On the Legibility of Expression: Rethinking the Transformation of Modern Chinese Prose

Speaker: CEAS CHINA BROWN BAG, SPRING 2009-10 Theodore Huters Professor of Chinese, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA While there has been a good deal of revisionist scholarship on the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s in recent years, the key assumption that the linguistic reform that was a major part of the movement was both desirable and necessary has hardly been questioned. My talk re-opens the debate over this linguistic transformation, beginning with Yan Fu and Zhang Taiyan's concerns about writing expressed in the late Qing. It poses questions about the cost in intellectual autonomy and initiative of the radical simplification of prose expression demanded by early 20th century reformers.