Field of Nightmares and Memories of Shame: The Cultural Representations of Baseball Scandals in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Po-hsi Chen, 陳柏旭
• Other Authors: Chih-ming Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/93556536207434467535

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 英美語文學研究所 === 100 === The 1968 “Red Leaf Legend” had been constructed as the genesis of Taiwanese baseball. In the post-martial law era, however, the overage/forgery incident at the underside of the legend has been the central focus of sociological critique against the Kuomintang’s nationalist sports policy. From the late 1990s on, the recurrent professional baseball game-fixing scandals has made the Red Leaf a point of departure to intervene with modern baseball history. Despite their socio-historical differences, 1968 and 1997 mark the stories of disillusionment at two different phases in Taiwanese baseball history: the former as the disenchantment of a nationalist myth constructed during authoritarian regime, while the latter, the corruption of post-martial law commercial society. In this regard, Taiwanese baseball scandals are characterized by a pride-and-shame oxymoron since the Red Leaf, which is a crucial symptom in understanding contemporary representations of Taiwanese baseball culture. Paradoxically, though subject to moralist condemnations, scandals have unexpectedly opened up a phantasmatic space for contemporary sports history, in which the repressed penumbral figures and backward feelings re-surface on the screen. In this field of dreams (or nightmares), the spectators are interpolated to come face-to-face with the fallen heroes, and reach the possibility of reconciliation with the latter. Thus, this study anchors less attended visual representations as the object of analysis, so as to reveal the faces heretofore obscured by scandals.