Taiwan 2001

		Literature
		Post-1949 Literature in Taiwan Shifting Literary Trends Taiwan's post-1949 era began when China's Nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, settled on the offshore island-province of Taiwan after the mainland fell to the Chinese communists. The 40-year period under the rule of two presidents from the Chiang family was characterized by remarkable social, political, and cultural continuity and homogeneity. Drastic structural changes have been occurring at all levels of society since the mid-1980s as direct consequences of the lifting of martial law, the recognition of opposition parties, the removal of the ban on establishing newspapers, and the resumption of communication with mainland China at the nonofficial level. New intellectual and artistic currents have emerged, many with the explicit or implicit motive of reexamining existing orders. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that the literary accomplishments of writers from the earlier post-1949 decades laid solid groundwork for Taiwan's vital and pluralistic cultural development in the 1990s. As China split into two political entities with different sociopolitical systems after 1949, the tradition of Chinese New Literature 新文學 traveled along divergent paths in these two Chinese societies. Writers in post-1949 Taiwan were selective in developing their literary heritage; whereas revolutionary literature and "critical realism" were suppressed, the more inoffensive, lyrical-sentimental strand enjoyed great popularity. From the anticommunist propaganda of the Cold War decade of the 1950s, through the modernist and nativist literary movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the expression of today's pluralism and the burgeoning of market-oriented mass culture, literary currents in post-1949 Taiwan have closely mirrored the country's larger sociopolitical transitions. The Western-influenced modernist literary movement of the 1960s and the popular nativist literary movement of the 1970s may appropriately be regarded as "alternative" and "oppositional" cultural formations in Taiwan during this period. As the modernists adopted literary concepts developed in Western capitalist society, they simultaneously longed for an ideological transformation, taking such bourgeois social values as individualism, liberalism, and rationalism as correctives for the oppressive social relations derived from a traditional system of values. The nativist literary movement, by contrast, with its use of literature as a pretext to challenge the dominant sociopolitical order, may be properly considered as counterhegemonic. The movement was triggered by the nation's diplomatic setbacks in the international arena during the 1970s, and provided a forum for native Taiwanese intellectuals to vent their discontent with the socioeconomic problems that have accompanied the country's accelerated process of industrialization since the 1960s. For different reasons, both movements dominated Taiwan's literary scene only for a relatively brief period of time. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of both the modernists and the nativists had sharply declined, and some of their inherent shortcomings had become obvious with the passage of time. As most of the modernist writers advocated artistic autonomy and were politically disengaged, the subversive elements of their works were easily co-opted by more powerful cultural forces and their critical impact was consequently diluted. The more radical adherence to aestheticism by certain writers, moreover, was deeply at odds with the predominantly lyrical sensibility of ordinary Chinese readers. Even though the essential dynamics of the modernist movement were not entirely exhausted by the loss of popular favor, both critics and general readers received the movement's most mature output in the 1980s with nonchalance. In the meantime, the militant political agenda of the nativists both threatened and bored middle-class readers. The resistant activities of the more radical nativists, moreover, were increasingly channeled into direct political involvement. The subsiding of these contending literary voices paved the way for the rise of a "serious" literature that was more popular in nature and a resurgence of the lyrical and sentimental strain of the 1980s. Thus, the younger generation of writers of this decade assimilated the technical sophistication of the modernists while displaying a social awareness as a result of nativist influence. Their vocational visions, however, significantly departed from those of their mentors and were much more deeply conditioned by the market logic of Taiwan's increasingly commercialized cultural setting. Fifties Mainland Emigre Literature After Taiwan was returned to rule by a Chinese government in 1945, Mandarin Chinese replaced both the Taiwanese dialect and Japanese as the official spoken language of the province. The creative activities of middle-aged native Taiwanese writers were greatly hampered by this language barrier. Political fear is another factor that silenced native Taiwanese writers, as many Taiwanese intellectuals were persecuted during and after the February 28 Incident in 1947 (see pertinent section of History). The literary scene in Taiwan during the 1950s was therefore virtually dominated by mainland writers who followed the Nationalists to Taiwan around 1949. These emigre writers were frequently mobilized in the state-sponsored cultural programs and produced a literature that has often been characterized as anticommunist. In addition to political propaganda, writers of the 1950s have been frequently faulted for their amateurism, which is partly the product of a special institution in Taiwan, the fu-kan 副刊, or literary supplement to newspapers. The fu-kan undeniably has been the most significant sponsor of literary activities in contemporary Taiwan; nevertheless, with its large demand for works of immediate popular appeal, it at the same time fostered casual, lightweight writing and pandered to middlebrow literary tastes. As literary writing became less professional, the distinction between artistic and journalistic genres was often blurred. Although the general climate of the 1950s was not conducive to the production of serious art, works of considerable artistic merit by a number of writers deserve greater critical attention than is usually given to them. Two broad categories of writings, traditionalist prose and realistic fiction, are considered to be representative of the literature in this decade. Traditionalist Prose Contrary to the situation in the People's Republic of China, where gentry literature of China's feudal past was sometimes renounced for ideological reasons and where numerous political idioms designed to mobilize the masses were added to the vocabulary, the prose style in post-1949 Taiwan tended to be more literary, retaining a great many more archaic expressions and allusions to classical literature. The proliferation of traditionalist prose 散文 in Taiwan during the 1950s, in the form of familiar essays and the hybrid genre of essay-fiction, was apparently a continuation of an earlier trend on the mainland during and following the Sino-Japanese war. The decade's best-known essayists--Chang Hsiu-ya 張秀亞, Chung Mei-yin 鍾梅音, Hsu Chung-pei 徐鍾珮, Liang Hsuan 亮軒, and Chi-chun 琦君--were therefore all mainland writers. Realistic Fiction Having been exposed to the works of Lu Hsun, Mao Tun 茅盾, Pa Chin 巴金, and Lao She 老舍 in their formative years, mainland emigre writers active in the 1950s and 1960s by and large carried on the Chinese "realist" tradition--a somewhat atrophied version of 19th-century European realism--established during the May Fourth era and the 1930s. For political reasons, however, they consciously or unconsciously modified those realistic conventions that might have been offensive to the dominant culture of post-1949 Taiwan: revolutionary and proletarian themes were taboo, and references to class consciousness were avoided. Nevertheless, the nature of literary conventions is such that their suppression can never be as complete as it appears on the surface. The 1960s saw the publication of several well-written, "anticommunist" realistic novels, such as Rice-sprout Song 秧歌, The Whirlwind 旋風, and The Ti Village 荻村傳. Although important in their own right, these stories were set exclusively in pre-Revolutionary China, and their authors either never resided in Taiwan (e.g., Eileen Chang 張愛玲, 1921-95), or were marginal to Taiwan's literary scene (e.g., Chiang Kui 姜貴 and Chen Chi-ying 陳紀瀅), thus diminishing their significance in Taiwan's post-1949 literary history. Far more relevant were such writers as Wang Lan 王藍, Meng Yao 孟瑤, Pan Jen-mu 潘人木, Lin Hai-yin 林海音, Nieh Hua-ling 聶華苓, Peng Ko 彭歌, Chu Hsi-ning 朱西寧, Tuan Tsai-hua 段彩華, Ssu-ma Chung-yuan 司馬中原, and Chung Chao-cheng 鍾肇政, who had established their literary reputations around the mid-1950s and who continued to play prominent roles in Taiwan's literary scene for some time. Although the fiction of these writers is also filled with nostalgic recollections of the mainland past, their works are nevertheless unique products of the contemporary cultural and political environment. Unmistakably, the emancipation ethos, a legacy of pre-1949 realist literature, has informed a number of their writings set in the past on subjects such as the oppression of women, the repressive nature of the traditional Chinese family system, and the condition of working-class people and domestic servants. In addition, the realistic codes were rewritten and the critical messages mitigated or displaced: rightist political convictions and active support of the present government frequently caused these writers to domesticate the revolutionary spirit with counterdevices and to shift the thematic focus from the sociohistorical to private domains. The rise of the young modernists, with their liberalism and new aesthetic conceptions, challenged not only these older writers' artistic visions, but also the dominant culture's ideological control over creative writers. The changes brought forth by the modernists in the artistic realm formed the basis for more radical cultural critiques found in later decades. Modernist Literary Movement The dominant culture in post-1949 Taiwan carries on many traditions established in China during the Republican era (1911-1949). The modernist literary movement is an expression of the predilection by Chinese intellectuals of the time to emulate Western high culture. Ever since the end of the 19th century when China was shocked to devastating effect by its encounters with Western culture, modern Chinese intellectuals have attempted various kinds of cultural rejuvenation, the most potent formula of which has been the assimilation of Western cultural products. Taiwan's modernist literary movement, as one of the latest in a series of such efforts, inevitably displays some of Western culture's essential characteristics. Second, an important link can be perceived between this movement and the liberal strand of thought in China's pre-Revolutionary era, especially that of the Anglo-American wing of intellectuals. It is readily observable that the ideas of important literary figures of post-1949 Taiwan, such as Liang Shih-chiu 梁實秋, former member of the Crescent Moon Society 新月社, Hsia Chi-an 夏濟安, mentor of a core group of modernists, and Yen Yuan-shu 顏元叔, leading critic of the '60s who introduced New Criticism to Taiwan, are all fundamentally rooted in Western liberal-humanist traditions. Yen Yuan-shu's proposition that "literature has the dual function of being the dramatization and criticism of life," in particular, closely echoes both Matthew Arnold and the Literary Studies Association's 文學研究社 famous tenet, "art for life's sake." Taiwan's modernists especially stressed the principle of artistic autonomy, among other liberal conceptions of literature, and, by and large, have more thoroughly adhered to this principle than their pre-1949 liberal predecessors. From the point of view of literary history, however, the epoch-making significance of Taiwan's modernist literary movement rests primarily in terms of its generation of new dynamics among contemporary writers and its redirecting of their artistic mode of expression. New Thematic Conventions In terms of theme and subject matter, writers of Taiwan's modernist fiction endeavored to explore new spheres of human experience beyond the confines of traditional literature. In doing so, they continued the efforts of their early-20th century May Fourth movement predecessors and even surpassed them in depth. To comprehend and analyze the complexity of human experience in the modern world, they generally favored rationalism, scientism, and serious, if at times immature, philosophical contemplation. We have thus witnessed the establishment of a set of thematic conventions that supposedly incorporate advanced knowledge of human behavior made available by the modern sciences. For example, apparently influenced by popular versions of Freudian psychoanalysis, young writers at the early stage of the modernist literary movement were particularly fascinated with nontraditional or even abnormal interpersonal relationships. These writers included Wang Wen-hsing 王文興, Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇, Ou-yang Tzu 歐陽子, Chen Jo-hsi 陳若曦, Shui Ching 水晶, Chen Ying-chen 陳映真, to name just a few. Their sincerity and bold, honest self-analysis broke new ground in Taiwan's cultural context and redefined the boundaries of normality in human behavior, thus presenting challenges to the conservative middle-class mentality that has been the backbone of the dominant culture in post-1949 Taiwan. Some truly radical cultural examinations are found in the movement's later more mature stages. For example, with a common theme of father-son conflict, two of Taiwan's most significant modernist novels, Pai Hsien-yung's Crystal Boys 孽子 (1983) and Wang Wen-hsing's Family Catastrophe 家變 (1973), offer bitter protests against the traditional ethical norms that are crystallized in the Confucianist notions of loyalty 忠 and filial piety 孝, and thus call into question fundamental underpinnings of the superstructure of contemporary Taiwan society. Notably, in both works, the battle against the social retention of traditional values is waged with the aid of Western conceptual frames. Family Catastrophe features as its central theme the conflict of bourgeois individualism with the concept of filial piety in a financially strapped modern Chinese family. That the hero is portrayed as a fanatic rationalist shows the degree to which the author is skeptical of the real efficacy of such an ideological transfer. Crystal Boys, on the other hand, projects a more idealistic vision influenced by the countercultural movement of the 1960s in the United States, with its anarchic assertion of the emancipatory power of the Dionysian impulse, its celebration of youth and beauty in their ephemeral physical forms, and its romantic affirmation of the redeeming virtue of love. The author further enriched the symbolic level of this book by infusing this vision with mythical themes from the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢. The underground homosexual community of New Park 新公園 in Crystal Boys, like residents of the Garden of the Grand Vision 大觀園 in the famous traditional novel, is ruled by the supreme order of sentimentality 情 and the heart 心, which can be both salvational and damning. This microcosm, however, is extremely vulnerable, as it is forever overshadowed by the law of the father--the dominant order of the patriarchal, Confucianist society outside the garden. The prominence of the father-quest motif in both Family Catastrophe and Crystal Boys--heroes in both novels are constantly searching for paternal surrogates--betrays their authors' anxiety over the general corruption of the terms governing human relationships in contemporary Taiwan society, terms that in history were solidly built on the patriarchal order. Formal Innovations Particularly eye-catching in the initial stages of the modernist literary movement was the temporary surge of an avant-garde trend. One prominent feature of the self-styled avant-garde writers of the 1960s was their infatuation with the intellectual current of existentialism. As Franz Kafka was introduced early in the movement, the use of obscure plots and bizarre language quickly became a fad, and the basic tenor of works by many young writers--Chi-teng Sheng 七等生, Tsung Su 叢甦, and Shih Shu-ching 施叔青 among them--seemed to be dominated by nihilism, agonism, and an anxiety over the absurdity of existence. The upsurge of aesthetic iconoclasm in the 1960s represented a significant moment in postwar Taiwan's literary history. The vigorous dynamics of newly introduced artistic conceptions associated with modernism called into question conventional forms and criteria of literary excellence. The more enduring efforts generated by this initial enthusiasm eventually ushered in a new era of modern Chinese literary history. Most modernist fiction writers in Taiwan stayed within the general confines of realism, but they were no less experimental. Their conscious explorations of language and voice brought forth fundamental changes in rhetorical conventions of modern Chinese narrative. Since, as some scholars have observed, the attempts of earlier modern Chinese writers to offer realistic portraits of life were frequently hampered by the dominance of the subjective voice in the work's rhetorical structure, the modernists tried to redress this deficiency by introducing a new "objective form." They strove to present an "impartial" picture of reality so that readers could be given the privilege of forming their own opinions and moral judgments. To be sure, these ideas are more reminiscent of the realists' concept of literary representation than the modernist view of literature as self-referential discursive practice. Throughout the 1960s, in fact, the majority of critical writings introducing Western literary concepts focused on basic technical rules and critical criteria that have long been naturalized and taken for granted in the West. Authoritative US-trained scholars and critics, such as Yen Yuan-shu, Chu Li-min 朱立民, and Wai-lim Yip 葉維廉, systematically expounded the fundamentals of a whole set of Western literary codes, and their influence on creative writing and practical criticism in Taiwan was immeasurable. Such a phenomenon is actually not very difficult to understand, given that the literary genres of the short story and the novel (in the strict sense) were both imported from the West during this century. It is also true, however, that the appropriation of foreign literary codes necessarily involved larger, more complicated networks of artistic and ideological systems. Given that the most noteworthy formal feature popularized by the modernists was the widened distance between author and text, their efforts may be seen as having continued the general trend in modern Chinese literary history away from the traditional expressive view toward the mimetic or imitative means of representation. With their denunciation of sentimentalism and express interest in the hidden complexities of the human psyche, personal emotions were no longer treated as the source or origin of literature, but rather as objects for detached observation. It is arguable that, despite the fact that Taiwan's modernist literary movement took place in a "postmodern" period from the standpoint of the West--in the 1960s and 1970s--and despite the fact that many newer artistic trends and techniques were incorporated by the modernist writers into their work, the dominant tendency of this movement nevertheless was closest to the early phase of Western modernism in the late 19th century and early 20th century. In other words, in the extremely compressed timetable of Taiwan's modernist literary movement, one nevertheless discerns features such as the reversal of the conventional content-form hierarchy and the radical rejection of traditional writing techniques that could only be the result of a burgeoning skepticism about language and meaning. Most of the modernists' explorations of language unmistakably reflect Western influences. However, more original experiments were also made, which resulted from a new awareness of the unstable relationship between language and its referents, as well as of a reawakened sensitivity toward the ideographic nature of the Chinese language. These experiments--especially those found in Wang Wen-hsing's two novels Family Catastrophe and Backed Against the Sea 背海的人 (1981), and Li Yung-ping's story series Chronicle of Chi-ling 吉陵春秋 (1986)--marked the apex of the development of modernist aestheticism in contemporary Chinese literature. Nativist Literary Debate As the modernist fiction writers began to mature artistically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so too did the resistance to modernism's dominance of Taiwan's literary scene begin. The precursor to a large-scale denunciation of the modernist literary movement was the 1972 Modern Poetry Debate 現代詩論戰, which involved a number of academic critics and modernist poets who discussed specific Western-influenced features in contemporary Taiwan poetry. The consensus reached in this debate seemed to be that, despite its other merits, the currently practiced modern poetry suffered from such unhealthy qualities as semantic obscurity, excessive use of foreign imagery and Europeanized syntax, and evasion of contemporary social reality. These features, furthermore, were considered symptomatic of the faulty style generally promoted in Taiwan's modernist literary movement. While it may not be unusual in literary history for critics and writers to periodically reexamine and revolt against the current dominant style, the Modern Poetry Debate bore a special social implication in that it was closely tied to the Taiwan intellectuals' growing consciousness of their endangered Chinese cultural identity. In what was later known as the "return to native roots" 回歸鄉土 trend around the 1970s, progressive intellectuals criticized the blind admiration and slavish imitation of Western cultural models, and exhorted their compatriots to show more respect for their indigenous cultural heritage, as well as greater concern for domestic social issues. Many liberal scholars, especially those who had just returned from the United States, played important roles in igniting this new trend, which at first revolved around several universities and intellectual magazines. Shortly after the Modern Poetry Debate, a group of critics began to publicly renounce the foreign-influenced modernist work and to advocate a nativist, socially responsible literature. This trend reached its apex with the outbreak of two virulent Nativist Literature Debates in 1977 and 1978, and suddenly declined when, in 1979, several key figures of the nativist camp exited from the literary scene and became directly involved in political protests. The tradition of nativist literature as a creative genre--of which the main features were the use of the Taiwanese dialect, depiction of the plight of country folk or small-town dwellers caught up in economic difficulty, and resistance to the imperialist presence in Taiwan--can be traced back to the nativist literary trend during the Japanese colonial period. While inheriting the dominant nationalist spirit from this earlier trend, the nativist literature champions of the 1970s had their own political agenda as well. Viewed retrospectively, the nativist camp was the first oppositional formation at a critical juncture in Taiwan's post-1949 history. After two decades of political stability and steady economic growth, the country suffered a series of diplomatic setbacks at the turn of the decadebeginning with its expulsion from the United Nations in 1971, followed by Richard Nixon's visit to the Chinese mainland and the termination of the ROC's diplomatic relations with Japan in 1972--which caused not only international isolation, but also a confidence crisis among Taiwan intellectuals. Unlike the majority of the country's liberal intellectuals, who demanded democratization while supporting capitalist-style economic modernization, the nativists believed that the socioeconomic system of Taiwan must be changed. They fiercely attacked the ROC government's economic dependence on Western countries (especially the United States), deplored the infiltration of "decadent" capitalist culture into the ordinary lives of Taiwan's people, expressed indignance on behalf of Taiwan's farmers and workers who paid a high economic price for the nation's urban expansion, and attempted to draw public attention to the adverse effects of the country's overall economic development. The regionalist sentiment implied in the nativist project immediately touched on an extremely sensitive issue, the "provincial heritage problem" 省籍問題. Tensions between native Taiwanese and mainlanders had always existed, especially given the perceptions of an unbalanced distribution of political power at the time. As a consequence, even though some of the leading nativist critics were socialists or nationalists rather than separatists promoting Taiwan independence, the nativist critical discourse as a whole could not but be part of the ongoing political strife. It is therefore undeniable that literary nativism was used by a special group of people at a particular historical moment to challenge the existing sociopolitical order. However, it appears that ideological debates in modern Chinese society inevitably generate widespread polemics around literature, as evidenced by the numerous such disputes held during the May Fourth period, in the 1930s, and during the entire communist reign on the mainland. The traditional Chinese pragmatic view of literature and the legacy of a gentry ideology, which assigns to intellectuals, especially writers, lofty social missions, combined to make literary discourse a genuine political space. As a result, the attacks launched by the nativists on the modernist writers, whose literary ideology was conspicuously apolitical, largely centered on the latter's default of their social responsibilities as members of the intelligentsia. The home base for the anti-modernist critics was the journal Literary Quarterly 文季, founded in 1966. With Yu Tien-tsung 尉天聰 as the central mover, the journal's founding members included several writers already known for their modernist works, such as Chen Ying-chen, Liu Ta-jen 劉大任, Shih Shu-ching, and Chi-teng Sheng. Furthermore, the journal had discovered two important writers, Huang Chun-ming 黃春明 and Wang Chen-ho 王禎和, whose fiction significantly departed from the current modernist fads and depicted rural life with unaffected realism. Although both writers refused to label their works as "nativist," the literary reformers on the journal's editorial board were ready to use them as weapons in their fight against the modernist hegemony. In 1973, Tang Wen-piao 唐文標, a visiting math professor closely associated with the Literary Quarterly, criticized the modernists' elitist tendencies and neglect of the masses. The straightforward accusations so startled the liberal critics that Yen Yuan-shu referred to this critical attack as the "Tang Wen-piao Incident." However, even more vehement militancy was to be seen when the nativist critics chose individual writers as targets. Almost simultaneously with the Tang Wen-piao Incident, the Literary Quarterly organized a series of seminars to examine the thematic implications of Ou-yang Tzu's fiction, and branded it "corrupt and immoral." By the mid-1970s, Taiwan's literary writers were already deeply split into opposing camps. The literary climate in this decade became truly unpleasant with the increasing politicization of critical discourse. With the founding of the radical magazine Summer Tide 夏潮 in 1976 and its provocative use of such taboo terms as "proletarian literature" and "class consciousness," the deep-seated anticommunist sentiments of the liberals were incited. In the summer of 1977, the country's leading modernist poet Yu Kuang-chung 余光中 wrote a short essay entitled "The Wolf Is Here" 狼來了 openly accusing the nativists of being leftists. This fatal charge ignited highly emotional responses and retaliations from all sides, and polemical writings about literature and politics began to flood the country's newspapers and literary magazines. This so-called Nativist Literary Debate was finally brought to an end in the middle of 1978 as a result of threatened government intervention. Placed within a larger historical context, the modernist-nativist split was part of the continual struggle in modern Chinese history between liberal and radical intellectuals with different reform programs and different views of literature's social function. The new paradigm of ideological writing as established in the mid-1970s moved in a direction diametrically opposed to that of the introspective, humanist, and universalist approach of the modernists and deliberately focused on the historical specificity of contemporary Taiwan society. In addition to later works by Huang Chun-ming on imperialism, such writers as Yang Ching-chu 楊青矗 and Wang To 王拓 explored capitalist exploitation as it affected urban factory workers and fishermen. These literary efforts were also backed by some serious theoretical thinking, although most of the Nativist Literary Debate itself was virtually divorced from contemporary literary practice. Wang To's 1977 essay, "It Should Be 'Literature of the Here and Now,' Not 'Nativist Literature'" 是現實主義文學,不是鄉土文學 stood out among numerous polemical writings precisely because of its accurate representation of the reality of recent literary practice. The main argument that Wang proposed in this essay was that, instead of writing about rural regions and country people, nativist literature should be concerned with the "here and now" of Taiwan society, which embraces a wide range of social environments and people. Thus, nativist literature should be defined as a literature rooted in the land of Taiwan, one that reflects the social reality and the material and psychological aspirations of its people. By using the term hsien shih 現實 (contemporary reality, the "here and now" rather than hsieh shih 寫實 (realism), and by enlarging the scope of nativist literature to include all levels of social reality in Taiwan, Wang stressed high-priority nativist issues. The essay, therefore, represented an important step in the nativists' process of self-definition. The critical evaluation of nativist works produced in the 1970s, however, was in general not very positive. Although the change in thematic conventions since the '70s met the approval of most critics, excessive ideological concern was considered to have detracted from their literary achievement. Even Huang Chun-ming, who was often regarded as an exception, has been criticized by many who felt that his art, too, deteriorated in direct proportion to the increase in social commentary in his later works. However, just as modernist literature continued to evolve after the rise of nativist literature, the practice of nativist literature did not come to an end even though the Nativist Literary Debate folded toward the end of the 1970s. In the continuing efforts made by such nativist ideological writers as Chen Ying-chen, Sung Tse-lai 宋澤萊, Li Chiao 李喬, and Wu Chin-fa 吳錦發 in the 1980s, one can discern a sharp increase in formal consciousness, as well as attempts to experiment with innovative techniques. Eighties Pluralism In a sense, the articulation of dissident views during the Nativist Literary Debate paved the way for more intense struggles toward democratization, which rapidly gained momentum in the early 1980s. Eventually, with the formation in 1987 of an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, literature was largely relieved of its function as a pretext for political contestation. At the same time, however, it became even more inextricably involved in the country's booming mass media. Most notably, the two competing media giants, the United Daily News 聯合報 and China Times 中國時報--with each claiming the loyalty of a group of writers--invested heavily in their literary pages for marketing purposes. The annual fiction contests they sponsored between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s gave creative writing a solid boost--an overwhelming majority of the writers of the baby-boom generation rose to literary prominence by winning one of these contests. The nativist theorists may have felt both frustrated and vindicated in the 1980s, as the "spiritual corruption" of capitalist society, which they had predicted, appeared along with the ascendancy of materialism and a sharp rise in the crime rate. The overall cultural environment also became heavily consumer-oriented. Not without a touch of irony, even the nativist literature itself was largely co-opted by the cultural establishment, especially between the late 1970s and early 1980s. Newspaper supplements and literary magazines were inundated by pseudo-nativist works, which displayed an abundance of Taiwanese local color but contained little ideological content. As public fervor for both the modernist and the nativist causes subsided, the literary scene of the 1980s became largely dominated by the baby-boom generation, whose vocational visions were drastically different from those of their predecessors. Rather than treating creative writing as an intellectual project or a political quest, they were more concerned with popularity and with various problems affecting Taiwan's middle-class urbanites, especially the new social affluence and the relaxation of moral standards. Some writers with a cynical intellectual pose, such as Huang Fan 黃凡 and Li Ang 李昂, offered critiques of materialism and the cultural impoverishment it caused; while others with down-to-earth pragmatism, such as Hsiao Sa 蕭颯 and Liao Hui-ying 廖輝英, examined the new social factors that had changed ordinary people's way of life, showing particular interest in liberated sexual views and the problem of extramarital relationships; and still others, such as Yuan Chiung-chiung 袁瓊瓊, Chu Tien-wen 朱天文, and Su Wei-chen 蘇偉貞, fell back on the sentimental-lyrical tradition and focused their attention on subjective, private sentiment with a posture of complacency in regard to sociopolitical issues. Whether progressively or conservatively inclined, the new generation of writers seemed to share a common response to the emergence of new political situations. As knowledge about the Chinese on the other side of the Taiwan Strait suddenly became available, and with the public debate over the nature and pace of unification with the Chinese mainland intensifying on a daily basis, many of the writers of the baby-boom generation tended to deliberately stress their unique cultural identity, rooted in the specific sociohistorical realities of Taiwan's post-1949 era. Writers' approaches to literature in this decade were certainly pluralist. While writers of the modernist generation published their more mature works during this decade, literary products of the younger generation were marked by a rich diversity--chuan tsun 眷村 (residential military community) literature, works about life in business corporations, political fiction (with a special sub-genre on the February 28 Incident), neo-nativist literature, resistance literature, feminist works, and science fiction--a phenomenon that may be aptly characterized as the orchestration of a multitude of discordant "voices." The broadly defined trend of "returning to one's native roots" carried over into the early 1980s beyond the modernist-nativist contention. After the Nativist Literary Debate, new interest in an indigenous literary heritage fostered a trend of cultural nostalgia. Several former modernist writers made notable contributions to this trend. Shih Shu-ching and Li Ang, for example, consciously turned to folk traditions and native subject matter in their writing. Lin Huai-min 林懷民, a former modernist writer who had studied under Martha Graham while in the US, founded the first Chinese modern dance troupe and produced the well-received "Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble" 雲門舞集, which incorporated both classical Chinese and folk Taiwanese elements in its choreography (see section, Dance, in The Arts). All of these accomplishments set the tone for creative endeavors in the new decade, even while encouraging commercial exploitation of traditional and native cultural signs. As the indigenous began to replace the foreign as the primary source of exotic imagination, and "Chinese/Taiwanese cultural identity" began to occupy a prominent place in the public consciousness, "postmodernism" became vogue after the mid-1980s and again raised issues about Western influences on contemporary Chinese literature. In a pattern closely resembling that by which such earlier Western literary trends as romanticism, realism, and modernism were appropriated by Chinese writers, the postmodern mode of writing became a new fad and its surface markers, such as double endings, juxtaposition of the factual and the fictional, and the technique of pastiche, among others, appeared profusely in works by both greater and lesser writers. Such imitative literary products cannot but recall works written during the earliest phase of the modernist literary movement, and not surprisingly, are considered to be of dubious value by some veteran modernists. The younger writers of the 1990s consciously subscribed to the more cynical, "postmodern" ideology--as evidenced by their emphasis on difference, tolerance of pluralistic coexistence of the incommensurable, and, above all, their appetite for the indeterminacy that is uncongenial to the modernist temperament. However, there were also similarities between the two generations of writers: their intellectual disposition, their globalism, and the way they looked to the West--or Western-influenced literary traditions, such as those of Eastern Europe and Latin America--for literary models. As prescribed by "postmodern" ideology, however, the younger writers were more keenly aware of the self/other dichotomy, and thus did not endorse universalism as the modernists did. Nineties Multiculturalism and Postidentity Politics Taiwan has undergone an interpretive turn in terms of national identity and critical multi-culturalism in the 1990s. Taiwanese literature of the '90s tends to use mixed genres and multilingual devices, drawing on a wide range of both global and local cultural codes, idioms, and traditions, to express the fluid, albeit disoriented, structure of feelings. In the '90s, Chu Tien-wen and Chang Ta-chun 張大春 were still prominent figures in the field of political fiction, especially for their nostalgic narratives on the dissolution of a certain culture within government housing compounds. Chang was reputed for his technique of intermixing various genres--including history, dream text, diary, and news reports--and voices. As a writer appropriating all news and media events, Chang gradually moved from writing cynical diaries and "factual fiction" based on the tragic death of a navy officer to producing public TV programs and increasingly becoming a media person. Chu's Notes of a Desolate Man 荒人手記 won the 1994 China Times best fiction award. Although the second-generation mainlanders who serve as the subjects of this novel reappear repeatedly, Chu's sensitivity to the ethnic tensions, rupture of tradition, and societal psychopathologies is nicely matched by her literary style and narrative coherence. In between Chu and Chang was Yang Chao 楊照, a young talent who successfully blended romance with saga, collapsing the distinctions between public and private and the personal and the social. Yang is currently a cultural critic, political activist, and novelist. His multiple roles in contemporary Taiwanese public culture, as well as his impressive talent in fusing personal and interpersonal histories, are self-evident in one of his trilogies, A Dark Alley on a Confusing Night 暗巷迷夜. In contrast to Li Ang, who severely criticized the patriarchal system of domination, younger women writers emerging in the '90s, such as Lo Yi-chun 駱以軍 or Cheng Ying-shu 成英姝, were more playful in their treatment of sexual liaisons in bars (often gay or lesbian), of the object-choice "medial woman," and of the fantasies and frustrations of the so-called "New Human Species" 新新人類 in relation to the new, unsettling social milieu that had thus far failed to take shape. Writers like Cheng were on their way to expressing postidentity politics, celebrating postmodern flexibility and unpredictability in the global cyberspace of easy accessibility. Their counterpart in the field of poetry was the late Lin Yao-te 林燿德, who employed the language of the fax machine and computer terminal to describe the fluid human relations in a transnational capitalistic society. Lin was very active in the '80s in promoting postmodern poetry about urban culture and cityscapes, following poets like Lo Men 羅門, Lo Ching 羅青, and others. These poets differed greatly from the humanist traditions set up by Lo Fu 洛夫, Wai-lim Yip, and Ya Hsien 亞弦, as well as from the traditions revised by Chien Cheng-chen 簡政珍, Hsu Hui-chih 許悔之, and Chiao Tung 焦侗, who added phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and even poststructuralist twists. To question Chinese nationalism, quite a few writers tried to highlight issues associated with the Taiwan independence movement, minority discourse, political feminism, and environmental protection. Reportage, science fiction, and biography were the most popular modes of literary expression and ethnographic exploration of everyday political subjects among these writers. Ku Ling 苦苓 was a most celebrated political satirist who never failed to make fun of statesmen, as Yu Fu 魚夫 did in his political cartoons. A prolific poet who also wrote on such subjects was Li Min-yung 李敏勇. However, it was in the mini theater 小劇場 that serious political satires truly intermingled with comic relief. The stages for mini plays took on many forms, and could be found in the theater, on the street, in city hall, or even in front of the Legislature. Some differing and milder versions of post-avant-garde theater, on the other hand, were offered by playwrights like Stan Lai 賴聲川, Li Kuo-hsiu 李國修, and Chung Ming-te 鍾明德, who drew their inspiration from a range of Chinese-Western dramas--both ancient and modern. (see Spoken Drama and Traditional Music Theater sections, The Arts) An important trend in the '90s was the revival of the local vernacular tradition. As the localization process took root, Taiwanese (southern Fujianese) and Hakka came to be looked upon as the preferred linguistic mediums for literary expression. In this regard, Chang Chun-huang 張春凰 was hailed, since the publication of her pioneering prose work Paths to Youth 青春e路途 in 1995 made her the first prose writer to write in Taiwanese. The work represents a crucial step in rearticulating one's literary tradition toward a more promising future, in which linguistic nuances and cultural differences are appreciated and cherished. After all, it is the diversity of languages and customs on the island that has enriched the literary expressions of the people of Taiwan. Online Literature The proliferation and dissemination of information technology in Taiwan has led to the emergence of new literary vehicles unique to the computer era. Electronic bulletin boards (BBS), the Internet, and electronic mail (e-mail) have not only diversified the means by which literary works are circulated, but also created a new aesthetic dimension for literature arising from the manipulation of on-line techniques, such as animation, multimedia, hyperlinking, and interactive writing. Works probing into the virtual reality of cyberspace, categorized as hypertext literature, are distinguished by their creative form from those appearing in the traditional print-based media (and from those works going on-line without hypertextual elements). They illustrate an "organized stream of consciousness," as one of the supportive statements for hypertext literature goes. The Garden of Forking Paths 歧路花園 (benz.nchu.edu.tw/~garden) is one of the sites devoted to the creation and promotion of hypertext literature. The recent developments of on-line literature in Taiwan include the establishment of online bookstores, professional literary sites, and intermedia sites (e.g., the literary supplements of newspapers, such as the China Times and the Central Daily News, are now on-line). Another phenomenon is the appearance of literary sites, organizational and personal, on the WWW, changing the scene of on-line literature formerly dominated by the BBS. One of the most significant characteristics of on-line literature is its immediacy, as well as its expansion across social, racial, sexual, and other hierarchical boundaries. For one thing, the writer can bypass both publishers and editors to reach readers directly through the ideally indiscriminate world of cyberspace, without joining in the marketing system of popular culture. According to some literary theorists, the free flow and easy access of on-line literary resources have vigorously challenged the "cultural hegemony" of traditional media. While there are still considerable controversies and even anxieties over the would-be paradise of cyber literature (the overflow of online works, the infringement of copyrights, and the intervention of commercialism have posed problems or complications), the function of digital archives on the Internet makes an indisputable contribution, as the availability of literary materials will surely aid in literary research and appreciation. One such effort is the Contemporary Authors Full-Text & Image System 當代文學史料影像全文系統 established by the National Central Library 國家圖書館, which collects personal information, brief biographies, manuscripts, photos, chronicles of works, critical sources, translation sources, famous words, and records of literary awards of around 1,000 modern writers in Taiwan. Another example is the "Way of Poetry" 詩路 project by the Council for Cultural Affairs and the On-line Alliance of Taiwan's Modern Poetry 臺灣現代詩網路聯盟, which gathers the works, translations, and multimedia materials of Taiwan's most important modern poets. Copyright (C) May 2001, Government Information Office.   All rights reserved.   Site design by L.F. Lee Best viewed with Netscape 4.x or IE 5.x (medium font) at 800 x 600 True Color (32 bit) resolution