Chih-ming Wang (Associate Research Fellow at Academia Sinica; HYI Visiting Scholar 2021-22),
David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University)

This talk revisits the institutional and intellectual history of foreign literature studies in Taiwan through the lenses of colonial modernity and traveling theory. It contends that the discipline of foreign literature studies is fundamentally a project of re-articulation—not only to introduce the Western canon in local contexts, but moreover to resignify it in the global/local nexus for social political transformations. It is particularly wedded to the formation of the Taiwan-China division born out of the civil war and Cold War contexts in 1949. To explain the political meanings of its discipline formations, I will focus on two examples: CT Hsia’s literary modernism as a form of anti-Romanticism in the Cold War era and the translation of subjectivity as zhutixing in the post-martial law Taiwan.