ABSTRACT
My current research on the cultural legacy of the May Fourth Movement—and for that matter, of twentieth-century Chinese culture—can be characterized as variations on an amorphous theme: that of modernity. However complex or problematic its theoretical underpinnings, the word has certainly come into intellectual fashion in post-Mao China, in part because it is semantically linked with the word "modernization," which has been further canonized in the official Four Modernizations. In contemporary Chinese literature, the word "modernism" (xiandai zhuyi) has been a subject of heated debate (as it was in Taiwan in the 1970s) and a catch-all phrase comprising various new artistic trends derived from a resurgent craze for Western literature among the post-Mao generation of young writers and critics.
