EAST 224 - Taiwan Native-Soil Literature

FC ARHU CD

4 credits
Native-soil’ (xiangtu) in Chinese stands for rurality, hometown, and local culture. Since the 1920s, nativist movements in Taiwan explore, define, and debate over writings that are distinctively ‘Taiwanese.’ In this sense, ‘native-soil’ becomes a site of memory, transformation, atonement, and melancholia. Native-soil literature studied in this course articulates an individual’s relationship with home not only in terms of ‘where I am from,’ ‘why I depart,’ ‘how I return,’ but fundamentally, ‘who I am.’ This course explores Taiwanese literature produced in two literary debates in the 1920s and 1970s, as well as works by neo-native soils writers after the millennium.