ABSTRACT
Taiwanese author Wu Ming-yi employs magical realism to address climate change and transnational environmental degradation in The Man with the Compound Eyes. Wu Ming-yi advocates a planetary consciousness to respond to the world’s environmental crisis in the twenty-first century and its catastrophic scale, largely through a focus on vast pollution in the borderless Pacific Ocean. The author not only draws on traditional Taiwanese mythology and spirituality but also merges this with a fictional mythical island society in the Pacific, thereby blending fact and fiction to make readers question received assumptions. The book sets its environmental themes within the broader geopolitical context of Taiwan as an island nation being repeatedly subject to differing colonial forces throughout contemporary history.
