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ter Two Literature Review

This chapter is composed of the following parts: basic conceptions of Memetics,researches on Memetics abroad and at home, theoretical basis, review of Englishwriting teaching and related studies on Memetics to English writing.

2.1 Basic conceptions of Memetics
The New Oxford Dictionary (2009: 1257) of English described meme: “a type ofbehaviour that is passed from one member of a group to another, not in the GENESbut by anther means such as people copying it.” The word “meme” was first putforward in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976, which was coined from theGreek word mimeme, meaning imitation, to explain the evolutionary law of culture.There are two definitions of meme: one is cultural transmission unit, the second isimitate units (Xie & Lin, 2008). In 1999, his student, Susan Blackmore, published hisbook The Meme Machine, and the book fully improved the former point of view to agreat extent .We can find memes everywhere around. Dawkins (1976) describes it as follows:Examples of memes are tunes, thoughts, beliefs, aphorism, clothing fashions,methods of manufacture pots or construct arches. Just like genes propagate by spermor eggs, memes propagate their own cultural meme from one brain to another brain,broadly defined, which can be called imitation. For example, if a scientist hears orreads a good idea, he will pass it on to his colleagues and students. He mentioned itthrough his articles and speeches. If this idea springs up, it can be said to propagateitself, leaping from brain to brain. Any information can be called meme as long as itcan be copied by imitation.A kind of classification depends on the meme capability in being copied and incompeting with other memes to be kept in its host’s memory as long as possible.There are two kinds of memes: strong memes and weak memes.There are two ways for language memes transmitting and spreading, for whichwe can classify meme into two kinds: genotype and phenotype. Same content butdifferent form is genotype. Different content but same form is phenotype.
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2.2 Researches on Memetics abroad and at home
The time of the appearance of Memetics is not too long, people have greatinterests in Memetics both abroad and at home and research it in different fields.Memetics is a new theory based on Darwin’s theory of cultural evolution. The source of the theory has a long history.In 1890, Gabriel Tarde pointed out in his masterpiece The Laws of Imitation:“Various imitations can lead to similarities of the social communicative derivation.Such as, tradition imitation, fashion imitation, rebellion imitation and obey imitation,natural imitation sedulous imitation, etc.” Therefore, he believes that society is justimitation (Marsden, 2000).Meme first appeared in the Oxford University distinguished professor RichardDawkins’ book The selfish gene. Dawkins defined it “a basic unit of culturaltransmission” (Dawkins, 1976). What is more important, Dawkins pointed out thethree characteristics of meme: copy-fidelity, fecundity and longevity.The book Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society waspublished by Lynch in 1996, and at the same year Brodie published Virus of the Mind:the New Science of the Meme. Finally, They concluded that the process of informationreplication is also a process of acquiring knowledge for the meme existed in humanbeings’ brains and it replicated to the obtained informat