Chih-ming Wang
聯經 Linking Publishing, 2021
About the book: Re-Articulations: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies examines the introduction, interpretation, and interrogation of western literature in the last century, to explore how “western learnings advanced eastward” through colonialism, the Cold War, and the abolition of martial laws in Taiwan formed and shaped the institution and development of foreign literature studies.
The book explores the important changes and key debates in the discipline of foreign literature studies to showcase the institutional forces that have formed and shaped it. It studies pioneering scholars and critical institutions of the field and analyzes important debates and emerging subfields in different conjunctures—to grasp how in each phase foreign literature studies interacted with its own social contexts and the transformation of the West so as to measure its values and meanings as a distinct form of knowledge production. It asks: how has Western literature and thought been re-articulated in its transnational travels and reincarnated as “foreign literature studies” in Taiwan? How have foreign literature scholars, through translating and interpreting the West, adapt into and overcome the colonial modernity embedded in their own training, to break away from and redefine foreign literature studies, thereby challenging the premise of liberal humanism inherent in it? And how may we redefine and reactivate “the foreign” as a space of change for the evolution of the discipline today?
About the author: Chih-ming Wang is currently Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies in Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and visiting scholar at Harvard Yenching Institute, 2021-2022. He also holds a joint appointment at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies at National Yangming Chiao Tung University as associate professor. His field of interest includes Asian American literature, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. He was the recipient of the MOST (Minister of Science and Technology) Ta-You Wu Memorial Award in 2009 and of the Academia Sinica Award for Junior Research Investigators in 2014.