Critique Of Hu Shi's Poetics

It was when the late Qing Dynasty's "Poetic Revolution" and the movement of "Upholding the Vernacular and Opposing Classical Literary Style" in prose writing had almost come to an end that Hu Shi, holding the banner of Cultural Revolution high and together with Chen Duxiu and a few others, started the May Fourth New Cultural Movement. Hu Shi's view of vernacular, his poetic theories and practices such as literary evolution, emancipating poetry, and so on and so forth have influenced Chinese modern literature much greatly. It may be true to say that the entire development of the Chinese literature since the beginning of the last century has all been based on the vernacular movement advocated by Hu Shi. However, while it is necessary to affirm the great impetus of Hu Shi's poetics to modern Chinese culture, we must also acknowledge the negative effects of it. In the two decades of the thirties and forties of the last century, both Fei Ming and Zhu Guangqian had questioned and refuted Hu Shi's theories of freeing from poetic conventions and using no allusions, suggesting that the later trend of over prose-likeness or prosaicness of poetry that led the loss of the poeticalness has all been the result of the negative effects of Hu Shi's poetics. This dissertation attempts to provide an analytical criticism, based on an objective, comprehensive and systematic analysis of Hu Shi's poetics, while affirming its positive function, of its anti-modernity, anti-poetical ness by applying both Chinese and western literary theories.The dissertation will set off its discussion mainly in parts as follows. It begins with an introduction, which gives reasons, identifies the purposes and significance of the work, puts in order the preliminary studies and the raw materials, sets the study method and synopsizes the main points of the paper and its innovative points.Apart from the introduction, this dissertation consists of four chapters.Chapter one will mainly examin the historical background of Hu Shi' s poetics, pointing out that it was the "poetic revolution" put forth by Huang Zunxian and others and the view of "Upholding the Vernacular and Opposing Classical Literary Style" in prose writing by Qiu Tingliang and others that served as the basis of Hu Shi's poetics. From historical background to Hu Shi's personal influences, I identify five, namely, the cultural and poetic influences of the Chinese traditional culture, the theory of evolution, the philosophical method of experimentalism, the literary trend of realism and the thought of liberalism.Chapter two will concern a debate between Hu Shi's new poetics at its drafting stage and the school of XueHeng, a sect of Chinese cultural selfish departmentalists, trying to give systematic reflections on Hu Shi's series of views from the perspective of cultural conservatism. Besides, I also give reflections on Hu Shi's poetic theories by subjecting them to the traditional Chinese poetics as represented by such scholars as Fei Ming, Gu Sui and Yu Pingbo. Further on in this chapter, I shall consider Hu's theories as examined from the perspective of Western poetics by Zhu Guangqian, Liang Zongdai and Li Jianwu as representatives of studies of this approach.Chapter three will mainly be a critique of Hu's vernacular view from the angle of comparative studies in both Chinese and western languages and also from the general trend of linguistic development. Then I will come to a criticism of Hu's "great poetic emancipation" plan. Further on, also based on modern poetics, I shall provide an analysis of Hu's eight claims as explained in A Tentative Discussion of Lierary Evolution (《文学改良刍议》) (namely, the eight views of using speech or writing to mean substance; of not imitating the ancients; of being grammatical; of no groaning without a disease; of getting rid of cliches; of not using allusions; of not having antithesis as purpose; of not avoiding colloquialism as a principle). I propose that in a certain sense, these view all go against modernity and are counter-poetics. Chapter four, as a conclusion, will give an aesthetic analysis of Hu's theories and point out the nature of anti-modernity and anti-poeticalness in his poetics.