Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature (review)

Chinese literary history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remains enormously resonant in the study of modern Chinese literature. The great merit of Placing the Modern Chinese Vernacular in Transnational Literature is Gang Zhou's unique lens of analysis of this pivotal period, that is, her richly informative exploration of the vernacular movement in modern Chinese literature. Lucid and illuminating, this book also breaks the conventional nation-based framework of literary studies and is not afraid to traverse borders. Demonstrating "kinship" among vernacular movements in a world setting, the author engages with the Chinese vernacular project from an expressly comparative perspective (9). The echoes, parallels, and analogies among different geographies and historical junctures are adeptly elaborated into a fuller comparative landscape of world literature, "a system of variations" (71, emphasis in original).

Zhou is gifted at tracing the roots, forms, and contours of changes and developments of certain discursive cultural practices. The four chapters are in a sense unified by this skill. In chapter 1, "The Language of Utopia," Zhou lays out in detail the changes in Chinese intellectuals' attitude toward the vernacular and sheds light on how this metamorphosis in language attitude is intermeshed with political needs and ideological productions. She highlights May Fourth vernacular discourse as a threshold and shows how the vernacular finally comes to dominate the political domain, shed its skin of vulgarity, shatter the diglossic structure of the Chinese language, and claim its triumph by virtue of its utopian character. Chapter 2, "The Chinese Renaissance," delves into the reincarnated lives of the Renaissance in different geopolitical contexts traversing China, India, and the Arab world. Such a comparative approach illustrates the fluidity of the Renaissance beyond its European origin. For instance, the creative processes of implanting and legitimizing the concept of renaissance in local contexts is enlivened in Zhou's penetrating analysis of how Hu Shi misreads and reinvents Dante as an anti-Latin hero in order to advancing his militant stance against classical Chinese. In chapter 3, "The Shaky House," Zhou's sensitive gift for tracing unseen contours becomes most fruitful. She takes issue with the traditional understanding of the writing experience of May Fourth writers as either making the canon of the vernacular or repressing other modes of modernities. Rather than seeing vernacular writing as a coherent, self-possessed, and reified entity, Zhou treats it as living, breathing, and volatile. From Martin Heidegger's writings Zhou draws the metaphor of the "the proper abode," which, in its original formulation, describes man's existence in language and thus conjures up an affective image of a shaky house. In Zhou's words: "In the case of that generation of May Fourth writers, who were ordained to experience a dramatic language change, their proper abode must have been shaky and precarious" (7, emphasis in original). Zhou uncovers the psychological, emotional, and linguistic intricacies of the May Fourth writers and shows the vernacular in this historical juncture as a language of anxiety, rivalry, manipulation, and uncertainty. She then opens up an inviting comparative vista, introducing the May Fourth writers' "foreign kin," which includes Meiji writers, Dante and Martin Luther, into " the 'shaky house' family" (97). Chapter 4, "The 'Vernacular Only' Writing Mode," further illustrates Zhou's gift for studying a particular individual or an area and tracing the contours of changes and connections. Whether reading through the personal letters of a single individual (Liu Yazi) or flipping through the pages of the issues of a single journal (Dongfang zashi) from 1919 to 1921, Zhou succeeds in enhancing the general understanding of Chinese literary history during this critical period of transition. Both Liu Yazi's letters and Dongfang zashi incarnate the traumatic experiences and complexities of the "vernacular only" writing mode.

My only disquiet with this book concerns its scope. The broad thesis of "a system with variations" comes off as lavishly all encompassing. The logic of variations remains rather vague. The mutual ground for comparison...