The politics of aestheticization: Zhou Zuoren and the crisis of the Chinese New Culture (1927-1937)

Focusing on Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967), a leading essayist and intellectual in modern China, this thesis analyzes the unfolding of the "New Culture" during the 1930s. Rather than describing an evolution of the May Fourth literary and intellectual revolution, it seeks to fathom the changed structure of social, political and cultural relations in which the Chinese Enlightenment intellectuals were forced to rethink their agenda and adjust their strategy. Among the positions and alternatives conditioned but also suppressed by the Communist-Nationalist confrontation, this thesis examines the "libertarian" discourse--the discourse of the urban, educated middle class who kept a cautious distance from the predominant political forces--as it took shape, both aesthetically and politically, in Zhou Zuoren's production of the personal essay (xiaopinwen). It shows that this "libertarianism" differs significantly from the conventional picture of the Anglophilic liberalism embodied by Hu Shi and his followers. Instead of advocating a piecemeal evolution, thus compromising and cooperating with institutional power, Zhou Zuoren engaged in a subtle negotiation between, on the one hand, a radical notion of Enlightenment centered on the coming-into-being of the rational individual, and on the other hand, a prudent elaboration of his stylistic codes and symbolic community as an everyday culture. Via the medium of xiaopinwen, Zhou carried on the May Fourth commitment to the building of a "literature of the ordinary people" while accommodating the internal drive of the vernacular literature to become a belles lettres which provides a discursive location and aesthetic prestige for the modern Chinese literati in a turbulent social sphere.; Based on the dialectic between social and formal histories, this thesis argues that the aesthetic solution to a political dilemma must also be a political solution to an aesthetic one; that any intellectual intervention is simultaneously an innovative leap within the paradigmatic chain of that particular literary-discursive tradition. By analyzing the personal essay as a strategy of writing vis-a-vis the space of political positions and symbolic powers, it confronts the crisis of the Chinese New Culture striving to define itself between its conditions and ideologies.