見證之眼與文學的凝視:當代小說敘事中的美學與倫理

This paper aims to look into how The Stolen Bicycle engages with the intertwining historical traumas and develops an aesthetic form of ethics that demonstrates an illuminating route of implication. In his monograph The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, published in 2019, Michael Rothberg proposes a theory of implication, which, as he declares, aims to bring about the possibility of forming a more nuanced approach to haunting legacies and the present-day political engagement. The notion of implication points to an ethical awareness of how one actually occupies multiple subject positions and how these positions may be implicated in diverse political situations and thereby should be examined in either historical terms or structural terms. Interestingly, Taiwanese writer Mingyi Wu also demonstrates a formulation of implication in his recently published novel The Stolen Bicycle. Reading Wu's work alongside Rothberg's theory, I aim to explore the historical and ethical dimensions of Wu's practice of postmemory and discuss how such aesthetic reflection disrupts the simplified memory of history and brings forth the interplay of multiple subjectivities and a nuanced approach to history and memory.