An Analysis Of Black Humour's Artistic Features In White Teeth

Zadie Smith,a young Jamaican-British female writer,by virtue of her excellent first-published novel White Teeth in 2000,gaining widespread attentions.The setting of White Teeth is multiethnic North London where unfolds a story around the entanglements of three families.The novel writes in a humourous style with unique structure,which narration seems wordy but thought-provoking,being popular with readers at home and abroad.As the beginning of new millennium literature,the writing of White Teeth contains the feature of realism,modernism and post-modernism.Black Humour highlights Smith's White Teeth,which is one of the significant literary schools in modernism and post-modernism.Black Humour literature generates in America in the 1960 s as a literary school of modernism,fully reflecting the intense anti-traditional artistic features with the employment of satire,ridicule,absurd,exaggeration and even transformation.Developing to the 1990 s,Black Humour gradually appears the feature of post-modernism,widely applying to English and American post-modernism novels.This thesis analyses the narrative style of White Teeth based on the theory of Black Humour's artistic techniques,excavating the novel's internal structure,intending to reveal current situation of immigrant group in Britain.Following the contemplation,this thesis consists of six parts.The first part is an introduction of Zadie Smith's life and career,and her famous masterpiece—White Teeth.It also gives a survey of studies of White Teeth at home and abroad,and explains main ideas of the thesis.In the first chapter,it revolves around the theory of Black Humour,elucidating its origin,definition and artistic features.For artistic features,they contain three domains which are plot features,characterization and language style.Chapter two starts the mainbody of this paper.The plots of Black Humour novels are always disordered and messy with half-done narration and disorganized plots,which are mainly represented as anti-climax,anti-centre and the method of time-travel.With the guidance of the above features,this chapter principally analyses the “Black Humour” plots in White Teeth to show a disordered living environment of Britain immigrant group.Chapter three analyses the characterization in the novel,which interprets two highlighted images by way of the features of “anti-hero” in Black Humour works and also gives explanations to other deformed characters,in order to perceive the absurd spiritual world of Britain immigrant groups.Chapter four expounds the language style of the whole novel through the variety of the language and rhetorical devices to embody the novel's Black Humour.The setting of the novel is multinational so as to the language is diversified,which blends with English,Jamaican,Bangla and so on;besides,the author keeps the story alive by better use of the rhetorical devices like symbolism,satire,exaggeration etc.It gives a further demonstration of Britain immigrants' chaotic living environment through analyzing the language style of the novel.Through the above expressions in plots,characters and languages,the thesis comes to the conclusion.It discusses the artistic features of Black Humour in White Teeth,appearing the current situation of London immigrants after the Second World War,at the same time deeply expressing the chaos and absurdity of Britain immigrants' living environment and spiritual world.