Revisiting the Modernist Literary Movement in Post-1949 Taiwan Sung-Sheng Yvonne Chang the University of Texas at Austin

** This is a preliminary, unpolished draft; some sections contain outlines for a larger project rather than fully developed arguments.) Revisiting the Modernist Literary Movement in Post-1949 Taiwan Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang The University of Texas at Austin Since the early part of the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism has spread in different regions of the East Asia in sporadic, fragmented, and variously mediated ways. Yet the trend has been persistently recurring, creating significant impact on local literary scenes and frequently accounting for its most celebrated artistic accomplishments. What are the similarities and differences between the various incarnations of literary modernism? Can we identify commonalities in the evolutionary trajectories of these modernist trends? In view of the fact that East Asian literatures are more often than not studied against theoretical notions derived from western literary traditions, contemplations on these questions are aimed to build a different critical paradigm that takes into account distinctive features of modern East Asian literary culture. The present paper, a preliminary effort in this direction, consists of the following: Section I situates the project within contemporary critical discourses; Section II introduces two sociologically oriented conceptual frames; Section III offers a sketch of analytical schemes to be explored; Section IV proposes three modules around which future investigations will be organized; the final section, then, revisits postwar Taiwan Modernist literary movement employing the critical methods suggested in the preceding sections. I. Critical contexts for the need to build a new critical paradigm for East Asian modern/modernist literature (**Limited by space, details of the arguments are omitted in this section.) 1. New and old forms of temporality and spatiality Scholars of postmodernity and globalization, like David Harvey and Arjun Appardurai, have called our attention to the emergence of new forms of temporality and of cultural formations that transcend boundaries of the nation-state in the late twentieth century. What about the cultural processes that preceded this Great Divide, when literature was conceived and developed as a new modern social institution in the East Asian regions, as part of their “belated” modernity with a compressed time-table? 2. The issue of positionality Postcolonial discourse has opened up sophisticated and nuanced deliberations on positionality. Yet many new narratives revolving East Asian literature still inadvertently take Western academicians as their primary audience/dialogic partner. We need to shift the focus further to consider systematically the concerns, strategies, and cognitive mappings of literary agents in East Asia in different stages of their compressed modernization processes. 3. Correspondence between the aesthetic/cultural dimension and the material/societal dimension of modernity Cultural Studies have contributed to the shift of focus by literary scholars from literary modernism or aesthetic modernism to the generative conditions, in particular to the material culture in the urban milieu. There is a dire need to reexamine the corresponding relationship between the two, and to greatly refine the terms in which such “deterministic” approach has been applied to studies of literary texts. 4. Implications of new phases in the industrialization of culture Nestor Garcia Canclini sums up the process of the “industrialization of culture” as presently reaching its final stage. The digital revolution has caused exponential growths in visual and audio forms of cultural production and consumption, as well as the institutionalization of the study of new modes of aesthetic existence, such as visual culture. This presents challenges to the conventional disciplinary boundary of “literature,” and provides a good occasion for us to look back at the no less drastic reorientation of the institution of literature in modern East Asia. II. Proposed conceptual frames: theories of the “field of cultural production” and “literature as a modern social institution” (**Again, details are omitted in this section.) 1. The field of cultural production 2 I propose a modified version of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on the “field of cultural production.” The theory has a synchronic and a diachronic dimension. Synchronically, by envisioning literary agents and texts as occupying specific positions in the literary field, the theory first enables us to comprehend the field as a complexly interwoven network of forces and relations in a syncrhonic sense. It also allows us to spell out how momentous changes in external world—political, economic, technological changes— exert their impact on the literary works indirectly, in the manner of “refraction,” through intellectual discourses and ideological presuppositions and through affecting the structure of literary field, in a “refractive” manner. Diachronically, we may tract the trajectories along which these aesthetic positions have evolved, career trajectories of the literary agents, as well as the evolution of the cultural field itself in anay given historical period. 2. Literature as institution Modern East Asian literature was reincarnated as a modern social institution during the course of the global spread of modernity. In Anthony Giddens’ terms, modern literature may be regarded as a sub-institution of the market, one of the four distinctive modern institutions he identifies, in so far as the production, transmission, and consumption of literature in modern times increasingly became embedded in the economic network of publishing industry, which gradually infiltrated, eroded, or superseded the traditional literary practices. The institutional approach allows us to better examine literature’s complex relationships and interactions, in a synchronic sense, with other modern institutions, such as mass literacy, nationalism, state surveillance, urban cultural industry, para-military mobilization associated with warfare and revolution, that are being entrenched in the society at the same time period. It also helps to elucidate the diachronic dimension of literary transformations in modern East Asia, frequently along disjunctive and convoluted trajectories. III. Analytical schemes: asymmetric comparison, structural affinities, and issues surrounding the “evolutionary temporal lag” 1. Asymmetric comparison 3 When dealing with cultural production and consumption in East Asia under globalization, scholars have paid special attention to the “uneven temporalities” or “uneven modernities” within the Asian region itself.1 Younghan Cho, a young Korean scholar, identifies two salient features of the East Asian sensibilities in discussing critical discourses surrounding the Korean Wave: “[East Asian’s] asymmetric but synchronous spatialities and its uneven but simultaneous temporalities.” It appears that the same phenomenon of “sameness and difference” may be observed in East Asian literary developments in earlier modern periods -- even with China itself. The two stories I always assign to students to conclude the Republican era, Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue” and Chao Shu-li’s “Lucky,” both written in 1942, powerfully illustrates this point.2 In addition to the dramatic differences in the habitus and social class of their authors, the enormous disparity between the literary cultures that produced these two stories may be conceived in terms of the institutional framework and mechanisms of literary production and consecration. These, in turn, speak to different types of cultural field that capitalist market and Communist ideology fostered in modern China and to the competing modernities they represented, which are crucial factors to be reckoned with along with the crude political factors that had resulted in the divisions between occupied coastal cities, Nationalist-controlled hinterland, and the Communist-reigned Yan’an region. The specific type and the stage of development of the particular cultural field is undoubtedly a significant factor to be considered when colonial Taiwan and Manchukuo in Northeast China are concerned. The first few years of the 1940s was also a time when the second-generation writers of Taiwan’s colonial period, Zhang Wenhuan, Lu Heruo, and Long Yingzong, reached their artistic maturity, with a number of impressive works published. The patently hybrid, complex nature of the cultural environment that nourished these writers is best captured in Shi Shu’s discussion of the “double-homeland 1 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke UP, 2002). Younghan Cho, a young Korean scholar, identifies two salient features of the East Asian sensibilities: “its asymmetric but synchronous spatialities and its uneven but simultaneous temporalities” in his “Desperately Seeking East Asia amidst the Popularity of South Korean Cutlural Products.” Unpublished paper, p. 17. 2 These stories, available in English translation in the standard textbook Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas: 19419-1949 (eds. Joseph Lau, Leo Lee, and C. T. Hsia), are probably found in most reading lists for courses on modern Chinese literature in the US. 4 consciousness” of the young Taiwanese elite in mid-1930s, beneficiaries of Taiwan’s colonial modernity. The study of modernist trends in different East Asian regions involves a different set of problems, however, because we are then dealing with comparable, but non- synchronous cultural phenomena. The four waves of

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