Suchergebnisse

The Italian scholar and political leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an active opponent of the dictatorial government ruling his country before the 2nd World War. He was kept in prison for11 years, until his death, by the ruling Fascist Party and during that time he filled over 3,000 pages, writing about Linguistics, History and Philosophy. He was concerned with the duty of Italian progressive intellectuals to create a 'common literary language', accessible to the under-privileged Italian people, who until then had been excluded from culture. After the war, during the sixties of last century, a 'common Italian language' started developing, through the introduction of the 10-years long compulsory school and the increasing power of mass media: that language was not fit to become the common literary language of the Nation. The writer and movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), who in his novels gave voice to the sub-urban proletarians of the city of Rome, was highly unsatisfied with the new common language that was in the process of being established in the country. As for China, when the imperial system was abolished by the 'Xinhai revolution', in 1911, the belief became increasingly widespread among intellectuals that the rebirth of China had to be based in the global rejection of the Confucian tradition and that the 'Báihuà' (people's language) should be adopted in literature, replacing the 'Wényán' (classical language), not accessible to the common people. Lu Xun and his colleagues eventually succeeded in their efforts of establishing the 'Báihuà' as the common literary language of China. Purpose of the paper is the comparison between the efforts exerted by these literati in creating a 'common literary language' in their respective countries.

The purpose of the present paper is to study the impact of Cambridge Literary Criticism (CLC) on Chinese scholars, since the visit to Peking's Tsinghua University by Prof. Igor Armstrong Richards, the initiator of CLC, in 1929, until present times. That first encounter signed the beginning of a fruitful intercultural communication activity between the two countries, which lasted for a decennial. Those contacts between the British literary world, imbued with the scientific spirit that was the basis of 'Cambridge Criticism', was very stimulating for the Chinese academic world, of that was being born. Unfortunately, those contacts were forcefully interrupted in 1939, in the raging of the anti-Japanese war. They resumed, with fruitful results, toward the end of last millennium, when the Chinese government issued a "Program for Education's Reform and Development in China". In present times the new movement of 'Ethical Literary Criticism' is developing in China by initiative of Prof. Nie Zhenzhao, from Peking's 'Central China Normal University', who took inspiration from the works of the Cambridge literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis.