| "Black humor" refers to a modern literature school of America in the late1960s.Its representative writers are mainly Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon,Vladimir Nabokov, William Geddes, John Hawks, John Barth, James Purdy and so on.In1965, B.J. Friedman firstly put forward the term "black humor" in his short fictionentitled "black humor". So, the school got the name and thrived. The characteristics ofblack humor novel protrudes the absurdity and coldness of living environment, sneersat and attacks traditional value and aesthetic concepts with helpless irony, and presentsthe alienation of the world, humanistic degeneration and emotional fragment. Byvirtue of exaggeration and combination, conflict and contradiction are strengtheneddramatically, which makes readers deeply feel funny, anguished and future indefinite.The interpretation of black humor novels is of great value in cognition.Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most popular black humor novelists in America.Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s representative. The salient feature of this novel isblack humor. The application of Cognitive theories in linguistics to analyze the blackhumor novel is beneficial to interpret the deep meaning of the novel, and reveals thetheme that wars are cruel and ridiculous.Based on previous researches, from the angle of cognition, this thesis makes anattempt to interpret black humor in Slaughterhouse-Five. From three perspectives ofcharacters, themes and writing skills, it studies the novel from the perspective ofSemantic Script Theory of Humor (SSTH), General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH)and Cognitive Construal (CC), aiming to testify whether these cognitive theories areeffective to unscramble black humor in the novel. |
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