The Taiwan Cultural Center in Paris, in collaboration with Bordeaux Montaigne University (UBM) and National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO), will be launching a program titled "Taiwan cosmopolite à travers sa littérature" to promote Taiwanese literature. As part of the program, UBM and INALCO will host a series of events that include reading workshops, scholar lectures, round-table conferences for contemporary writers, and documentary film screenings on April 12 and 14 as well as in October.
During the two events in April, Chen Yun-yuan (陳允元), assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture of the National Taipei University of Education, will give a speech on Le Moulin Poetry Society (風車詩社) and the modernity of Taiwanese literature in the 1930s. On April 14, he will deliver a video lecture focusing on Liu Na'ou (劉吶鷗), one of the earliest avant-garde film and literature pioneers in Taiwan, exploring the role and historical context of Taiwanese writers in the New Sensationalist school in Shanghai. The program will also include two rounds of screenings of the documentary film "Le Moulin (日曜日式散步者);" each screening will be followed by a discussion on the film's conception process and feedback with director Huang Ya-li (黃亞歷) and Professor Chen.
Other speakers in attendance include Valéry Hugotte, vice professor of UBM, who will give a presentation about the Surrealist Movement and French poets; Guillaume Muller, also a vice professor at UBM, will discuss the connection between Japanese writers and colonial literature in the 1930s; Cécile Sakai, an emeritus professor at Paris University, will present a special topic on the relationship between the Japanese literature circle and globalism during the 1930s.
These events aim to introduce the period where Taiwanese literature gradually reached out to the world and flourished in the 1930s, with a focus on the practices of contemporary creators across various genres, in order to contemplate the relationship between "contemporary Taiwanese literature" and "globalism." For more information, please visit the Taiwan Cultural Center in Paris' official
website.