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"This is an original project, difficult to achieve, that updates scholarship on the literature of Taiwan. Its originality is strong and welcome."--Edward Gunn, author of "Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose"

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WRITING TAIWAN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

PREFACE David Der-wei Wang............................................................................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION Carlos Rojas.............................................................................................................................................11 Representing Taiwan: shifting Geopolitical Frameworks Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang.......................................................................................172 Postmodern or Postcolonial? An Inquiry into Postwar Taiwanese Literary History Fangming Chen........................................................................263 On the Concept of Taiwan Literature Xiaobing Tang...................................................................................................................514 The Importance of Being Perverse: China and Taiwan, 1931-1937 Joyce C. H. Liu.......................................................................................935 "on our Destitute Dinner Table": Modern Poetry Quarterly in the 1950s Michelle Yeh..................................................................................1136 The Literary Development of Zhong Lihe and Postcolonial Discourse in Taiwan Fenghuang Ying..........................................................................1407 Wang Wenxing's Backed against the Sea, Parts I and II: The Meaning of Modernism in Taiwan's Contemporary Literature Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang.........................1568 The Monster That Is History: Jiang Gui's A Tale of Modern Monsters David Der-wei Wang...............................................................................1819 Taiwanese Identity and the Crisis of Memory: Post-Chiang Mystery Yomi Braester......................................................................................21310 Doubled Configuration: Reading su Weizhen's Theatricality Gang Gary Xu.............................................................................................23311 Techniques behind Lies and the Artistry of Truth: Writing about the Writings of Zhang Dachun Kim-chu Ng............................................................25312 Travel in early-Twentieth-Century Asia: on Wu Zhuoliu's "nanking Journals" and His notion of Taiwan's Alternative Modernity Ping-hui Liao..........................28513 Mapping Identity in a Postcolonial City: Intertextuality and Cultural Hybridity in Zhu Tianxin's Ancient Capital Lingchei Letty Chen...............................30114 Li Yongping and spectral Cartography Carlos Rojas..................................................................................................................32415 History, exchange, and the object Voice: Reading Li Ang's The Strange Garden and All Sticks Are Welcome in the Censer of Beigang Chaoyang Liao.....................34816 Reenchanting the Image in Global Culture: Reification and nostalgia in Zhu Tianwen's Fiction Ban Wang..............................................................370APPENDIX: Chinese Characters for Authors' names and Titles of Works....................................................................................................389CONTRIBUTORS...........................................................................................................................................................395INDEX..................................................................................................................................................................397

Chapter One

Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang

What strikes me most about the title of the conference, "Writing Taiwan: Strategies of Representation," is the word strategies. Why strategies? It is true that the word can be interpreted in different ways: as interventionist theoretical lingo as well as the basis of the more conventional rhetorical strategies of literary representation (which is actually a focus of the conference's last panel). But, in a more fundamental sense, strategies are employed to achieve goals. And the participants here do appear to share a common goal: to reexamine and, ultimately, to advance the strategies of representing Taiwan to the outside world through literary scholarship and translations. Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, there is an inevitable political subtext to all efforts at representing Taiwan today. On the one hand, the country is strenuously struggling to "expand its international living space" (to borrow a phrase used in another context by Thomas Gold). On the other hand, greater penetration of global capitalism in the post-Cold War era has hiked the stakes of symbolic wars. As these factors have come increasingly to determine the condition of possibility for culturally representing Taiwan-whether through the publication of literary anthologies or various other ways of showcasing its creative products at film festivals, book fairs, and arts exhibits-strategies are important.

But let us refrain from critiquing such commercial activities of cultural brokerage from the moral high ground of either Marxist or liberal-humanist theories. Instead, I would like to urge that we keep in mind the political and economic subtexts of our own activities while examining the strategies of representing Taiwan at another-not necessarily higher but different-level: the academic level.

Whereas less oriented toward immediate, tangible goals, academe is certainly not a disinterested cultural space. After Said, who could be adamant enough to maintain that the acquisition of knowledge, and, for that matter, any type of intellectual activity, is inherently innocent? Not to mention the fact that political and economic interests everywhere have direct bearings on the institutional distribution of resources. Nonetheless, the processes, rather than the results, are more highly valued in scholarly researches, which in turn are governed by conceptual frameworks that scholars internalize via different channels in their personal lives and academic training. After a series of rapid shifts in theoretical paradigms in the last two decades, new critical models are now being applied to, and experimented with in, the study of Taiwanese literature, as the essays in the present volume undoubtedly testify. To fully appreciate the significance of this moment and the promise that it holds for the enhancement of the quality of our work, it is, perhaps, useful to take a brief retrospective look at the analytic models that have previously dominated research activities on Taiwan in the American academy.

Owing to the exceedingly institutionalized nature of scholarly fields in this country, there seem to be only a limited number of viable analytic models that prevail at any given time. In the early postwar years, the most prevalent model in Taiwanese studies was one that regarded Taiwan as "the other China." Conceived within the Cold War ideological frame, this approach clearly echoed such political conceptual pairs as "Red China versus Free China" and implied a perceived rivalry between two divergent paths along which the Third World countries pursued modernization: the capitalist, liberal-democratic and the socialist-Communist. Even today, such a binary mode of thinking remains popular among certain scholars. Lucien Pye, for example, faults China's political authorities for stigmatizing individuals in China's coastal regions, Taiwan, and Hong...