Imagination And Practice

The paper is divided into three parts: the language activities Lin Yutang had participated in,Lin’s literary language view and literature practice.By analyzing these three parts,we try to understand his imagination of literary language and language characteristics of literature practice while Lin is young——before he settled in America in 1936.Meanwhile,we try to explore the relationship between his literary practice and imagination.We are looking forward to have a further understanding of humorous quotative essay creation Lin advocated in the 1930 s and treat it as an approach to recognize complex language field,thereby probing into the language ecology of the day.The first part traces the language activities that Lin Yutang had been involved in since the beginning of the new culture movement.Taught in Tsinghua University,in 1918,Lin published two articles about index system of Chinese characters in the journal New Youth.After going to the United States in 1919,Lin kept continuous communication with Hu Shi,discussing the language of the new literature,he concerned the vernacular movement and devoted into Mandarin romanization construction and dialect research immediately after coming back.The second part investigates Lin’s literary language view and determines his attitude and position in the vernacular movement mainly through the analysis of Lin Yutang’s published articles.Lin’s basic view of literary language is introducing classical Chinese into vernacular Chinese and accepting the influence of europeanization to some extent in order to improve vernacular Chinese.His ideal of mandarin is clear,simple,elegant and natural.At the same time,"humor" is also an aspect that cannot be ignored in discussing Lin Yutang’s view of literary language.This was his idea from the 1920 s to the 1960 s.The third part analyzes Lin Yutang’s literary practice,mainly investigating the stylistic features of his articles published in Yu Si magazine in the 1920 s and his writing of quotations in the 1930 s.From the perspective of language structure,his creative practice in the 1920 s,integrated factors such as europeanization factor,composition of classical Chinese and spoken dialect into written vernacular,reflecting his free and uninhibited spirit and "language silk" style full of publicity.The quotation works of the 1930 s included both classical works and more hybrid works,this kind of literary practice on the middle road between europeanized vernacular and popular language is not only his practical attempt of national language imagination,but also the implementation and writing of his humorous proposition.