Shuang Shen is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese, Penn State University

This paper situates Cantonese literature in the context of several key programmatic changes of language in the twentieth-century Sinosphere, including language reforms, language movements, or language policies. It aims to show how Cantonese literature critically engages with “accessibility” as a cultural and political issue through navigating through certain fetishized divisions between the classical and the modern, script and sound, the national and the regional, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese dialect. The paper examines a number of cases drawn from a variety of literary treatises and texts, including Lu Xun’s essays on Hong Kong (1927), Lin Shouling’s serial fiction Diary of a Muddleheaded Man (1950’s), and the documents related to the Chinese Language Movement of early 1970’s.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, 'rough work.' This rough work session is hosted by EAP core faculty member, Andrea Bachner.