爾雅1980年代「年度短篇小說選」研究

Abstract

This paper researches the ten volumes of Annual Anthology of Short Stories published by Erya Publishing House in the 1980s. Annual Anthology of Short Stories of Erya edition was founded in 1968 and came to an end in 1998, having existed for 31 years. Since then, it has been run by Chiu Ko Publishing Co., Ltd. It is now the largest annual anthology with the longest history in Taiwan. Every volume of it was compiled by different editors and selectors. Every year, the editors and selectors selected some excellent short stories from literature newspapers and magazines and compiled them into one volume. Articles and comments were written by the editors to make recommendations and comments. Compared with other literature anthology with many summaries, it was specific and profound historical materials of stories. It also provided important research materials about development course of story creation and interpretation in Taiwan. Before the 1980s, stories of Taiwan had been led by multiple external forces, such as control by official ideology, confrontation, blending and evolution of modernism and realism as well as historical transformation of political mechanism and social formation. This produced tremendous creation capacity and diversified forms in the 1980s, and laid down a foundation with greater arts and research value for later development of stories. Therefore, the author tries to carry out observation by researching Annual Anthology of Short Stories (Erya, the 1980s). The author aims at finding out whether the Anthology also demonstrated diversification and richness of Taiwanese literature history in the 1980s and further summarizing creation features of the Anthology. This paper researches the Anthology in two aspects, namely, works and cultural history. According to features of each story, the author respectively adopts linguistic analysis perspective of formalism, neo-criticism, structuralism, deconstruction and other literature schools to interpret the stories. While interpreting these stories, the author necessarily considers such external factors as the writers, history and culture. Nevertheless, the author still mainly researches the works and focuses on language detail analysis of these stories. In addition, references are reviewed and quantified statistics of the research object are collected, classified, analyzed, synthesized, summarized, induced, deduced and compared to put forward qualitative description and research achievements. Chapters of this paper are outlined as follows: Chapter I Introduction: This Chapter describes the research motive formed during learning process and the research objectives. Personal opinions are raised about references of the forerunners or the follow-up research process elicited by this paper. Finally, the research scope is defined, with research means and methods described. Chapter II Literary Criticism and Story Creation: This Chapter is divided into two parts and the timeframe is set in the 1980s of Taiwan according to the subject of this paper. The first part deals with Taiwan literary criticism development and observation extended from editor’s comments on the concepts. The second part deals with writing trend summarized from story creation achievements of Taiwan. The former lays down a discussion foundation for Chapter III to focus on editors while the latter provides discussion background for Chapter IV to focus on the writers and works. Chapter III Editors and Works: From the perspective of archaeology, this chapter regards the ten volumes of the Anthology as ten individual units and studies their language structure so that they are independent in terms of time sequence and can be regarded as a whole in terms of the times. In discussion, this chapter mainly studies the prefaces, stories and editor comments with reference to literary campaigns, magazines or literary trend. In this way, this chapter carries out synchronic archaeological observation of the Anthology. Chapter IV: Writers and Works: The first section mainly studies the writers. According to the number of their stories selected into the Anthology and publication of their stories, their times and positions are listed. In this way, comments about the related writers and works in the Anthology are discussed. The second section focuses on analyzing themes of works. By personally reading the Anthology and making judgment, the author divides the works into four categories according to the theme. With reference to the writers’ positions listed in the previous section, the author arranges works of each theme like a family tree and compares writers and works at relative positions to carry out contextualized interpretation and evaluation, for the purpose of attaining criticism achievement different from that of the previous chapter. Chapter V Conclusion: This chapter lists the academic research value which may be provided by this paper, summarizes the research achievements and describes the research limitations and prospects to enlighten newcomers. To sum up, this paper provides three achievements, namely, multifaceted interpretation and demonstration of text reading, understanding of and thought about character of stories, and attempt at contextualization of writers and works positions. This is unmatched by common research on works of a single writer. In this way, researchability of the Anthology is also proved.