Taiwanese Essays: Literary Criticism and Its Origin

In middle school, I hated Chinese classes. Problem solving and appreciation are based on judgments without a verdict. They want to tell you that this article "only" writes about the magnificence of nature. It was written by the "XX Eight Great Masters." Why choose these eight? The teacher told me that the ancients were chosen, and they were unbreakable. In middle school, I heard a good question mark. The ancients also went to the toilet, so why did the teacher use the toilet?

I am over 30 years old and feel that I was too restless in middle school. You are right to believe in ancient literature. Chinese literature is almost pathologically attached to the sages. Now it seems to be post-modern, extremely nostalgic, and virtuous. It’s just a pity that there is no room for change. . After the Industrial Revolution, books were printed in large quantities, the media flourished, and it was easier to transport across regions and countries. We may know a lot about a work, but we don’t know the author. Modernism began to have a voice, and people began to respond to modernity, such as mechanical Production, the birth of large-scale enterprises, capitalism, the possibility of mechanical reproduction, and the dramatic reduction of communication costs, literary critics, in response to the times, try to understand literature not from the author's point of view, but from language, such as the American New Criticism ( Yes, the lead is TS Eliot who wrote "The Waste Land"), Russian formalism and French structuralism.

Specifically, when we see this passage from Long Yingzong's "The Town with Papaya Trees":

The road in front of the market is called "Main Street", but there are black pillars on both sides, rotten wing rooms, and at the foot of the narrow pavilion, soybean meal and groceries are cluttered together, and weeds grow everywhere on the sloping roof. In the dust-covered grocery store, the businessman sits all day long with expressionless faces covered with moss. The old man with his face full of vertical and horizontal wrinkles, on the ground of the pavilion's feet, stretched out his feet like dead branches, holding a long bamboo cigarette pipe, and dozed lazily.

We have many possibilities for interpretation. For example, was the living environment of Taiwanese in a small town really like this in 1937? Why are grocery stores full of dust? Why are the roofs full of weeds? Why was this work handed down, and what did readers see? In other words, the author's words are no longer central to the interpretation of the work, but the words of the work itself.

Theories and their origins, we can not but talk about the context of time and space, post-war postmodernism is based on the power field as the premise, and we will talk about it later.

Recently, I was distracted to understand the history of Taiwan mystery novels. I read the introduction of Professor Chen Guowei's "Crossing Borders and Translation Paths: The Body Translation and Transnational Generation of Contemporary Taiwanese Mystery Novels ", and I found the two fractures mentioned by Chen very interesting. He simplified Taiwan's mystery novels into three stages: the period of Japanese occupation > 1980s > after 2004, among which there was a paradigm shift. Roughly speaking, the sources that can be tested during the Japanese occupation period include Chinese koan literature (Bao Qingtian), Translation of European and American detective novels (Sherlock Holmes) and Japanese detective novels, under the influence of colonial education during the Japanese occupation, Japanese "literary" detective novels attracted the most attention. The publishing industry has introduced translations of foreign detective novels, and because of the Lin Foer Mystery Fiction Award, Taiwanese mystery novelists have had a way to publish, and after 2004, they are mainly Japanese. What attracted me to this introduction was that the information Chen provided sent a lot of imagination,

1. Detective novels are indeed a product of Europe and the United States (China's koan cases are not based on logic and should be treated differently), and then Japan absorbed and recreated them and became another model. In addition to being loved by Taiwanese readers, how do Taiwanese detective writers absorb models and recreate them?
2. Why does Chen describe the dividing line between the three periods as "broken"? The time point is indeed similar to the "pure" literary history of Taiwan written by Chen Fangming's post-colonial history concept. It is generally believed that the two local literary debates in Taiwan occurred first in the 1930s, focusing on the use of language, and the second occurred in In the 1970s, I haven't read the content, so I won't talk about it (how much trouble in the end). (PS, what is even more interesting is that Chen emphasized the distinction between pure literature and popular literature, perhaps because his research focused on popular literature a while back?)
3. How do we define the emergence of indigenous paradigms? Could it be that there are Chinese-to-English translations circulating in the international market?

I have no answer to the above, this is a reading note full of questions, haha.

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