Contemporary Minority Literature Study

As Taiwanese minority groups have never created their own written languages, they didn't develop their literal awareness until some of their intellectuals who received their education through Chinese language began to work on literature in the 1960's. In spite of the fact that they were writing at that time under the mainstream norms, it was out of question that these writers moved the national literature toward its modernity and started a new era of Taiwanese ethnic literature. After the 1980's these minority intellectuals began to find all their ethnic groups in an unfavorable historical situation when their subject consciousness was increasingly aroused by the influences from the Taiwanese Indigenization Movement and the worldwide aboriginal movements. In an effort to fight against the political oppression from the Taiwanese authorities and to shield their traditional culture from being stricken by the modern civilization, the writers assumed the mission of rejuvenating their ethnic cultures to save the whole minority groups by using Chinese in their literary creation and made remarkable achievements with a display of a stronger impetus in writing. Thereafter, the Taiwanese ethnic literature has been greatly improved in its quality through nearly half a century's journey from political struggles to aesthetic transcendence marked by the birth of the literary magazine, Green High Mountain in 1983 to the publishing of Selected Chinese Works of Taiwanese Ethnic Minorities in 2003. And now this notable writing trend is exerting a vital and profound influence on the current structure of the Taiwanese literature in facilitating its development toward diversification.Thereby, the thesis examines the Taiwanese ethnic literature in the frames of the Taiwanese literature and the Chinese literature of national minorities on the whole and analyzes it in the view of cultural globalization and modernization. The study develops, on the basis of a comprehensive overview of changes in the Taiwanese cultural pattern and in its ethnic relations, the historic origin, the developmental law, the aesthetical features, difficulties in development and the cultural significance of the postwar Taiwanese ethnic minority literature. The thesis falls into seven parts. The introduction defines the study object and the concept of Taiwanese minority groups with a brief outline of its development followed by the statement of the study focus, the research meaning as well as the methods. The first chapter is titled as Taiwanese minority groups in view of modernization, which mainly discusses its historic development and cultural features, analyzes how the Taiwanese writers of the Han nationality presented the images of the minority people in their works at different historic periods and what significance those writings produced in transforming its transmission modes of the Taiwanese ethnic literature and examines their actual predicament caused by the Taiwan's ethnic policies and the modernization of the island. The second chapter deals with the marginalized rise of the Taiwanese minority groups, which mainly explores the formative background and causes of the Taiwanese ethnic literature by starting with the changes in its domestic political environment, the"crossover"writing of the Han writers in the island and the literary expression of the mass media and the disadvantaged groups. The third chapter is on the subject utterance of the Taiwanese minority groups, which probes into the literary works by the ethnic writers from different periods, and makes it clear that the Taiwanese ethnic minority literature has developed into an important way of expressing their aesthetic feelings, resisting against power politics, and saving the ethnic cultures, from their pursuit of the mainstream utterance to their transcendence over the aesthetic quality. The forth chapter is the aesthetic quality of the Taiwanese ethnic literature which begins with the geographic conditions and cultural features of their living space with analyses on the shanhai cultural landscape and their ecological ethics displayed in their literary works and the influences on their literary expression exercised by Chinese thinking patterns and folk literature. The fifth chapter is centered on the developmental dilemma of the Taiwanese ethnic literature, which looks into the literary responses of the ethnic writers in encounter with the impacts from cultural globalization, modernization and Chinese culture, and proceeds to the confused choices of the ethnic literature between tradition and modernity, past and present, literature and politics, and mother tongue and Chinese language; it also finds out the reasons why it has fallen into obscurity since this century. The sixth chapter is named as the Taiwanese ethnic literature and the contemporary Taiwanese literature, which investigates the benefits of the ethnic literature bringing to the contemporary Taiwanese literature from a macroscopic perspective and the ways in which the themes on the ethnic groups are presented from their different standpoints generated in their political society; and it continues to discuss the changes in the frame of the Taiwanese literature and in the historic viewpoints of the Taiwanese literature. In the end, the conclusion is the reflection and outlook on the Taiwanese ethnic literature which thinks about how the ethnic groups should handle the relationship between ethnic, international, political qualities and literariness and the relationship with the Taiwanese Han culture and the Chinese culture under the setting of cultural globalization.