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Humanitas Taiwanica, No. 83
Item
Title
Author

1


Constructing “Taiwan” Literature:
The Appropriation and Adaptation of Hippolyte Taine’s Theory and Its Meanings in Taiwan Literary Criticism during the Japanese Colonial Era

   While much has been written on Taiwan’s literature under Japanese rule, studies on its literary criticism are comparatively neglected Therefore, this article aims to trace the development of literary criticism in pre-war Taiwan and point the way to a new field. This paper focuses on the literary critical projects which adopted and adapted Hippolyte Taine’s theory of literary criticism, including Ye Rong-zhong’s “the Third Literature,” Wu Yongfu’s discussion of literary creation, Liu Jie and Li Xian-zhang’s research on folk literature, Huang De-shi’s construction of Taiwan literary history, and Shimada Kinji’s criticism and rewriting of Taine’s theories as a lecturer of Taipei Imperial University. This paper argues that the main reasons for the popularity of Taine’s theory in colonial Taiwan were that it fulfilled the local-desiderata of establishing a scientific approach for literary criticism and also that Taine’s focuses on race, milieu, and moment fitted well with Taiwanese critics who were enthusiastic about the projects of discovering Taiwan’s uniqueness and constructing a national literature.

Lin, Nikky

2

Focusing the Lens on Taiwan under the Globalization of Capitalism:
Rereading Wang Zhenhe’s Novel Rose, Rose, I Love You


   Through the framework of postcolonialism, Qiu Gui-fen has interpreted the male and female prostitutes in Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You as the symbol of colonial Taiwan under American economic imperialism. This article, however, suggests the globalization of capitalism as an alternative framework, arguing that the development of local sex industry in Rose should be read as a metaphor for the modernization of indigenous corporations. Focusing on the development of capitalism in Taiwan, this novel examines the rationalization of the sex industry, a capitalistic economy based on calculation, the conspiracy between capitalists and politicians, and the oppression of sex workers. Through the rhetoric of comedic exaggeration, this novel defamiliarizes the economic conditions where everyone is involved, thereby leading its readers to realize that these laughable, comic characters in the novel are indeed the readers themselves. My reading of this novel seeks to challenge the framework of postcolonialism by suggesting that the binary opposition of the colonizer and colonized often obscures the differences of subject positions on each side and reduces the complexity of the relationship in which nationality, gender, sexuality and class intertwine with one another.
Shie, Elliott Shr-tzung

3

A Reinvestigation of Dazai Shundai’s Sango


   This article explores Sango 產語, a book about economic thought written by Japanese Confucian Dazai Shundai 太宰春臺 (1680-1747). Firstly, based on my study in philology, I point out that the author of Sango is Dazai Shundai. Secondly, I analyze the structure of the thought in Sango and explain Dazai Shundai’s economic policy in order to highlight his ideas on developing agriculture and controlling commerce. Thirdly, I investigate the relationship between Dazai Shundai’s economics thought and the Sorai School 徂徠學派 for the explanation of why he wrote Sango and the values and the limits of it.
Chen, Wei-chin

4

From Symbolic Forms to Phenomena of Life: On the Cultural Implications of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

   This article aims to provide a comprehensive outline of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. First, I will show that Cassirer transformed Kant’s transcendental philosophy into a type of semiotics under the model of Humboldt’s philosophy of language and established an epistemological basis for cultural science in his critical philosophy of culture. Second, based on the Davos Debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, I will explain how Cassirer used the basic phenomenon of life to illustrate the foundation of meaning of scientific knowledge under his research on phenomenology of perception so that his metaphysical philosophy of culture would be well explicated. Based on the above discussions, this article argues that the cultural philosophy embedded in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms presents human beings’ self-understanding on the cultural life-form.
Lin, Yuan-tse

5

A Study of Bian’s Grammaticalization

    This article examines the grammaticalization of Bian 便from ancient Chinese to early Mandarin Chinese by tracing its evolvement of using as a verb into twelve syntactic functions and accordingly constructs its path of grammaticalization. In the path the consecutive and emphatic adverbs are two key grammatical functions since most adverbial and conjunctional functions of Bian are derived from them. In addition to Bian, Ji 即and Jiu 就 underwent the same path of grammaticalization and also have developed the twelve functions as Bian has. This similarity indicates that the path of grammaticalization we propose in this article is representative in the history of Chinese language. My article also discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of consecutive and emphatic adverbs in order to explore the cause of Bian’s polygrammaticalization and thus confirms that the development of the three words does not contradict the hypothesis of unidirectionality.
Chang, Li-li
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