This article uses Brian McHale’s interpretative model of postmodern change as a dominant shift, i.e. as a transition from epistemological to ontological poetics, to explore trends and developments in the fiction by Su Weizhen, one of the most prominent Taiwanese women writers to appear on the Taiwanese literary scene at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, a period which witnessed the revival of women’s fiction in Taiwan. Firstly, I reexamine some of the basic characteristics of Su Weizhen’s earlier work and try to demonstrate what might possibly have directed it to the epistemological dominant of modernist literature. In the second part of the article, I trace the subsequent shift towards ontological poetics, described by Brian McHale as being a characteristic of postmodernist fiction in general, something which has been partly realized in Su Weizhen’s more recent works. This, however, is not to say that I wish to argue that Su Weizhen should be placed among the pantheon of modernist or postmodernist writers; rather, I would like to point out that by using McHale’s model to (re)interpret her works, we can arrive at some new elucidations and interesting insights into the development of Su Weizhen’s fiction (including both form and content), especially as regards her more recent works.
The commonly encountered account ot the postmodern (including postmodernist cultural practices) is the one based on (or very similar to) Fredric Jameson´s view of postmodernism as representing the logic of late capitalism and being defined by the issues of surface, pastiche and paranoia. This also includes Jameson´s criticism of postmodernism´s supposed ahistoricity (or belief that when it uses history, it does so in a naive and sentimentally nostalgic way). Such is also the prevalent definition of the postmodern in Taiwan, most recently adopted, for example, in Liu Liangya´s new publication, Postmodernism and Postcolonisalism: Taiwanese Fiction since 1987. Offering an alternative view, this article deploys Linda Hutcheon´s project of "problematics" of postmodernism to argue that as opposed to the more or less dualistic view of postnodern vs. postcolonial tencencies in contemporary Taiwanese fiction (especially as regards postmodernism´s relation to history) it is also possible to describe the constant revisiting of the past in numerous novels by different authors in post-martial-law Taiwan in terms of Hutcheon´s "postmodern historiographic metafiction". This thesis is further demonstrated by means of an analysis of a short story by Lai Xiangyin.