The introduction of gendered third person pronouns in written Chinese in the late 1910s has been hailed as one of the seismic linguistic shifts of May Fourth (1919), a period which was rife with debates on the position of women and men in Chinese society. While research on the topic has mainly framed this event as being about linguistic progress and about “her,” little attention has been paid to the specific ways in which the new pronouns were vocally opposed, quietly subverted, or leveraged by writers of the period and how this affected gender representation in literary texts, especially at a time when literature was deemed the foremost tool for the unification of the language and the education of the people.Rather than focusing on “the invention” of a third person feminine as customary of existing scholarship, my dissertation aims to retrieve the diversity of literary uses of linguistic gender that often went hand in hand with political goals. As the introduction of a new feminine pronoun ushered in the formerly gender-inclusive third-person pronoun being rewritten as masculine, I scrutinize the works of four writers representative of both early adopters and outspoken opponents of the new pronouns: Liu Dabai 劉大白 (1880-1932), Ling Shuhua 凌叔華 (1900-1990), Zhao Yuanren 趙元任 (1892-1982), and Xiao Hong 蕭紅 (1911-1942). Together, they exemplify different generations of writers working with a variety of genres (prose, poetry, drama, translation) and a variety of linguistic and social movements. This corpus allows to uncover not only how each of them plays with linguistic and gendered norms prevalent at the time (through homophony, creation of characters, deictic shifts, etc.), but also how genre itself impacted pronominal manipulations. These debates are contextualised against an historicization of “pronouns” as a linguistic category which came to be understood as open-ended and “lacking” gender over the course of the nineteenth century. This dissertation probes how these views paved the way for a wide variety of gendered pronouns being quickly incorporated after 1917 when the stakes moved from a specialty issue of interest to literary translators and linguists to one that involved institutionalizing the language and gender equality in general.Beyond its contribution to the field of Republican Chinese literature, this dissertation shows how relevant Chinese literary “pronominal politics” from 1917-1937 are to contemporary debates on inclusive writing and helps (re)place sinophone literature on the map of contemporary theoretical developments in pronoun studies, historical and comparative linguistics, translation studies, and feminist literary studies, where Anglo-European canonical works tend to remain overwhelmingly the focus of inquiry. / Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

China has become a major contributor to world science today, with the largest number of qualified scientific publications in the world, a centralized government willing to sponsor the development of science, and pioneering scientists in all disciplines. Where did this scientific power emerge from historically and how did this history connect with the rest of the world? My dissertation suggests that comprehending the Sino-American intellectual exchange network since the early twentieth century is essential for us to grasp the development of science in modern China. It argues that a Sino-American intellectual exchange network through the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture (ie., the China Foundation) played a critical role in the development of modern scientific research and education from the 1920 to the 1940s. In the first half of the twentieth century, leading American intellectuals of the progressive era such as Teachers College’s educational scholar Paul Monroe and Columbia University’s prominent philosopher of pragmatism John Dewey frequently communicated with prominent Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were their former students in the United States. Such face-to-face interchanges across the Pacific ultimately influenced Chinese choices in shaping modern scientific education and research. The impact was generated primarily through the China Foundation. The China Foundation, financed by the second American remission of the Boxer Indemnity Funds, served as a sponsor of the development of scientific research, teaching and training in modern China. The trustees of the foundation, responsible for the custody and administration of the fund, included prominent Chinese intellectuals (most of whom had received western graduate training) such as Hu Shi (PhD, Columbia), Jiang Menglin (PhD, Teachers College), Zhang Boling (visiting fellow at Teachers College, 1917-1918), Ren Hongjun (H. C. Zen, MA, Columbia), Guo Bingwen (PhD, Teachers College), Ding Wenjiang (aka V. K. Ting, BA, University of Glasgow), Zhao Yuanren (aka Y. R. Chao, PhD, Harvard) as well as the American intellectuals and reformers Paul Monroe, John Dewey, Roger Sherman Greene and John Leighton Stuart. This dissertation researches the history of Sino-American intellectual exchanges in the China Foundation network, which were central to the establishment of science in modern China. It begins by tracing the cohort of leading Chinese intellectuals trained at American universities, who paved the way for its establishment. They invited leading American educators like John Dewey and Paul Monroe to China, and did the translation work that allowed for their reformist ideas of democracy, education and science to become popular in China. While the American intellectuals aspired to transmit a democratic education through introducing science, the Chinese intellectuals also developed their own rationales to pursue China’s scientific modernization. It also examines the political assumptions and tensions wound up in this Sino-American educational exchange network that illuminates the ways in which the intellectuals on both sides of the Pacific were mutually influenced by their intellectual exchanges. In asks the following questions: How did American intellectuals of the progressive era design and pursue a democratic vision for the Chinese scientific development, and what were their political assumptions undergirding the transmission of science? How did the Chinese intellectuals respond to the American knowledge of science, translate, and negotiate this transmission of science to China? What aspects of science did they absorb and incorporate for the Chinese national purposes? What ideas did they absorb from the United States, and what aspects did they deliberately eschew? In posing these questions, part of my goal is to shift the predominant narrative of transnational progressive era US intellectual history from “Atlantic Crossings” to a dense and constitutive set of exchanges of knowledge, ideas and practices of sciences across the Pacific.