ISSN : 1229-9618(Print)
ISSN : 2671-7506(Online)
ISSN : 2671-7506(Online)
Chinese Studies Vol.93 pp.359-375
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14378/KACS.2025.93.93.17
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14378/KACS.2025.93.93.17
A Study on the Evolution of Chu Tienwen's Linguistic Style
Abstract
This study, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of “champ”, “habitus”, and “capital”, traces the three-stage evolution of Chu Tienwen’s linguistic style from “fresh and plain(清新素朴)” to “ornate and baroque(繁复华丽)” and finally to a “sorcery-like poetics(巫术诗性)”. Through close readings of The City of Hot Summer(炎夏之都), Fin-de-siècle Splendor(世纪末的华丽), Notes of a Desolate Man(荒人手记), and Wuyan (巫言), this study explicates the interactive mechanisms among stylistic shifts, the transformations of the Taiwan literary champ, the “collective habitus” of literary groups, and the operation of capital. Nurtured in her early phase by military dependents’ village culture and Hu Lancheng’s aesthetics, Chu Tienwen adopts a restrained, concise, and colloquial mode of writing that produces a distinctive sense of clarity and serenity. After the lifting of martial law, under the impetus of urban culture and cross-media experience, and through the strategic pursuit of the reproduction of cultural capital and symbolic capital, her style develops into one marked by lexical luxuriance(辞采繁缛) and imagistic opulence(意象富丽). Entering the twenty-first century, within a postmodern literary champ she engages in a reflexive reconstruction of habitus, extending the boundaries of fictional language through nonlinear, ritualized discourse and shamanic imagery(巫魅意象). This study concludes that the metamorphosis of Chu Tienwen’s linguistic style is not a mere self-propelled aesthetic evolution of an individual writer, but the outcome of the continual shaping of her habitus by the literary champ of production; through conversions among different forms of capital—especially cultural and symbolic capital—she actively positions herself and realizes literary value. This has instructive implications for research on contemporary literary styles in Chinese.





