‘Versailles literature’ on WeChat Moments – humblebragging with digital technologies

Abstract

Versailles literature is a newly emerged phenomenon on Chinese social networking sites. It is in essence an indirect form of self-praise. Despite its popularity on social media, there is little research on this phenomenon. This study investigates the pragmatic strategies for performing VL on WeChat Moments. The results showed that Versailles literature often includes strategies such as implicit self-praise, modified explicit self-praise, and self-praise through comments and replies, among which the tactics that have not been observed before, such as bragging in a foreign language, creating false ‘question–answer’ or ‘compliment–response’ interactions and commenting to the adverts. These strategies are implemented in various ways by virtue of the technological affordance of WeChat Moments, in order to balance the disclosure and the dissimulation of the object of praise. The study also discusses the distinctive features of VL and explains the absence of some frequent strategies of self-praising in Versailles literature.

Responses to self-praise on Chinese social media

“…In example (7), the blogger directly praised the hiking with her friend as successful. The use of emoji intensified her happiness and pride by adding a positive feeling to the utterance (Zuo, 2023b). In the reply comment, the netizen simply asked about the location of the hike.…”

“…The particular speech style was realized by various mitigating strategies to avoid explicitly self-praising. Likewise, Zuo (2023b) explored functions of WeChat Moments' affordances in Versailles literature, that is, combining different pragmatic strategies, complimenting different objects at the same time, modifying the degree of self-praise, emphasizing the self-praising act and hiding the self-praising intention. Lin and Chen (2022) argued that the viral popularity of Versailles literature in China is driven by two major socio-psychological factors, that is, the tucao Internet subculture and the bandwagon effect.…”