents a trend from domestication to foreignization; Part five draws a conclusion of the thesis and summarizes that the reason why Confucian memes can be successfully replicated and transmitted among different groups in different periods is that they can vary themselves to adapt to dynamic cultural environment and meet the demands of the readers. The tendency of the translation and transmission of The Analects is that the intact traits of Confucian memes will be transmitted to the English-speaking countries gradually. Finally, it is hoped that through the analysis of this thesis, some inspirations can be provided for the translation and transmission of other Chinese classics, thus facilitating the interculture communication between East and West.