Dr Wen-chi Li

Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr Wen-chi Li

Dr Wen-chi Li - orcid.org/0000-0003-3718-2947

Susan Manning Postdoctoral Fellow, September 2022 - June 2023

Home Institution: University of Zurich

Wen-chi Li received his PhD in Sinology from the University of Zurich, after an MSc by Research in Chinese Studies and MSc in General and Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His PhD dissertation Poetics of Rebellion: Hybridity, Minor Narrative, Yang Mu explores how the Taiwanese poet adopted several postcolonial strategies to subvert the grand official narrative. In addition to postcolonial studies, his research fields also include Sinophone studies, gender studies, translation theories, and world literature. As an editor, he has co-edited the Chinese book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBTQ (Dark Eyes, 2019) and the volume of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2023) and is now (co)editing the two volumes of Literary History of Taiwan in the New Millennium (Cambria) and the book Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry (Routledge). As a vigorous translator, he introduces works from Taiwan in anthologies published by Columbia University Press, Washington University Press, Cambria, and Seagull Books. His translation won him the first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. He is also the co-founder of the “World Literature from Taiwan” series in Balestier Press.

Project Title: Terribly Sorry for My Existence: Queer Melancholia, Suicide, and Decoloniality

Terribly Sorry for My Existence is a project to investigate Taiwanese queer literary texts that contains multiple negative feelings such as melancholia, loneliness, shame, self-hatred, and despair and answer the question of why there are numerous suicide scenes and how these can refer to common sentiments of the LGBTQ people. Although Taiwan is the first of any Asian states to approve a bill to legalize same-sex marriage, this does not mean that the miserable past that was embodied in discrimination and stigmatization can be easily obliterated or underestimated. Instead, contemporary LGBTQ people are still haunted by the fear of coming out, anxiety about social intolerance, worry about HIV, and the suicide tendency—all of these are well represented in many Taiwanese novels and poetry such as Pai Hsien-yun’s Crystal Boys, Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man, and Chiu Miao-chin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre. Therefore, this project will investigate literary texts in twenty-first century Taiwan. It first discusses how a new homosexual discourse was formed through the appropriation of modern Western psychiatric prejudice in republican China and then emphasizes how Taiwanese psychiatrists, doctors and writers used these new scientific approaches to represent both negative and positive sides of homosexuality. It discloses many cases of depression and suicidality in Taiwanese queer communities, both in reality and in literature, and explores, in particular, the trauma and pain that lie behind these phenomena.