关于五四新文学“新”在哪里，人们从形式或内容的角度展开过许多讨论，将其与白话文、人道主义，或某种特定的政治倾向相关联。该论文则显示了一种从读写能力的角度把握五四新文学的努力。本文认为，新文学的新颖性一定程度上在于新的读写能力的形成，即文学革命改变了人们看待和参与读写活动的方式。而这种读写能力的变革又被紧密地整合在1910年代中国的经济、政治与舆论环境之中，尤其是与时人对现代化、工业化的普遍关注相关。在实业救国、教育救国的呼声对“工作人”的召唤中，文学显示出了其重要性：读写能力既构成了劳动者经由教育获得的工作技能、现代国家必须掌控的无形资产，同时也与对待工作的正确态度、对工作经验的感知方式有关，文学书写协调的正是个体与高度分工的现代工作之间的关系。同时，一个自我认知为“工作”之一种的新文学的自律场域也在文学与工作的相遇中成形，为脱离体力劳动的文学活动注入了持久的合法性与使命感。就此而言，本文是从读写能力的角度同时切入新文学的诞生与现代中国工作文化的构造，揭示文学活动与工作世界之间的复杂纠缠，从而丰富对文学革命的时代背景与现实意义的认识，为考察新文学的起源与流变补充一个新视角。

第一章以《科学》杂志为中心，展现了1910年代中期“资本主义黄金时代”的工业化议程下对生活与书写进行合理化的诉求，胡适的文学革命思想正产生于这一语境。人们要求一种更精确、更有效率的书写，以便有序地安排物品与人事；同时，这种书写的再生产也必须得到有效的管理。借助教育学与语言学知识的武装，胡适和他的同道们对现代中国人的一般读写能力进行了规划，坚持了一种理性、可控、效率至上的观点。

在上述观点的支持下，第二章以《新青年》为中心对文学革命的历程进行了重新回顾。随着文学革命的呼声在国内获得越来越多的支持，对中文书写的合理化设计逐渐深入教学与生产领域，与当时的教育改革计划相结合，《新青年》1916-1918年间围绕中文书写的全面革新的讨论正是其代表。这些讨论涵盖中文书写的各个环节，其中作为诗歌、小说、散文、戏剧的狭义的“文学”，此时是作为字典、教科书、语法书的替代品，因其表意能力的优胜而被寄予高度关注。

但以1918年底周作人《人的文学》的发表为标志，伴随着五四运动之后的社会改造浪潮，一种新的“人道主义”文学观念逐渐兴起，占据了之后的文学史叙述的主流。正如留美学生对效率、生产力和工业化的关注，在周作人那里，工作或劳动仍然作为“人”的规定性占据文学再现的中心。然而，不同于胡适和科学社以“科学精神”统摄工作与文学，在五四运动唤起的对社会与社会性的渴望之中，工作被赋予了空前的神圣性与可见性，成为这一时期文学书写的重要内容。第三章的内容涉及的正是“人的文学”再现劳动或工作的方式。然而，神圣化与合理化一样，都以日益分化的社会与专门化的职业领域为前提，也以特定的智识劳动的积累为前提，这导致了对具体的工作经验的遮蔽。文学与工作的结合既产生了推动社会变革的强大的虚构力量，又造就了关于工作的根深蒂固的感觉与认识装置。在这一时刻，文学活动也被认作工作之一种，汇入“劳工神圣”的宏大叙事。

第四章以文学研究会的成立为线索，分析了这种“文学作为工作”的认识的进一步巩固。在与新兴的社会工作领域的紧密关联中和时髦的职业代表制的影响下，郑振铎和他的“新社会”小团体成为了文学研究会的组织核心，他们把文学视为一种名副其实的工作，并积极地探索这种工作的特点、要求与限界。标榜“著作同业公会”的文学研究会致力于对文学活动进行组织、管理与规范化，他们因而成为“文学工作者”的最初代表，对20世纪中国的文学生产方式产生了重大的影响。

第五章则回顾了一些不满于“文学工作”模式的声音。瞿秋白用他悲剧性的写作与革命生涯显示了文学工作的自身矛盾与内在限度；周作人通过退回“自己的园地”消除了文学工作的社会维度带来的不稳定性，为20世纪的纯文学理想注入了活力；创造社作家承认艺术家日益无产阶级化的现实，并对文学工作的理想进行了不留情面的嘲讽；鲁迅则持久地思考工作与休息的主题，并在晚年的《门外文谈》中表达了在现代社会中回归余裕与闲暇的理想。

借助读写能力这一线索，本文在“文”或“书写”的名下把文学革命重新置入一种大文学视野；这不仅意味着更充分地肯定文学革命的历史意义，也为进一步呈现20世纪中国的“工作”经验、并走向一种工作的文化史作了准备。

There have been many discussions about what was “new” about the May Fourth New Literature, either in terms of form or content, associating it with baihua, humanism, or a particular political orientation. This dissertation, however, shows an effort to grasp the May Fourth New Literature from the perspective of literacy. This dissertation argues that the novelty of the new literature was actually located at the level of literacy, that is, the literary revolution changed the way people viewed and engaged in reading and writing. This change in literacy, in turn, was tightly integrated into the milieu of economy, politics, and public opinion of China in the 1910s, especially in relation to the common concern about modernization and industrialization. In the call for “working man” to save the country through industry and education, writing showed its importance: literacy means both a work skill acquired through education and intangible asset that the modern state had to control, but it also defined the correct attitude toward work, the way to perceive work experience, and negotiated the relationship between the individual and the highly divided modern work. At the same time, an autonomous literary field which recognize itself as a kind of “work”, was born in the encounter between modern literature and modern work; this injected solid legitimacy and lasting sense of mission into literary activities that were free from manual labor. In this regard, this paper cuts through the birth of New Literature and the construction of work culture simultaneously from the perspective of literacy, revealing the complex entanglement between literary activity and the world of work, thus enriching the understanding of the context and relevance of the Literary Revolution and adding a new perspective to the investigation of the origin and evolution of New Literature.
The first chapter, centered on Science magazine, shows the demand for rationalization of life and writing under the industrialization agenda of the "golden age of capitalism" in the mid-1910s, a context in which Hu Shih's idea of literary revolution was born. People demanded a more precise and efficient writing in order to organize objects and people; at the same time, the reproduction of this writing had to be effectively managed. Armed with linguistic and pedagogical knowledge, Hu and his friends planned the general literacy of modern Chinese people, insisting on a rational, controlled, and efficient view. 
With the support of the above-mentioned views, Chapter 2 reexamines the course of the literary revolution with La Jeunesse as its center. As the call for a literary revolution gained more and more support in China, the rationalization of Chinese writing gradually penetrated into the realm of teaching and production and was combined with the educational reform programs of the time, as represented by the discussions in La Jeunesse between 1916 and 1918 that centered on the comprehensive reform of Chinese writing. These discussions covered all aspects of Chinese writing, including the narrow sense of “literature” as poetry, fiction, prose, and drama, which at this time was a substitute for dictionaries, textbooks, and grammar books, and was given great attention because of its superiority in terms of its effecincy of expression. 
However, with the publication of Zhou Zuoren's Humane Literature at the end of 1918, a new “humanistic” idea of literature gradually emerged along with the wave of social reconstruction after the May Fourth Movement, and occupied the mainstream of the subsequent literary historical narratives. Just as the students in the United States were concerned with efficiency, productivity and industrialization, in Zhou Zuoren, work or labor still occupies the center of literary representation as the nature of "human kind". However, unlike Hu Shih and the Science Society disenchanted both work and literature with the so-called “scientific spirit”, it was sacredness, along with the unprecedented visibility of work, given in the desire for new society and sociality evoked by the May Fourth Movement. Work became an important theme of literary writing in this period. However, consecration, like rationalization, presupposes an increasingly differentiated society and specialized professional fields, as well as the accumulation of specific intellectual labor, which leads to the obscuring of the concrete working experience. The combination of literature and work produced both a powerful fictional force for social change and an entrenched apparatus of cognition and perception on work. At this moment, literary activity was also recognized as a form of work, merging into the larger narrative of “Sacred, the Labor”. 
Chapter 4 analyzes the further consolidation of this understanding of "literature as work" by taking the establishment of the Literary Association as a clue. In close association with the emerging field of social work and under the influence of the fashionable system of professional representation, Zheng Zhenduo and his small group of “New Society” became the organizational core of the Literary Association, which regarded literature as a veritable work and actively explored the characteristics, requirements, and regulations of such work. Labeled the “writers’ guild”, the Literary Association was dedicated to organizing, managing, and standardizing literary activities, thus provided the initial sample of “literary worker” and had a significant impact on the literary production mode in twentieth-century China.
Chapter 5 reviews some of the voices that were dissatisfied with the “literature-work” model. Qu Qubai showed the contradictions and inherent limits of literary work with his tragic writing and revolutionary career; Zhou Zuoren eliminated the instability of the social dimension of literary work by retreating to his “own garden”, and breathed life into the ideal of pure literature in the twentieth century; the writers of the Creation Society acknowledged the reality of the growing proletarianization of the artist and mocked the ideal of literary work without mercy; Lu Xun, on the other hand, thought persistently about the theme of work and rest, and in his late years, in his Chat about Writing Outside, expressed the ideal of returning to surplus and leisure in modern society.
Through the clew of literacy, this paper reinserts the literary revolution into a larger literary vision under the name of “wen” or “writing”; this means not only revealing the historical significance of the literary revolution more fully, but also prepares for a further presentation of the work experience in 20th-century China and for a cultural history of work.