In my dissertation, I engage the rhetorical strategies of Yu Dafu and other Creation Society members as a way of evaluating their work and positioning it -- via the language ideologies it deploys -- in the aesthetic and ethical discourses of early twentieth-century China. To do so, I focus on multiple modes self-articulation and address the problem of self-expression in modern Chinese literature from the perspective of linguistics, rhetoric, and social discourse. I aim to show the ethical relevance of Yu Dafu's project for the development of modern notions of self-expression and the role that Yu's views of literary language played in the process. In the quest for self-expression that his work repeatedly undertakes, Yu Dafu betrays a propensity to claim failure, and to use that failure as a negative mode of self-positing, by which modern selves are depicted as both defying and demanding articulation. First, I address the modern problem of self-articulation from the perspective of linguistic innovation and the deployment of alternative texts, and consider the particular predicament of Chinese writers seeking to forge a viable vernacular from the available, though imperfect, languages of the old literary vernacular, classical poetry and prose, and foreign text. Building on this semiotic context, I then move on to a consideration rhetorical strategy in the confessional novels of Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping, in which this negative confessional mode of self-articulation expiates as it appears to condemn. Third, I broaden my discussion from the rhetorical strategy of confession to discourses of love and guilt, and examine how Yu Dafu and Zhang Ziping's fraught depictions of intimacy participated in the creation of a new romantic imaginary. Finally, I look back at Yu Dafu's strategy of negative self-articulation through the parodic lens of the contemporary Malay-Chinese author Huang Jinshu. I consider Huang's work "Death in the South" in order to offer insight into Huang's anxiety over Yu's influence, and to better situate Yu's problematic legacy in contemporary Sinophone literary discourse.
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