Reflections on cross-cultural literary contact: The reception of American critical discourse in Taiwan in the 1970s

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of cross-cultural theory transmissions, with particular reference to the reception of American critical theory in Taiwan since the late 1960s. Rather than being an empiricistic narrative, the paper has several meta-critical tasks to perform. It reviews the present status of ‘Third World’ area studies by questioning their blurring of systems as well as ignoring the functions of linguistic and scriptorial coding. It further examines some available communication models, discusses the functions of coding in intra-system and transcoding in inter-systems, and, finally, gives a meta-critical account of Taiwan's reception of American critical theory and practice in the last two decades. The paper therefore has its socio-political situatedness. It is intended as a critique of the subservient status accorded to literature in a ‘developing’ society, such as Taiwan, where economic and technological modernization is always on top of state technocrats' agenda. While modernization in Taiwan is primarily modeled on the United States, literary studies have unwittingly followed suit, observing the laws of anachronism and availability, which characterize cross-cultural literary reception.