Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, NCCU

Title Why Women Writers Reject Rural Literature Author Fan, Ming-Ju Distinguished Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature, National Chengchi University Abstract This essay is going to discuss women’s disinterest in rural writing from three following aspects, personal experiences in urban and rural area, the interests of literary productions toward urban and rural regions, and gender nature in narrative of city and country. Although the main focus is on Taiwanese women writers, this article will also take in consideration women writers of China and Hong Kong, as well as the American women’s literature in the mid nineteenth-century, particularly the historical conditions resulted in regional literature. It tends to prove that women’s position is closer to urbanity, no matter from the angles of empiricism, literary production or narrative tradition, unless under special circumstances. The spatial preference of women’s literature has been constrained by internal and external structures. Sexual segregation of space always inscribes in women’s reality and writing, even though we did not notice it.

Title The Popular Writing of Xie Xue–yu and Transcultural Identity Editing: Exploring Gender and National Allegory in The Heroines of Japan and China Author Lin, Fang-Mei Professor, Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, National Taiwan Normal University Abstract This paper examines the popular fiction written by Xie Xue-yu, The Heroines of Japan and China, by focusing on three aspects: women’s images, imagination of Chinese and Japanese culture, and the way the author advocates national policies in the novel. This paper withholds the issue of constant and stable identity and whether or not the author is pro-Japan. Instead I raise the concept of transcultural identity editing to show how Xie Xue-yu moves across in-between spaces of Japan/China, tradition/modernity, East/West. This paper explores transcultural flows, which is different from multiculturalism. The latter assumes that there exist many kinds of cultures within a nation, and each of these cultures is homogeneous within itself and differentiates itself from other cultures through external comparison. But transculturality proposes that each culture has built within itself internal differences and interacts with other cultures to form a dynamic network. To construct personal identity is more like choosing, deleting, and arranging elements from various cultures to build up a configuration that attends to the needs at the moment. I also attempt to revisit the thesis of national allegory as proposed by Fredric Jameson. I think the term “national” as used by Jameson does not mean “national identity.” Instead, the term refers to a problematic regarding politics, society, and history in the conditions of modernity. And contemporary allegory can be characterized by the fracture between the signifier and the signified, as well as the ambiguity and heterogeneity of meanings. This paper does not regard the fiction as a mouthpiece of Japanese imperialism and nationalism; instead, I emphasize how the internal textual differences evade a single national position in order to re-arrange multiple positions under the surface of conforming to official policies.

Title How to Do a History of Homosexuality in Literature: 1960s Taiwan Author Chi, Ta-Wei Assistant Professor, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Chengchi University Abstract While homosexuality is found in documentary materials on Taiwan in the first half of the twentiethcentury, it was not clearly represented in local literature until the 1960s. This article responds to and supplements David Halperin’s work in How to Do the History of Homosexuality, which is Eurocentric, male-centric, and focused on history per se rather than on literary productions. The article intends less to construct a history of homosexual literature─as if the category of “homosexual literature” were some sort of given─than to consider how the persons, desires, acts, and knowledge of homosexuality are produced in a literary history by analyzing key works in the Taiwan of the 1960s. Although Kenneth Pai is widely acknowledged to be a pioneer of representing homosexuality, it is in fact a mistake, though a common one, to reiterate Pai as the only seminal writer of sexual dissidence in Taiwan. The 1960s featured other seminal writers, whose contributions to our knowledge of homosexuality must be recognized along with Pai’s. The plurality of the 1960s is found not only in the temporal coincidence of Pai with other writers but also in the cooperation of local authors with literary critics such as C. T. Hsia, a mentor figure to Pai’s generation, who detects signs of homosexuality in local literature. The subjectivities found in 1960s literature are also more pluralistic than presumed. Whereas some characters in 1960s fiction resemble today’s self-sufficient subjects of homosexuality, more figures are elusive subject-effects of homosexuality that demand more attention in contemporary LGBT studies in and on Taiwan.

Title Colonial Modernity and the Empire of Love: The Representation of Same-Sex Love in Colonial Taiwan and Korea Author Chen, Pei-Jean PhD Candidate, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University Abstract This paper seeks to examine the knowledge production of free love and sexuality in colonial Taiwan and Korea, with specific focus on how the normative ideas about same-sex love were created, transformed, and translated into local cultural practices in an effort to "modernize" the individuals under the Japanese rule. Due to the need of mobilization of national/colonial subjects, the discovery of the individual as a modern identity in the early twentieth century East Asia brought about the outer expression of human desires, which had been restricted under the system of Confucian rites. Especially, the liberation of sex was the most conspicuous affair and one crucial indication of modernity during the colonial time. The emerged sexual discourses during the 1920s and 1930s produced a great variety of sexual subjects, through highly diversified debates on masturbation, venereal disease, birth control, and prostitution in publishing industry. Built upon this social condition, this paper traces the specific cultural debates and literary practices that represented the same-sex love events in public media, with special focus on Taiwan Nichinichi Shimpo and Taiwan Min Bao published in colonial Taiwan and Dong-A Ilbo, New Women and Pyŏlkŏn’gon magazine published in colonial Korea, to show how the writings and columns encompassed sexual issues by local intellectuals demonstrate the specificity of interior modernization and addresses complex issues of modernity.

Title The Phenomena and Strategies of the Rewriting of Novels Published in Newspapers and Magazines in Taiwan under Japanese Rule Author Hsu, Chun-Ya Professor, The Department of Chinese, National Taiwan Normal University Abstract This essay focuses on the phenomena of the rewriting of novels published in newspapers and magazines in Taiwan under Japanese rule, as well as the strategies of narration adopted in the process of rewriting. Among those original texts to be rewritten, many are note novels written in classical Chinese, news of the society and translated foreign novels. The strategies of narration can be classified into the following categories: substitution of the spatio-temporal background, translation from classical Chinese into vernacular Chinese or vice versa, transformation into another literary genre and misrepresentation of news (which are factual) as novels (which are fictional). As a result, in practice, the title of a text may be replaced; the words and sentences may be deleted or supplemented by extra ones; the order of paragraphs may be reversed; the grammatical person may be changed; the sequence of serialization may be altered; and different texts may be combined and intertwined with one another. With regard to the transformation of the literary genre in which the original text was composed, in particular, a novel may be transformed into an essay, a poem into a novel and so forth. The wide variety of different ways of transformation is miraculous, some of which might not have been seen in literature. Depending upon the editors’ varying conception of literature, aesthetic preferences and practical concerns, the rewritten texts not only preserve the gist of the original ones, but also make explicit the underlying idea of karma, implied Confucianist thoughts or the influences of the pursuit of commercial success. Besides, the editors may at times add further notes to the end of a text, responding to the policy promoted by the Japanese government or his or her subjective assessment of the text. The content of these additions also varies dramatically, some of which tend to mislead some other scholars working in this field to misidentify the author of an original text as a Taiwanese, as opposed to a Chinese. Therefore, this article puts great emphasis on the meticulous examination of different versions of a text and the tracking of the original one. It is strongly hoped that this contribution can help other researchers avoid committing further grave mistakes and making arbitrary interpretations of these texts that are, I am afraid, outright fallacious and wrong.

Title Propaganda and Resistance: The Textual Discrepancy in the Discourses over Jialan Dazun Author Chen, Shu-Jung Liu, Shu-Chin Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University Professor, Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Tsing Hua University Abstract The construction of Jialan dazun (Jialan Great Ditches) was completed in 1930. This public-private cooperative irrigation project under the guide of the colonial government was record-breaking in many respects. This article first analyzes the production, promotion, and content of a propaganda film entitled Happy Farmers, and demonstrates how the official colonial ideologies were propagated. Secondly, the article discusses the writer Tsai Chiutong’s short stories as well as investigates the Farmers’ Association’s critique of this grand irrigation project, in order to locate an anti-colonial message in Tsai’s stories. This article argues that these stories deconstructed the pseudo-realism of the official documentary film and challenged the legitimacy of the colonial worldview. In conclusion, this article reveals historical and social meanings masked in a textual discrepancy between official colonial discourses and anti-colonial ones.