Women Used To Perform Cultural Critique At Both A Linguistic And A Discourse Level

By Author: kobe
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Sanwen and redefinition are the major rhetorical choices I focus on in this essay, for they enabled Chen and Yang to communicate explicitly to their readers about their views of nuquanzhuyi and to envision new possibilities for themselves and other women. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many writers experimented with baihua (the vernacular) sanwen, integrating some features they appropriated from the Western essay and emphasizing the expression of the writer's individual personality in writing. This genre innovation revitalized the traditional essay represented by the Tongcheng school, which attended to strict rules in organization and diction. During the May Fourth period, zawen (the argumentative essay), a special type of sanwen, was adopted by many May Fourth intellectuals to argue for social change and to promote the new culture. As a genre, the vernacular essay is flexible and has unique potential for the writer to describe, narrate, argue, and express her political beliefs freely and directly; therefore, it soon became among women writers the most popular form to present social and cultural critique ...
... during that period. Because the vernacular essay is Ed Hardy Clothes a deliberate genre of choice among early twentieth-century women writers, examining essay writing as a specific rhetorical practice offers a distinctive opportunity for analyzing women's work.

In many of Chen's and Yang's essays, they employed what I call redefinition to negate what they viewed as old, traditional mores and values, and to define niiquan-zhuyi and modernity on their own terms. As I have analyzed elsewhere, language is crucial in forming and maintaining the old gender relationship; therefore, language is also important in forging a new one. At the turn of the twentieth century, many neologisms and linguistic or rhetorical innovations were made to promote a new culture and to change women's social position. Renquan (human rights), nanniiping-deng (equality between men and women), niiquan (women's rights), xinniixing (new women), and other new terms and phrases provided women with ED Hardy Boots a new language to reexamine their lives. This rhetorical choice enabled women to challenge the sexist assumptions and to construct an alternative discourse that legitimized women's needs in a modern society. Hence, it is a distinctive textual strategy that women used to perform cultural critique at both a linguistic and a discourse level.

Although Chen and Yang promoted women's rights through writing, they were cautious about claiming themselves as feminists. Yang admitted her feminist orientation in her essays, though she never hesitated to point out the differences between Chinese niiquanzhuyi and Western feminism. In Chen's case, she seemed reluctant to explicitly name herself a feminist; in fact, she almost always positioned herself as a critic of Western feminism and those who followed Western women's movements blindly. Using terms such as niiquanzhuyi and feminist rhetoric to discuss Chen's and Yang's texts, I provide a reading that attends to both the evocations of the Chinese concepts in the past and my present engagement with them from a feminist rhetorical perspective.