Book Chat: Literature in the Age of the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Study of the Taiwanese Writer Wu Ming-yi

Taiwan On-Air 空中直播台灣

Hello everyone. This is Ti-han 張迪涵_, one of the hosts of our Taiwan On-Air podcast series, sponsored by the European Association of Taiwan Studies and today we are here for a Book Chat.

Our guest today is a rising-star French scholar who specialised in Taiwanese and Chinese literary studies and translation, Professor Gwennaël Gaffric from Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin.

Both Gwennael and I studied at the University of Lyon 3 as doctoral students back in early 2010s. First time we met was because I required some help from a native French speaker to help me revise my poorly written doctoral proposal and application in French at the time. Although Gwenn had never met me before, he was very kind to lend me a hand to review my application together. And since then, he had always been a great help and a true friend, and of course a wonderful colleague to work with throughout these years.

Many of our Francophone colleagues who work on Taiwan studies also know Gwenn through his great works of fiction translation. As a doctoral student, he started with translating Wu Ming-yi’s 睡眠的航線 [Routes in a Dream], and subsequently translated also Wu’s 複眼人[The Man with the Compound Eyes] and 天穚上的魔術師 [The Magician on the Skywalk], as well as other Taiwanese novelists and poets such as Chi Ta-wei, Kao Yi-feng, Xia Yu and Walis Nokan. In recent years, his translation also goes beyond Taiwan, further including other Chinese best-selling eco sci-fi such as the Three-Body Problem from Liu Cixin and The Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan. Gaffric’s research today crosses between science fiction, ecocriticism,, and Sinohpone literary translation.

And of course, he also plays a key role in the promotion of Taiwan literature and culture to the French-speaking world, as he is not only in charge as the director of Taiwan Fiction Collection Series in the Asiathèque, but he also collaborates with Ministry of Culture文化部 and Centre Culturel de Taïwan à Paris 巴文中心 to bring authors and poets to the Francophone readers.

Today, however, we are not here to quiz Gwenn about his literary translation, but more about his scholarly research and his monograph, The Literature in the Age of Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Study of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi [La Littérature à l’ère de l’anthropocene: Une étude écocritique autour des oeuvres de l’écrivain taïwanaise Wu Ming-yi] which is recently translated into Chinese by his wife, Hsu Ya-wen, and published in Taiwan by Xinjindian Publishing. This is a book that based on Gwennaël’s doctoral thesis and with adapted revisions. In the book, readers are able to go more in depth on Gaffric’s own critical interpretation and analysis of Wu Ming-yi’s works across different periods as well as his theoretical understanding and worldview contextualised in the era of Anthropocene.

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