This essay traces the development of Taiwanese fiction since the 1960's. While the 60’s were a period of aestheticism (“modernism"), Chinese modernism is never completely a reaction against realism; it shows humanitarian concern for the common people and often is “realistic” in style. Thus the “local color" realism of the 70’s, which aimed at accurate portrayal of the native Taiwanese people, was a further development rather than a reaction. In the 80's, a period of greater political freedom and openness, writers began to treat political encounters as symptomatic of the age and its people. Thus while history has a role to play in all three periods, its relation to the narrative becomes crucial in contemporary fiction. Here I analyze the relation between aesthetics (“modernist") and ideology (“realist") on the horizontal axis, and that between history and the unconscious (of the narrator as individual or group) on the vertical axis. In contemporary writing history functions together with myth and other genres, transforming Taiwanese fiction into something beyond modernism and realism.

This essay develops a feminist perspective called “returning the gaze.” It discusses differences between early pre-May Fourth Movement writers and the “New Sensationalist” writer Mu Shiying (1912-1940), Eileen Chang (“the first modern woman writer to represent female sexuality in Chinese literature”), and Li Ang (a post-modernist, feminist, writer from Taiwan). These newer writers examine the space made available for the female in a male dominated culture, and are generally more open-minded about sex than earlier writers.

Reading Pa-ta Shan-jen’s poetry is akin to the pleasure of “reading”’ his painting—for both concern the unraveling of the play of symbolism, the ambiguous, unbounded symbolism which contains allusions within allusions, memories within memories, and lines that change meanings with continual reimagining and reexperiencing. In reading Pa-ta’s poetry, the—critical focus is on the text, although in reading his painting the power of sight is inevitably dominant. In studying Pa-ta’s paintings and almost all Chinese painting, there is: the constant demand to be involved with two powerful but opposed forces—the textual and the visual. In fact, today the “textual” dimension of Chinese painting has been forgotten by some modern art historians. From this stand point, deconstruction in literary criticism insists upon interdisciplinary approaches that erase boundaries that traditionally separate disciplines from one another. Even with interdisciplinary work, scholars in poetry and criticism tend to conceive of cultural products as “texts,” limiting the process of interpretation. Traditional Chinese literati held that the integrity of both textual and visual forces created the total context of writing and interpretation. This paper examines two of Pa-ta’s paintings and their inscribed poems: “White Jasmine” and “Two Birds” to explore possible textual and visual strategies the poet-painter may have used, and thereby derive from the possible conflicting meanings the interpretation which is “right” or the one which is most rewarding.

Here I interpret Wang’s theory of poetry—specifically his notion of ching-chieh, “world”—as a unique blend of Chinese and Western aesthetic models which is nonetheless grounded in a coherent world-view. Wang’s “world” is composed of two essential poetic elements, “scene” and “feeling”: “only poems which depict true (chen) scenes/objects and true feelings possess world.” The concept of “truth,” which as in Schopenhauer involves inner spiritual depth, is thus crucial here. The truly depicted scene has “soul” and “vitality?” truthful description of world is “un-blocked,” direct, transparent. “Truth,” “no blocking” and “world” are closely interrelated concepts, suggesting a consistent, unified world-view.

Here I question the view that Chinese lyric is a unique (Non-Western) form of expression by “deconstructing” the models of poetic meaning of three Chinese critics. Thus while Wai Lim Yip holds for a purely “natural” poetic meaning beyond language, I suggest that this is an impossible (selfcontradictory) claim. While Pauline Yu sees Chinese lyric as a “contextual response” to the immediate environment, I show that the monistic, “immanent” world-view she presupposes reveals itself on closer examination to be a dualistic view. And while Wong Kin-yuen distinguishes Chinese “metaphor”—by stressing the metonymic, carrying-across force of the phor—from Western meta (“beyond”)-phor, 1 emphasize the common linguistic ground of metonym and metaphor. My argument in each case is based on a view of language as open-ended, inclusive but indeterminate, a signifying network grounded in its own self-difference. Thus I conclude that all poetic models are finally equivalent because inevitably grounded in a language itself ”un-grounded.”

Here I analyze the phenomenon of a politically subversive message (“Down with Li Peng”) embedded, unseen by the editor, in a very traditional, nationalistic poem in the People’s Daily. In addition to discussing the literary/political ironies of this situation and the linguistic/literary/pragmatic issues involved in translation—I’ve translated the poem into English, attempting to keep the hidden “acrostic”—I reflect on the broader question of the relation between literary sensitivity (traste) and political sensitivity (acuteness, “correctness”). People are, after all, members of a linguistic community and culture before they are members of a political state.

China’s reception of Ibsen and his plays reflects generally the world’s reception but at the same time has its own idiosyncratic developments. Nineteenth century people first related to Ibsen, the author, as social critic and political reformer. But as the moral and social issues his plays inscribe lost currency, response changed in some camps from a moral/political one to an aesthetic-formalist one concerned with art. Russian interests carried the moralist concern in its socialist-Marxist interpretation, while America’ and Western Europe pursued an aesthetic-formalist interpretation, Ibsen’s reception in China can roughly be divided into four periods: (1) 1907-1927, (2) 1928-1948, (3) 1949-1978, and (4) 1979-present. In the first period Chinese interpretations of Ibsen were closely associated with social movements, moral code, individualism, iconoclasm and feminism. The second period showed growing maturity with some individuals placing emphasis upon Ibsen’s artistry, yet under the influence of the split between Russia and Western Europe constroversy centered on whether Ibsen was an artist or social reformer. During the time of the Sino-Japanese War emphasis was placed upon Ibsen’s political content. In the third period, after 1949, under the dominant influence of Russia and communism, interpretation followed socialist-Marxist ideology. In the last period, after 1979, there has been a gradual adoption of an aesthetic-formalist code of interpretation. China’s reception follows the general trend of the West but has necessarily reacted according to its particular circumstances along the way. In sum, Iben’s legacy in China has spawned a growing awareness of the importance of individuality and iconclasm, women’s emancipation, and a modern theatre.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Werther was partially translated into Chinese in 1902 or 1903 and was completely translated in 1922 by Kuo Mo-jo. Since that time Werther became the most frequently reprinted German novel in translation in China. The popular reception of Werther correlates closely to the socio-intellectual climate and ideological changes of China at the time. The May Fourth era represents a time when young intellectuals rebelled against Confucianism and feudalism and upheld the importance of democracy, science, individualism, freedom, vitality and nature. In this regard, young Chinese found echoes of their own aspirations, sentiments, frustrations, uncertainties and problems in young Werther. The epistolary novel as a literary genre is unknown to Chinese literature prior to the introduction of Werther. The young literati freed from past limitations looked for a mode of presentation that was simple and easy to master yet flexible enough to allow free expression; the epistolary novel fit the bill and spawned a spate of Chinese works. This paper reviews Lu Yin’s short story “Ho-jen ti pei-ai,’ Kuo Mo-jo’s “Ke-erh-mer-lo Ku-niang” and Chang I-P’ing’s Ch’ing-shu i shu comparing and contrasting them with Geothe’s: Werther in various aspects. Certainly Werther had a profound influence upon young writers and readers in China. While there is similarity to the German model, it is not mere imitation rather the efforts of young Chinese writers show they consciously assimilated the form and content of a foreign work to suit their own socio-cultural needs.

Here I show that the Dream of the Red Chamber is based on a quite sophisticated naming system: apart from their literal meaning, the names of characters and places have a number of connotations. The interplay of meanings of names sheds light on the novel’s theme, plot and characters, and also reveals the author’s own thoughts on a number of specific issues. For instance, the Taoist theme of yin/yang opposition-and-harmony and Buddhist vision of the world as illusion are subtly expressed through names whose “original” meanings are ironically subverted by the opposite connotations of their homonyms.

This feminist essay on Hung lou meng (A Dream of Red Mansions), focuses on the character of Bao Yu as embodying a subversive gender ideology; his own rather bisexual nature and sympathetic attitude toward women in the novel represents a utopian sexual ethics—a recognition of the Other (the female) as different and not merely derivative. Further, like the woman characters who are “fluid” and ambiguous as water, Bao Yu’s gender orientation is “fluid.” The author employs the theories and terminology of modern French psychoanalytic theorists like Lacan and Luce Irigaray to critique the Confucian gender ideology of Hung lou meng. The author remarks at the end of the essay that in this novel, “Marriage as an institution is powerful enough to strangle femininity.”