Global Modernism: The Literary Language of the Japanese, Shanghainese, and Taiwanese New Sensationalist Schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the thought on literary language that arose from the circulation of the New Sensationalist School in Japan, Shanghai, and Taiwan. Divided into three sections, it first examines Yokomitsu Riichi’s modernist formal renovation, which was based on a rediscovery of the Chinese ideogram’s physical and visual features. Situating this formal renovation in the literary Sinitic context (Kanbunmyaku 漢文脈) sheds light on Yokomitsu’s ambition to build a modernist nationalist literary language. Second, this article analyzes the characteristics of the multilingual fragments in Liu Na’ou’s works and suggests three possible explanations for his linguistic style. This article also points out that Liu’s linguistic diversity might be criticized for being a kind of comprador literature, which, consciously or not, imported the colonial or orientalist gaze inherent in foreign literary texts. Third, this article focuses on Weng Nao, a Taiwanese New Sensationalist writer working in Japanese, and highlights how his eclecticist writing strategy championed archetypically Taiwanese subjects while allowing the form to parallel those of his Japanese counterparts. In the conclusion, we discuss the hybridity of the literary languages of Yokomitsu, Liu Na’ou, and Weng Nao, and some possible ways to reflect upon written language (bun/wen) in the Sinosphere (Kanjibunkaken/Hanjiwenhuaquan).