Postmodern Literary Discourse and Contemporary Public Culture in Taiwan

Abstract

With the increasing importance of Taiwan's role in the global economy and since martial law was lifted in 1987, a number of literary critics have tried to apply the term postmodernism to discussions of contemporary Taiwanese public culture. Often these critics singled out features that could be loosely defined as postmodern in terms of the fascinating, albeit unstable, mixture of speedy economic and political change, consumerism and multinational capital flows, the feminist and gay rights movements, cyberspace and counterdiscourse, new occult imaginary and alternative medicine, satellite TV and the transnational mediascape, call-in radio programs and semipublic spheres, interior design and the multiple layers of cultural bricolage, metafiction and generic hybridity, architectural doublecoding and the resurgence of traditional religious and moral beliefs, and the shifting identities in increasingly plural, though at times polarized, arenas, et cetera.1