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Images of the Injured: The Intellectuals’ Psychological Dilemma in Taiwan Fictions during Japanese Colonial Period

  • The Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China
  • Abbr : JSLCKC
  • 2013, (33), pp.553-580
  • DOI : 10.16874/jslckc.2013..33.023
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Study on Chinese Languge and Culture
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Published : October 31, 2013

陳明柔 1

1台灣 靜宜大學台文系

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Taiwanese intellectuals’ psychological dilemma and their sense of alienation in the fictions. During Japanese colonial period, Taiwanese intellectuals had spiritually burdened with the identities both as an illuminator and the colonized when they started to appear in that specific era. On one hand, the colony status is the reality that they cannot avoid; on the other, as they are stimulated by the world view and value formed by modern education and the ideological trend of their time, they inevitably have to break up with the tradition and fight against the colonial ideology with their newly formed modern identity. They are simultaneously the pioneers and the reformers of the Taiwanese modern culture but are also trapped powerlessly within the colonized identity, perceiving sense of alienation for being the colonized. At the beginning, most of the fictions which are given the responsibility of enlightening during the colonial era often carry the theme of criticizing the injustice of the colonial society and the theme of the hopeless agony of the colonized in realist style. As a result, the main characters in the texts are usually different from the stereotypical activist’s images praised by the intellectuals, but they are often the prototype characters of frustration in both ideal and material aspects. The utopian ideal they eagerly pursue has never been realized. What they really burden is the historical trauma and destiny, and also the tragedy of being lost in the colonial reality. Such psychological dilemma embodied in the texts becomes the typical “superfluous man” who cannot fit into the family and society in reality, while alienating themselves spiritually. In these characters we could find that after the disillusionment of idealism, the petit intellectuals who suffer from the precocious colonial capitalism, face the bitterness and the lure of urban life alone, and objectify themselves in the material worlds, forming self-contradictory sense of alienation and psychological dilemma. The images of the injured are often the combination of the colony’s tragic destiny and the failure of realizing the ideal of socialism or individualism. Through the imaginary texts, the authors are able to represent the collective disillusionment of ideality and able to represent how the structure of feeling that has been gradually reformed along with the colonial modernization carries new values. In the structure of feeling constructed under such leaping-forward colonial capitalism, as the elites of Taiwan society, these colonial intellectuals have attached their own images on to the characters in the fictions and thrust to represent the strait, trauma and inability of these characters, and furthermore, to reflect the powerless colonial reality with the dispirited petit bourgeois’ personal consciousness.

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