Abstract

In this book, the poetic personality and intercultural communication in Lin Yutang's works are studied. It's a kind of communication study in comparative culture. Lin Yutang is a unique landscape in Chinese modern literature. In the eastward transmission of western sciences, he has gone against the tide and been keen to introduce the East to the West and achieved unprecedented success. As a successful case of intercultural communication, Lin's own charisma played a decisive role in the cultural communication. Taking Lin's personal characteristics as the entry point to study his intercultural communication is a new perspective in the study of Lin Yutang.

The first innovation point of this paper is analyzing Lin's poetic personality characteristics, which is mainly reflected in Chapter 2. Lin Yutang is a three-dimensional, multi-faceted person, his personality is very complex, which he claimed to be “a group of contradiction”. Different people may concern about the different aspects of Lin's personality. His personality has some prominent place, which has a distinctive reflected in his works and intercultural communication, which is poetic personality. This poetic personality manifested straight forward and free character, natural and sincere emotion, gentle and leisure temperament, contradictory and harmonious thinking. Lin Yutang's poetic personality was innate and also the results of acquired fusion of Chinese and Western culture. It was influenced by the Western humanism, individualism, Christian thought, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism traditional Chinese thinking, the impact of local culture as well. His poetic personal influenced his creations and it also produced a very significant impact on the spread of the intercultural communication. Under the influence of poetic personality, early in the creation, Lin had marginal mentality and wrote in liberalization. He promoted “humor, spirit, and leisure” in China, not only founded several magazines, but also personally wrote a lot of prose work. Lin became one of the famous modern Chinese prose writers. In the late of his creation, as a multi-cultural people, Lin Yutang wrote in English to introduce the traditional Chinese culture to the West with globalization mentality.

The second innovation point of this paper is studying how Lin introduced Chinese traditional culture to Western readers in the poetic way and how to integrate different cultures, which is mainly reflected in Chapter 3 to Chapter 7. Lin Yutang's poetic personality is unique and his cultural transmission was also unique, self-contained system. When Lin faced the different cultures, he was always influenced by his poetic personality whether at home or abroad. As a result, his choice, absorbtion, integration and interpreting of cultures are all with very obvious subjectivity. He preferred to absorb the poetic parts of the East and West traditional cultures. In the intercultural communication, no matter Lin Yutang took what kind of genre and expression, his works was full of poetic, kind, pleasant, and easy to understand. This feature made the imprint of his personal work very obvious, and also got the reader's acceptance and love. The straightforward and free character, and the pursuit of natural instinct made Lin have a powerful psychological adaptability, and then he become a multi-cultural person. In intercultural communication, cultural integration is a powerful tool to deal with cultural diversity, which reflects the cultural understanding and cultural competence of the communicators. As a communicator across Eastern and Western cultures, Lin transcended cultural integration, carried out cultural mergence. From potentially to obviously, Cultural mergence not only affected Lin's thinking and culture perspective, but also affected his creation. His works of different periods revealed the traces of his thoughts in the different stages. All his works were a history of idea about cultural mergence. Lin Yutang upheld the principle of “long fill long”，which means merging the advantages of different cultures to face and deal with Eastern and Western cultures. This was a difficult and lengthy process. Due to the impact, his ideas appeared fluctuations and changes, such as the change of his belief, which caused his works reflecting some contradictory and confused expression status. But these did not reduce the charm of Lin's works, but for the works to add a unique style. In his later years, Lin Yutang modified his ideas of cultural mergence, which showed a strong native complex. His cultural transmission focused from the traditional culture to Minnan culture.

The third innovation point is pointing out the important role of sensibility in the cultural transmission through in-depth analysis of Lin successful intercultural communication, which is mainly reflected in the conclusion. Lin Yutang's poetic personality, the poetic way of cultural transmission and the mergence of different cultures, in fact, were closely linked with sensibility. In cultural transmission, we can not separate traditions and not ignore the needs of the audience; we should locate the audience to spread. To the common audiences, cultural transmission cannot go purely academic noble large routes. The communication should be sensibility, with the help of logos, even if there is a rational component, it should be sentimentality. The communicators'reasonable personal interpretation of Chinese traditional culture should be allowed, and it also should allow communicators making new play and constructivism after the absorbing the advantages of different cultures. Culture communication should integrate into daily life of the people with elegance and popularization, and all of the people should be mobilized.

The era Lin lived has gone and will never come back. In the world of globalization, with the help of Lin Yutang's successful experience gained in intercultural communication and the set of all wisdom, we might be able to create a new situation of Chinese culture output.

Kedwords: Lin Yutang; Poetic; Personality; Culture Mergence;Intercultural Communication