「不朽」の修辭學 : 胡適・コスモポリタニズム・白話詩

Abstract

Today Hu Shi is well known as the major player in the Literary Revolution. His important idea of new literature had been already proposed and argued with his friends, when he stayed in Cornel and Columbia University (1911-1917). The aim of this paper is to trace the argument in those days, and examine its political implication. Hu's diary written in America tells us his remarkable action of writing various topics, and one notes one of the important problems to him was to resolve the conflict between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. As an idealistic cosmopolitan, Hu tried to mediate the both and give priority to the latter, because cosmopolitanism would cause the peace or the cooperation to ease the international struggle. Hu was at first the heir to the heritage of the nationalism ideologue Liang Qichao, but in the end, from Hu's viewpoint, to be cosmopolitan was not contradictory to loving his coountry. There was also another problem which caused an argument among them: the conflict between Chinese classical language (wen-yan) supported by Mei Guangdi and vernacular language (bai-hua) supported by Hu Shi. In order to criticize the privilege of classical poetry written in bai-hua. But after he returned to China, he still had to argue with conservatives who condemned his new style. Hu then proposed the characteristic theory of poetry, which had great relationship with secular communication rather than sublime messages. His perspective of poetry was also related with cosmopolitanism, and his rhetoric of justification of cosmopolitanism had a strong resemblance to that of bai-hua. His major essay "Immortality" theorized the rhetoric. In this essay, he proposed a new universal theory, "Social Immortality", instead of the philosophy of Confucianism. Using poetic metaphor, he tried to not only change traditional legitimacy but also define immortality as the universe in which everything exists. Therefore the range of communication he thought infinitely extended from individual to humanity, from the past to the future. And whether conscious or not, his idea in "Immortality" was widely shared among May-Fourth writers.