Lin Yutang (1895-1976), whose main body of works were written in English in America, is now generally regarded as one of the most important writers modern China has produced. My dissertation is a critical reading of Lin Yutang's literary and cultural discourses and practices against the historical background of modern China that has been undergoing a cross-cultural experience not only in her native soil but also through her diaspora. It intends to reveal the particular ways in which Lin negotiates Chinese modernity by responding to a number of key modern problematics such as politics, aesthetics, individuality, traditionality, nationalism, gender and immigrant identity, and arriving at an "engaged but distanced de-political attitude," an "aesthetics of existence" characterized by a "leisurely humorous attitude in the spirit of reasonableness based on free expression of individuality," a "modern nationalist stance with a global perspective," and a "non-exclusive cross-cultural approach for the modern Chinese immigrant experience," respectively. Given my larger concern of the historico-cultural problematics of Chinese modernity and its diaspora, my interpretive analytic of Lin will engage, through comparison and contrast, a number of other important modern Chinese and Chinese American writers such as Gu Hongming, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Liang Shiqiu, Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, as well as contemporary cultural critics like Michel Foucault and Edward Said. My interpretation of Lin Yutang, as a cross-cultural critic, will highlight his insight that only by way of piecemeal reconciliation and contestation between traditional Chinese culture and Western modernity can the East/West dichotomy be successfully overcome. I will argue that Lin Yutang, far from offering a grand systematic scheme, has nevertheless articulated elements of a coherent alternative attitude towards building an integrated and mature modern Chinese culture, as well as its diaspora modality, out of the notorious East/West dichotomy, both inheriting and diverting from the May Fourth legacy.
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