A Memetic Study Of Metaphor In Wei Cheng And Its English Version Fortress Besieged

Since Aristotle, metaphor has been arousing popular interest. It has developed from a rhetorical study to a series of comprehensive studies complete with rhetoric, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, etc. Qian Zhongshu believes that metaphor is the essence of literary expression, as he did in his Wei Cheng. A large number of scholars have studied Wei Cheng in terms of its theme, image of the character, and metaphor as an effective artistic technique, while few have studied from the perspective of memetics. The author of the present thesis conducted a memetic study of metaphor in Wei Cheng and its English version Fortress Besieged. In this thesis, the metaphor is studied just as a kind of meme, an element of culture, which can be imitated and passed on.Qian Zhongshu, the erudite writer, employs large numbers of similes and metaphors to create the unexpected and marvelous artistic effects. His metaphorical style is formed in the same process of a meme's successful replication, which will pass through four stages: assimilation, retention, expression and transmission. The analyses in the thesis are developed from the following aspects: the purposes and effects of metaphor, the features of metaphor, the forms of metaphor and the images of metaphor in Qian's meme pool. In illustrating the point, the author employed exemplification to render her argument reasonable and justifiable. In addition, Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao, the translators of Fortress Besieged, are also infected by Qian's metaphorical memes, so similes and metaphors are tackled with the methods of literal translation which is a successful way to transmit source language culture. The successful rendering of memes plays a very important role in literary creation and cultural transmission..