Abstract
Humoristic and Bantering Narrative, a tone ceaselessly found in official newspapers, is always woven into solemn national policies in“ Taiwan Daily News Chinese Edition”. This research chooses Humoristic and Bantering Narrative from “Taiwan Daily News Chinese Edition” as language data and aims to probe into how traditional Taiwanese literati express themselves in official newspapers, which are complicated with the colonized, the colonists, and the colonial society, during the early Japanese Colonial Period, a period without freedom of speech, when colonial hegemony overwhelms the society while civilization is germinating and the political situation is changing. This thesis has drawn some interesting conclusions as follows. First, humors in newspapers reflect a China with weak sense of time and geography, proclaiming and reemphasizing national identity to readers by contrasting Ancient China with Modern cīna. Second, the methods of simulation used in these narratives create a complexity of combining classics and jokes in the same articles. Third, the parody in Confucius and Mencius piles up those people’s imaginations of shift between Confucianism and practicality, and it also highlights colonists’ chase after Confucianism. The sarcasms in stories of all walks of life found in humoristic and bantering narratives represent literati’s surrender to national policies, while they also reveal the fact that traditional literati, the colonized, were negotiating with colonists about policies. Only by uttering some seemingly harmless humorous words could contemporary literati express how rude colonial policies are. Through sarcasms free from political situations, literati build an unofficial corner where pain from suffocating practice of colonism could be relieved.