From The Vernacular Chinese To The Popular Dialect

It is generally agreed that the discussions of China's Popular Dialect in 1930's was successful, having promoted the construction of new literature and modern Chinese written language. The author intends to review the history of literature of that time on the basis of textual research and analysis. She also believes that comparing with May 4th Vernacular, The Popular Dialect was merely a utilitarian, close and anti-literature class utterance. Instead of following the modern tradition of May 4th Literature, it recovered the classical spirit of literature of writings for conveying truth, tying to create another New Literature Movement paradigm. In terms of the value of May 4* New Literature Vernacular, The author explains the discussions of the popularity and the meaning of the Popular Dialect comparatively, arguing that the Popular Dialect was on the whole a failure in inheriting the new tradition of May 4th Literature, developing the modernization of literature and carrying out the complicated and unique literature practice due to its logic bigotry, its theoretical radicalness and its shallow writings.This dissertation includes four parts.The first part discusses the Popular Dialect and popularity, and the discussions about it, explaining the cause and process of popularity. It focuses on how the 1930's discussions about popularity led to the third Popular Dialect.Part two deals with the Popular Dialect in the discussions of popularity in which May 4th tradition had been a target of criticism. Correspondingly there formed three different schools towards May 4th Literature: school of defense, school of negation and Lu Xun's Views. The vernacular Chinese played a role between Classical Chinese and The Popular Dialect.Part three emphasizes on the Popular Dialect associated with the Vernacular Chinese. Looking back to the period of May 4th literature, it is not difficult to find that the Vernacular Chinese and the Popular Dialect had differences in different aspects. While the former had both utilitarian and literature purposes the latter was only for a literal purpose in terms of utility; while the former was open and multi-element the latter unitary and close; while the former was a carrier of one's consciousness of his own life the latter was only a receptacle of political ideas.The last part explains the circumstances that the Popular Dialect found itself in and its destiny, mainly analyzing what caused its failure. The author thinks that the Popular Dialect lost its balance in dealing with the relations between traditions and radicalness, class character and modernization. Its initiators and supporters also failed to take account of these two as a whole. It was a powerless and radical utterance which absorbed only part of May 4th tradition, aiming at recovering the classical spirit of literature of writings for conveying truth. Besides, The Popular Dialect had become a kind of class utterance based on its theoretically mechanical application , advocating class contradictions while strongly opposing the colorful modern vernacular, appearing to be more classical, rather than popular. All these resulted in both the readers' and the writer's refusal of it, thus indicating its failure.