A RELAY RACE: VIEWING DANG THAN FROM NGUYEN HUY THIEP

Abstract

Since the Đổi mới (Renovation) and Open policies era, Vietnamese literature has gone through two shifts of paradigm. The first one was from the premodernism paradigm to the modernism paradigm. The second one was from the modernism paradigm to the postmodernism paradigm. The former Renovation/innovation has created a new, different writing movement and changed the whole climate of literature. A new generation of young writer, “post-1975 literature generation” has been born. The latter Renovation/innovation happened silently but more profound, had deep individualism instead of a movementcharacteristic and the self-consciousness of the writers. To present the relay races in Vietnamese literature history, the author studies Nguyen Huy Thiep and Dang Than, respectively, the former is the most prominent writer of the modernism literature and the latter of postmodernism literature. And therefore the reader could see the difference between two literature paradigms, also the difficulties in the paradigm shift.