from which the writing at hand would have no motivation or inspira-
tion, no cause to be (or be studied).
Nature writing is thus part of a struggle to preserve affective, imagi-
native, solitary and social encounters with an external, concrete other,
nature—a concrete entity that has no discourse of its own and always
stands partly outsidethe realms of language and cultural production.^10
While rendering such encounters into literary forms, nature writing seeks
to sustain and restore a connection to the world that is necessary for the
sustenance of allculture, society, and humanity (see Cronon 1990).
If this language smacks of romanticism and idealism, then it only
serves to highlight the difficulty of these aspirations and the need for a
new way of discussing them, beyond the scope of reigning intellectual
paradigms, and resistant to their cooptation. Modes for the reception
and interpretation of Chinese nature writing must be novel in form
and grounded in a knowledge that our task as academicians is to “help
us locate in a given historical situation the critical linkages between
people and the ecosystems they inhabit” (Cronon 1990: 1126).^11
Otherwise, academia, namely the field of (modern) Chinese literary
studies, will rapidly appropriate a new genre such as nature writing
and incorporate it into its/our established practices.
In this inenviable scenario, discussing nature writing from Taiwan
would be an easy enough task, merely a matter of introducing another
literary genre to a group of academics. We would start with a survey
of names, dates, and exemplary texts and provide a sample cross-
section of the variety found therein, eventually divvying it into sub-
genres.^12 Then we, or a second generation of nature writing scholars,
would begin to produce the requisite applications of currently dominant
critical theories to selected texts. Canonization—or colonization—
would soon follow. In this enterprise, we would be faithful to Davis’s
critique of the process: “Most professional students of literature are
technicians who, like Thomas Kuhn’s ‘normal scientists,’ prove their
membership in the [academic] community by putting reigning
paradigms into practice” (Davis 1994: 3).
Taiwan nature writing, I hope, will prove resistant to the applica-
tion of reigning paradigms in the study of Chinese literature. For it,
and nature writing in general, demands a more concrete, vital, and
self-referential interpretive methodology. As Liu Kexiang 劉襄
(b. 1956) has written, Taiwan nature writing has struggled to free
itself from, among other Western and Chinese traditions, both
abstract idealism and eremitism (Liu 2002: 6). Literary scholars
approaching this genre likewise must free themselves from received
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 89