Author ｜
Theodore Huters, Vanina Wen-hsuan Kao trans.
Abstract ｜
It has been known for more than a century that the Chinese term wenxue 文學 in its now ordinary meaning as the equivalent of the English “literature” was a loan-word from Japanese, brought into China in the waning years of the nineteenth century. The older meaning of the term was something like our sense of “humanities,” and/or writing informed by a profound sense of moral and stylistic conviction. This change has become common knowledge, but its implications have rarely been explored.There was, of course, a large amount of aesthetic writing in pre-1900 China that fit within the definition of what we now refer to as wenxue, but what are the implications of the fact that there was never a single category that encompassed all the genres and forms we now take for granted as making up the constituent components of wenxue? In my paper, I intend to look into some of these implications, from the most obvious, such as the consequences entailed by the inclusion of xiaoshuo 小說 within “literature,” to the less easily detected, such as how the new category of wenxue affected the standing of discursive prose and its relation to the expression of ideas. To what extent, for instance, did Wang Guowei’s notion of the “purposelessness” of literature feed back into the movement to deny the efficacy of the classical language to express “modernity?” Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is what might be called the “palimpsest effect,” or how the pre-existing sense of the term had an unacknowledged effect on its new meaning and function. This, on the one hand, expanded the sense of writing regarded as wenxue to the broader cultural role assigned to it in the pre-modern period, while, on the other, paradoxically setting limits based on a new sense of a particular set of aesthetic parameters and a need to fit into a newly conceived “international” sense of the term.To what extent can the tension-fraught history of wenxue in twentieth-century China be traced back to this collision of meanings in the early years of the century?
keywords ｜
wenxue/literature, shiwen, Tongcheng school, wen yi zaidao, reader and writer