ABSTRACT
A crucial, though largely unnoticed, moment emerges in the current debates on post-modernism when the American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson refers to the as yet un-translated works of a contemporary Taiwanese writer, Wang Wenxing, as postmodernist. As the May Fourth Movement gathered momentum in the process of Westernizing Chinese letters, the label Mandarin Duck and Butterfly was used generally to attack all types of old-style fiction that continued to enjoy popularity. For Jean-Franois Lyotard, postmodernism is not a break from modernism; it is rather the nascent state by which modernism was possible in the first place. By that, he means that it is only in the post-modern condition that the rationality of the modernist is fully unravelled for the first time. For Jameson, the postmodern is thus defined in terms not of a narrative function, but of a practice of mapping, a metaphor to which he attaches great significance in his essay Post-modernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism.
