Abstract
In June 1917, on his return trip to China from the United States, Hu Shi, who would soon become a major figure in China’s literary scene, read a small book, The Renaissance, by Edith Sichel (1862–1914). Sichel’s book, priced at a dollar, had been commissioned for the Home University Library and was intended to educate a mass American audience. Sichel was an academic, and her approach to the Renaissance was a product of centuries of knowledge transmission among elite thinkers, but her book had been written for the general public and is a good example of how ideas emerge from the academy and penetrate society.1 When Hu encountered Sichel’s book, the meeting created a “contact zone,” a space where people who are geographically and culturally separated come into contact and engage in meaning making.2 Sichel would likely never have expected her book on the European Renaissance to play a significant role in shaping a Chinese intellectual’s imagination of “vernacularization.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
My examination of Hu’s encounter with Sichel’s book benefits from Robert Darnton’s illuminating study of bestsellers in pre-revolutionary France, which showed that meanings do not come prepackaged in discourses but, rather, are shaped by various circumstances. Darnton’s work has made it easier for scholars to pay attention to popular genres and to explore the role of publishers and booksellers when discussing the reception of ideas. See Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).
Burke, “Jacob Burckhardt and the Italian Renaissance,” in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Penguin Books, 1990), 12.
Edith Sichel, The Renaissance (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), 8.
Hu Shi, Hu Shi liuxue riji, (Hu Shi’s Diary While Studying Abroad) (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1959), vol. 4, 1155.
Irene Eber, “Thoughts on Renaissance in Modern China,”, Studia Asiatica: Essays in Asian Studies in Felicitation of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of Professor Ch’en Shou-yi, ed. Laurence G. Thompson (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1975), 216.
Liang Qichao, Zhongguo xueshu sixiang bianqian zhi dashi (On the Development of Chinese Scholarship and Intellectual Trends) (Taipei: Huazheng shuju, 1981), 103.
Quoted from Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xiandai xueshu de jianli (Establishing Modern Chinese Scholarship) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1998), 336.
See the invention of the word transculturation in Ortiz: “The word transculturation better expresses the different phrases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation.” Fernando Oritz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 102–3.
Yu Ying-shih, “Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: A Historian’s Reflections on the May Fourth Movement,”, The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova and Oldrich Kral (Harvard University Press, 2001), 320.
It is tempting to approach Hu’s appropriations of the Renaissance as instances of Occidentalism defined by Xiaomei Chen as “a discursive practice that, by constructing its Western Other, has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation, even after being appropriated and constructed by Western Others” (Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China [Oxford University Press, 1994], 2). The reason I am hesitant to do so is that Chen’s Occidentalism is in a way a derivative of Orientalism, as Chen herself acknowledges: “Chinese Occidentalism is the product of Western Orientalism, even if its aims are largely and specifically Chinese” (Ibid., 5). On the one hand, I am not denying that Hu’s worldview is highly influenced by the Western thought, but I do not think that should be considered a case study of Western world domination. On the other hand, the emphasis of my discussion is certainly not on the workings of power relationship. My choice not to focus on them is a response to the overarching power of the theory of power. Sometimes one wonders whether obsessively talking about power merely reinforces that power, verbally and in other ways. For this reason, I prefer a more neutral term such as transculturation.
See Bruno Migliorni, The Italian Language (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984). The vernacular gained considerable ground in the fourteenth century, although the main contributions to the development of the vulgar tongue were made by the likes of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who drew strength from their knowledge of the classics and in their efforts to give artistic nobility to Italian. In the early fifteenth century, the vernacular went through a crisis. The humanists’ exaltation of Latin lowered the vernacular in public esteem. However, in the last decades of the century, the humanists’ search for a pure Latin only increased the uses of the vernacular in practical spheres. Between 1470 and 1550, printing made a decisive contribution to the stability and uniformity of language in Italy. The final codification of a standard written language occurred in the sixteenth century. The national language of Italy that Hu refers to did not even exist until a unified Italy was established in the nineteenth century.
Volosinov. V. N. “Verbal Interaction,”, Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 52–53.
For a recent book that examines the phenomenon of other Renaissances, see Brenda Schildgen, Gang Zhou and Sander Gilman, eds., Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006).
David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773–1885 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 123.
Hu Shi, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1933), 46.
The Bengali Renaissance traces its origin to the ancient Aryan civilization. The Aryans brought to India the Vedas and Brahmanism, with their sacred language, Sanskrit. The Bengali Renaissance, usually also labeled the Indian Renaissance, came to marginalize the Southern Indian Tamil Renaissance that began during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Tamil Renaissance espouses a separate “Dravidian” identity. See Francis Britto, Diglossia: A Study of the Theory with Application to Tamil (Georgetown University Press, 1986); also see Schildgen, “Sri Aurobindo: Renaissance in India and the Italian Renaissance.” in Schildgen, Other Renaissances.
Quoted from G. Smith, Life of Alexander Duff (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1879), I, 118.
Report of the Second Indian National Congress, 2. Quoted from Sankar Ghose, The Renaissance to Militant Nationalism in India (Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, Madras, Bangalore: Allied Publishers, 1969), 8.
See Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Book, 1979).
The kind of harmonious relationship with the English language that Aurobindo experienced became impossible as India went further down the road to national independence. A year after India had attained independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking in English at the Constituent Assembly in Delhi on May 16, 1949, said: “Here I am the patent example of these English contacts, speaking in this Honorable House in the English language. No doubt we are going to change that language for our use, but the fact remains that I am doing so and the fact remains that most other members who will speak will also do so.” H. J. S. Cotton, New India or India in Transition (London, 1886) But as of today, English, a “foreign” language, remains an “associate official language” in India.
In one of her articles on translation, G.C. Spivak tells the other side of the “ver-nacularization” story in India. “[F]rom the end of the eighteenth century, the fashioners of the new Bengali prose purged the language of the Arabic-Persian content until, in Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s (1824–73) great blank verse poetry, and the Bangadarshan (1872–76) magazine edited by the immensely influential novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya (1838–94), a grand and fully Sanskritized Bengali emerged … A corresponding movement of purging the national language Hindi of its Arabic and Persian elements has been under way since independence in 1947” (in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Berman and Michael Wood [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], 98). The kind of “synthesis” emphasized in Aurobindo’ paradigm was probably also oriented towards certain parties and certain relationships.
See Sasson Somekh, Genre and Language in Modern Arabic Literature (Otto Harrassowitz Wiesbaden, 1991).
Quoted from M. Pei, The Story of Language (New York, 1960), 159.
See Anwar Chejne, The Arabic Language: Its Role in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969).
Taha Husayn, the great Egyptian writer (1889–1973), states: “I am now and will always remain unalterably opposed to those who regard the colloquial as a suitable instrument for mutual understanding and a method for realizing the various goals of our intellectual life … The colloquial lacks the qualities to make it worthy of the name of a language. I look on it as a dialect that has been corrupted in many respects. It might disappear, as it were, into the classical if we devoted the necessary effort on the one hand to elevate the cultural level of the people and on the other to simplify and reform the classical so that the two meet at a common point.” Husayn, The Future of Culture in Egypt, trans. Sidney Glazer (Washington: American Council of Learned Society, 1954), 86.
Seybolt & Chiang, Language Reform in China (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1979), 18–19.
Copyright information
© 2011 Gang Zhou
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zhou, G. (2011). The Chinese Renaissance. In: Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117044_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117044_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29211-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11704-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)