dc.description.abstract | The major post-war modernist writers in Taiwan first emerged in the 1960s as
their work became a growing influence on the Taiwan literary scene. Among these writers Wang Wen-hsing, in his dedicated adherence to the craft, can perhaps be regarded as a representative of the movement. This dissertation, entitled Wang Wen-hsing and His Contemporaries in the Modernist Movement, focuses on a study of the works of Pai Hsien-yung, Ou-Yang Tzu, Chen Jo-hsi, Kuo Sung-fen, and Wang Chen-ho, alongside those of Wang in an effort to demonstrate their creative contribution to the development of modern literature in Taiwan.
Chapter 2 investigates the father-son relationship, the conflict between family and personal freedom, and the pursuit of reality in Wang Wen-hsing’s Family Catastrophe and Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys. The relationship between mother and sons/daughters in Ou Yang-tze’s Autumn Leaf is also discussed. In their works modernist writers probe into reality to present the complexity and multiple dimensions of humanity and to challenge the conventional rules of morality and ethics. For these three modernist writers, the value of literature is to present human nature. They challenge the traditional point of view by exposing reality and in so doing transcend the scope and imagination of conventional realism to open up a new window in literary creation in Taiwan after the 1950s, an era that was dominated largely by military and anti-communist writing.
Chapter 3 explores the relationship between the idea of “modern”in the modernist movement and classical Chinese literature. Contrary to the common view that these modernist writers indiscriminately accepted Western literary ideas while abandoning the classical Chinese literary tradition, Wang and Pai not only draw heavily from the latter to nourish their creativity but also show clear evidence of classical Chinese literary traditions in their works. That is to say, these writers, most of whom received their training in Western literary techniques at the National Taiwan University and in the United States, retain a deep-rooted connection to the classical Chinese literary and artistic heritage.
The opinions and strategies of Wang and his fellow writers on the language of literary modernism are discussed in Chapter 4. Dissatisfied with vernacular Chinese after the May Fourth Movement, they sought to revitalize the written word in their works through the use of poetic expressions and sentence structures of classical Chinese. Both Wang Wen-hsing and Kuo Sung-fen employed poetic methods in their writing. From their reading of modern western literary masterpieces, from the translations of these classics, from sentence patterns in Western languages as well as their own background in classical Chinese literature, they found the inspiration to reanimate the language and style of their writings.
Chapter 5 focuses on the presentation of language patterns in the works. The use of dialects from the various provinces of China in Wang’s and Pai’s works, and the multiple voices in Wang Chen-ho’s writing all demonstrate the rich linguistic diversity present in Taiwan at the time. Moreover, the mixture of Taiwanese and Japanese in the poetic language of Kuo’s works testifies to the intimately heartfelt monologue of an intellectual living in prolonged exile. On the other hand, Wang Wen-hsing and Wang Chen-ho attempt to rise above tradition through the use of such stylistic innovations as bold type, repetition, blank spaces, phonetic symbols and letters of the English alphabet in the texts of their works to achieve new heights of artistic creation and to express the musicality of their language.
Chapter 6 studies the description of cities and Taiwan localities in Pai’s and Wang’s novels respectively. In Pai’s Taipei People and New Yorkers, for example, the city is used to reflect the themes of estrangement and diaspora and provide a meaningful interpretation of these experiences. Wang’s Family Catastrophe can be considered a “memory book” in its vivid and concrete depiction of life in Taipei in the 1950s. The author painstakingly portrays the details of everyday life to render the physical surroundings and atmosphere of society at the time. In Backed against the Sea, the complex interaction between a mainland Chinese exile and the geographical and social realities of the local small town community is explored in depth. The discussion here examines intricate relationship between literary modernism and the concerns of regionalism.
In conclusion, Wang Wen-hsing and his fellow modernist writers tried to break out of the strictures imposed on artistic endeavors by the government and to find new approaches in literary creation to link up with developments of the West. Their efforts have become the earliest examples of modernism in Taiwan after World War II. In going beyond the limits of vernacular Chinese in their works and moving the narrative esthetics of Chinese writing to a higher level, they are not only pioneers in the modernist literary movement in Taiwan but have established an important milestone in the history of Taiwan literature.
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