Modernism Against / For the Nation: Joycean Echoes in Postwar Taiwan

Abstract

This chapter examines how Irish Home Rule, the Irish Revival, and modernist aesthetic experiments – particularly those of Joyce – influenced similar nationalist, cultural, and aesthetic developments in Taiwan, the ‘Ireland of Asia’.  Focusing largely on Wang Wen-hsing, an experimental writer known as ‘Taiwan’s Joyce’, Huang shows how Wang’s novel Family Catastrophe (Jiabian, 1972) became a lightning rod for heated debates between modernists and nativists—debates that echoed similar conflicts between modernists and revivalists in Ireland. Citing Susan Stanford Friedman’s argument that non-Western modernisms are ‘different, not derivative’, Huang identifies a fundamental paradox in Wang’s Taiwanese modernism: rather than signalling a betrayal of native culture, Wang’s ‘Westernization’ made him native and his work, in turn, indigenized the West.