1970년대 대만 향토문학논쟁의 쟁점과 의미

Abstract

“The Home Soil literary debate” was connected to the movement to (re)discover Taiwan as a space for real life, especially as Taiwan became isolated from the international community in the 1970s. The debate began in earnest in April 1977 when 11 articles titled “Where Will Local Literature Go?” were published in the magazine Cactus. As suggested by its name, the Home Soil literary debate clearly originated in the literary field. Wang Tuo, a representative writer of the Home Soil movement, distinguished between Home Soil literature and rural literature, emphasizing that Home Soil literature focuses on Taiwan’s reality. This is why he argued that Home Soil literature is Taiwan’s realist literature. Meanwhile, critics of local literature, such as Ying Zhengxiong and Zhu Xining, had a narrow understanding of local literature, seeing it as merely rural literature. They strongly criticized the new literary trend from a literary perspective. Despite their differences, both camps, early in the debate, shared a common understanding of the importance of Taiwan’s immediate reality. However, the debate began to show signs of turning into a political controversy about four months after it started, when Peng Ge and Yu Guang-zhong, who seemed to represent the Kuomintang’s stance, entered the debate. The Kuomintang reacted nervously to Home Soil literature, calling it a separatist movement. Hu Qiu-yuan defined Home Soil literature as Chinese national literature and stepped forward to calm the crisis. Ironically, however, Hu Qiu-yuan’s position partly aligned with that of the Kuomintang. By asserting that Taiwanese Home Soil literature should be considered part of Chinese national literature, Hu’s position redefined Taiwan’s locality as part of Chinese locality, and the critical spirit that had exposed the core of unfair and irrational realities was ‘moderated’ into a position advocating for social integration and national unity.