Writing Taiwan

Taiwan's nativist literature, known as Taiwan hsiang-t'u literature, originated in the Japanese occupation when Taiwanese native authors strived to establish a national literature distinct from Japanese and Chinese literatures. Drawing on recent colonial/postcolonial theory, this project aims to investigate the process of writing in which the native tongue profoundly undermined the privileged status of the colonizer's language and through which natives could articulate their colonial existence. It argues that the new conception of Taiwanese writing produced a new literature where the cultural otherness was traversed by the language and literature of the colonized. Concurrently, the practice of Taiwanese writing as a means of resistance to the writing of the colonizer constructed a new paradigm for Taiwanese national identity.

Autorentext

Yu-lin Lee received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Georgia and now is Assistant Professor of Taiwan Literature at National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His present research focuses on modern Taiwanese literary and cultural studies. He is also the Chinese translator of Deleuze on Literature.

Klappentext
Taiwan's nativist literature, known as Taiwan hsiang-t'u literature, originated in the Japanese occupation when Taiwanese native authors strived to establish a "national" literature distinct from Japanese and Chinese literatures. Drawing on recent colonial/postcolonial theory, this project aims to investigate the process of writing in which the native tongue profoundly undermined the privileged status of the colonizer's language and through which natives could articulate their colonial existence. It argues that the new conception of Taiwanese writing produced a new literature where the cultural "otherness" was traversed by the language and literature of the colonized. Concurrently, the practice of Taiwanese writing as a means of resistance to the writing of the colonizer constructed a new paradigm for Taiwanese "national" identity.