A Probe Into Chinese And English Bestseller Titles From The Perspective Of Memetics

Once a book turns into a bestseller, it means great success to the author, the press and the dealers, either economically or in the sense of publicity, which enhances the author's reputation and unveils other enormous benefits as well. Bestsellers unveil the value orientation and the spiritual and cultural state of a region or a generation. A successful bestseller title attracts readers'attention immediately and forecasts its popularity.The phenomenon has aroused more and more concern. Up to now, loads of researches have been conducted, aiming to analyze the qualities of bestsellers, their research perspectives ranging from selected topic, marketing strategy, propagation medium, social psychology, etc. However, comparatively less researches probe into bestsellers from the angel of book titles. Despite the fact that some work has been done to study present situation of bestseller titles, few systemic research has been conducted via pragmatic channels, let alone a relatively new theory Memetics, which enjoys powerful explanatory power and wide popularity in pragmatic circle. Memetic view holds that language is the tool to spread meme and meme pushes forward the evolution of the language through imitating and variation. Strong meme works like virus in gene, spreading fast and having great effect. One of the prominent features of bestseller titles is language use, which reflects changes and development of a certain language. Since no work has ever been conducted to probe into bestseller titles with memetics, this thesis aims at filling this blank.Based on qualitative research of memetic phenomena collected and sorted from authoritative bestseller lists, etc., this thesis tries to illustrate memetic features of bestsellers'titles and comes to the finding that bestseller titles enjoy advantages for being replicators. Based on memetic view of language, the author analyses single memes and memeplexes in bestseller titles and makes classification of bestseller titles which is distinct from traditional approaches. This thesis also analyzes the reasons for successful prevailing of bestsellers'titles in present world, and the selection criteria at assimilation, retention, expression and transmission stages that a successful book title meme has to undergo, as well as to explore major replication and transmission types of bestseller title memes, namely meme genotype and meme phenotype. Analysis reveals that it is feasible to probe into bestseller titles from the perspective of memetics and that present bestseller titles are results from functions of strong language memes. Besides, a systemic and comprehensive framework is constructed at the end of the thesis, which may be helpful for us to better understand how language memes function in bestseller titles, and to acquire some inspirations for creating ideal book titles. At the end of this dissertation, suggestions will be made on how to hold a correct attitude towards the phenomenon of"follow-trend".