Chih-ming Wang’s book, Re-Articulations: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan, is an ambitious work as it traces the evolution of the research on foreign literature in Taiwan over the last century to offer a panoramic view of the key debates in the discipline. Along the way, it discusses fraught theoretical concepts, such as translation, identity formation, knowledge production, and aesthetic provocation to address how these concepts have shaped and are still shaping the discipline in Taiwan, while obliquely hinting at the possible direction the discipline may have to take in the future.

Wang’s book carries the subtitle Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan. Since publication, there have been at least three book-launch events held in Taiwan with forums set up for reviews of and responses to the book. However, among these three online events, in which I participated, no one has yet asked a question at the core of Wang’s discipline-building narrative, which is: What is “Foreign Literature Studies” (FLS)? Why does Wang opt to use this somewhat imprecise term rather than other options, such as “English Studies,” “Literary Studies,” or “English Literary Studies”? Is FLS a comprehensive discipline that is a uniquely Taiwanese phenomenon? As a categorical term used to mark the boundaries of the discipline, “foreign literature studies in Taiwan” demands further explanation and inquiry.

This question about boundaries of the discipline is of interest because in Taiwan FLS is used almost interchangeably with English Studies (ES). For example, in most of the universities in Taiwan, one of the key departments in the College of Liberal Arts is the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature (DFLL), even though, on closer scrutiny, the curriculum at the DFLL invariably focuses on English and American literature and linguistics. In other words, with its curriculum’s focus on English language and literature, the DFLL claims to include other foreign, or non-native, languages and literature only to exclude most of them. As a pedagogical unit, the DFLL teaches mostly English and American Literature and thus unapologetically conflates FLS with ES. However, whereas ES constitutes the core of the DFLL, Wang in his study turns the tables and renders ES nearly invisible, as he devotes a whole chapter to tracing the rise of “Cultural Studies” but only adds a few words in the afterword to briefly acknowledge that he has, due to length constraints, no room to map out the development of English Studies, Theatre Studies, etc., in Taiwan.

An interesting paradox however is exposed. Whereas in a pedagogical setting, FLS is used interchangeably with ES only to push non-ES studies further to the margin, as a term that describes the institutional parameters of a form of knowledge production, FLS becomes for Wang a much more inclusive term that covers not only English literary studies but also literary theory, cultural studies, and ethnic studies. His reticence about English Studies seems to suggest English Studies not only constitutes the “unsaid” of Wang’s “foreign literature studies in Taiwan” but is also the “unsayable,” given that the inclusion of this unsaid is surely going to complicate his argument, making his work but another inventory that, in its ambition to be all-inclusive, ends up excluding all. However, this methodology he has adopted leaves unmentioned those “foreign literature studies” that comprise about 70 percent of the research projects sponsored and supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan each year. Moreover, it is at variance with the “foreign literature curriculum” found in most “foreign literature” departments in Taiwan. This mismatch between the foreign literature studies charted by Wang and the actual research conducted by most foreign literature scholars, as well as the courses taught by most of them, exposes an unsettling “internal outside” that has troubled most of those who have worked in this discipline, even though they have not truly tackled this difficulty head on. In this sense, researchers in Taiwan need to thank Wang for highlighting, in his indirect and oblique manner, a question that those working in this discipline with blurry boundaries need to confront but so far have not. After all, if a satisfactory answer to this question cannot be found, then scholars in Taiwan might continue to be troubled by the messiness of the discipline’s self-definition.

The history of FLS in Taiwan that Wang maps out is about the discipline’s search for self-definition, about how the discipline outgrows its earlier orientation towards philology, translation, and comparativism, progresses to its fetishization of “literary theories,” and finally reaches its present alignment with cultural studies and ethnic studies. The coherence of the story told by Wang about the discipline’s self-constitution leaves out the institutional parameters of the discipline that Wang calls foreign literary studies. This unintentional elision may, however, leave unexamined the institutional pressures imposed, either from without (from the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Science and Technology) or from within (e.g., local scholars’ own political desire for relevance), upon individual scholars who find themselves split between their dual identities as on the one hand teachers of Anglophone literature and on the other researchers straddling the boundaries of multiple disciplines in search of topics that are “of relevance,” or to be more precise, “of local relevance.”

As repeatedly emphasized by Wang in his two chapters on Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies but also hinted at in his chapter on Theory, relevance is a key concern in the discipline’s search for self-definition. What is yet to be clarified is how relevance has been defined and practiced in Taiwan over the last three decades. Wang has offered some examples of how diverse cultural scholars in Taiwan have defined “relevance.” Professor Te-hsing Shan, Wang writes, explains that Asian American literature is a hot field in Taiwan, for a lot of local scholars feel affective solidarity with Asian American writers and the topics tackled in their works, solidarity that is defined in geographical, historical, and cultural terms. At the same time, in the chapter on the rise of institutionally embedded Theory in shaping FLS in Taiwan, Theory and the debates on the uses, misuses, and abuses of Theory are said to give FLS scholars the language they have always wanted to answer questions about the relevance of literary studies in the first place. Theory, they believe, helps them set into motion local acts of social intervention and bring into being locally situated political agency. This desire to render FLS a discipline for social and political intervention is then re-articulated in the discipline’s embrace of Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies, both of which are then legitimized by local scholars’ joint efforts to translate and re-articulate the kind of theory that informs their collective project to imbue literary studies with relevance, purpose, and value. That is to say, whereas Theory justifies the political relevance of FLS in Taiwan in terms of the deconstructive reading of literary texts, this desire for “relevance” was also materialized in the emergence and growth of Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies, first in the 1990s and then during the first decade of the twenty-first century. So, in a sense, it is this desire for social and cultural relevance that has become the organizing principle of FLS’s self-fashioning in Taiwan: the exclusive inclusion of Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies and the inclusive exclusion of English Studies.

Yet the dominance of this desire of FLS to prove and justify its political relevance has its inevitable downsides. It is, for instance, quite difficult for English Studies scholars in Taiwan to translate what they perceive to be the political relevance of their work into politically enabling action in the local context. Their responses to the perceived “irrelevance” of English literary studies in Taiwan are usually three-fold: first, they use a universalist idiom of literariness to prioritize the aesthetics of literature; second, they use a humanist idiom to sanctify the mission of literature, which is, for them, to improve and benefit the world; third, they are encouraged to deploy a “trans-disciplinary” strategy and seek inspiration from other humanities disciplines, such as anthropology, history, geography, etc., for methodological breakthroughs. The fact that these efforts and debates, however, are not discussed in Wang’s book seems to suggest that the efforts of English Studies to achieve local relevance in a non-Anglophone context are fraught with difficulties.

Given that, in Wang’s account, FLS in Taiwan has always been searching for self-definition as it has taken up different paths to concretize its social relevance, FLS’s aspiration is, accordingly, a political desire. After spending so many chapters charting the political desires of FLS in Taiwan, Wang then adds an Afterword in which, as an afterthought, he speculates on the place of aesthetics in FLS in Taiwan. The Afterword gives the reader a different kind of tracing; it is not a tracing of the efforts made by scholars in the past that have helped to shape FLS today; instead, it is a highly personalized tracing of what motivated Wang to embark on literary studies in the first place. This individualized tracing then brings him to speculate on a “desirable” return to Aesthetics in FLS today. By venturing into Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of the “redistribution of the sensible” (43) he seems to suggest, along the lines of the argument made elsewhere by Gayatri Spivak, that humanities studies should provide a rigorous “training of the imagination for epistemological performance” (122), a training that has to be persistently pursued, even though its effects on students cannot be predicted. That is to say, Aesthetics as politics is perhaps another answer, other than Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies, that Wang gives in response to the question about the potential relevance of foreign literature studies in Taiwan. In so doing, he implicitly suggests that what makes “foreign literature studies” relevant in Taiwan is perhaps not Anglophone literature (or any other foreign literature), canonic or not. What makes it relevant is whether a text, any text, written or oral, verbal or visual, can initiate in the reader a mode of thinking that is politically charged and aesthetically expanding. Whether that text is an American short story, a Japanese haiku, or a Taiwanese poem is not the real issue and should not be the issue.

As a professor teaching in a department with an explicit emphasis both on upgrading students’ English proficiency and on enriching students’ understanding of English and American literature, does Wang’s ground-breaking book help me clarify the relevance of what I teach to students whose sense of the relevance of what they want to study may be quite different from mine? How do I negotiate with and navigate this epistemological gap? Can I help students upgrade their English proficiency while initiating in them an aesthetic understanding that can launch alternative political and aesthetic possibilities? All these are questions that literature scholars in Taiwan need to ponder. However, if there is a welcoming and productive “turn” towards Aesthetics, it does not have to suggest a turn against Theory or Cultural Studies. Instead, as Wang seems to suggest in his Afterword, the mission of FLS in Taiwan is perhaps to promote the kind of “imaginative close reading” that Eve Sedgwick envisioned (145). Perhaps it is not. It is nevertheless a question that Wang’s book pushes his readers to speculate on, even though no definitive answer about how it can be implemented is yet proffered.

Works Cited

Rancière, Jacques. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (2003). “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham, N. Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 123–151.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2013). An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.