Global Time-Space Reorderings: Literary, Cultural, and Cinematic Transformations transnationally explores the impact of globalization on the reconceptualization of time and space in modern
and contemporary literature, culture, and cinema. Yi-Hsuan Tso’s examination includes the novel Magical Mountain by the Nobel Literature Laureate Gao Xingjian, the Taiwanese Canadian poet Lo
Fu’s epic Driftwood, the work of Taiwanese woman poet Hsia Yü, the Taiwanese documentary Let It Be, and third wave feminism in Taiwan. The book maintains that there are at least three axes of
global time-space reordering. The first axis is the possibility of escape and freedom in time-space. In Magical Mountain, the escape from civilization is facilitated by the utopian nature with
which a person communicates spiritually. Likewise, in Lo Fu’s Driftwood, the self gains freedom through the transcendence of local, local-global, and global time-space. The second axis is a
translocal consciousness exemplified by the double-center globally migrating identity in Lo Fu’s Driftwood, the local, regional, and global entanglements in Taiwanese third wave feminism, and
the acentric poetics of Hsia Yü. The third axis is the debate in Let It Be over whether to sustain the local-global economic interconnection or to lessen this interconnectivity confronting the
spaces smoothed out by capitalism’s laissez faire policy.
