The French Language and the Making of Modern Chinese Intellectuals: New Selves, New Worlds (Languages and Culture in History)

This book offers the first interdisciplinary study of how different generations of Chinese individuals learned and used the French language as an intrinsic part of their engagement with new worlds-both tangible and envisioned-and with their emerging selves. Drawing from Wittgenstein understanding of language as a “form of life”, learning a foreign language is, therefore, a social, cultural, and epistemological activity of traversing from one form of life to another.Through such “traversing,” one sees a new world and becomes a new self.The book explores not only how Chinese individuals acquired the language, including its ideological and cultural dimensions, the sociocultural milieux, the methods and materials involved and created, the institutions and networks formed, and the memories and emotions evoked, but also how they used the language to communicate new worlds and selves to different audiences.It demonstrates that, more than a tool for accessing Western science, thought, and cult