Yen Yuan-shu (顏元叔), a highly respected professor of English and one of the leading figures of institutional reform for foreign literature studies in the 1970s, has died, National Taiwan University confirmed on Wednesday.
The university said a public memorial service for Yen would be held on Jan. 27.
Yen was a long-time faculty member at the university’s department of foreign languages and literature, and was the dean of the department for five-and-a-half years.
Yen was born in Nanjing, China, in 1933, and his family relocated to Taiwan following the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Yen graduated from the university’s department of foreign languages in 1956 and went to the US, where he obtained his doctorate in English and American Literature at the University of Wisconsin. He returned to National Taiwan University to take up a faculty position and started teaching in 1963.
Said to be the first academic with an overseas doctorate in English and American literature to return to teach in Taiwan, Yen brought home many new Western ideas and concepts in language studies and literary criticism.
When he was the dean of the department, starting in 1969, Yen initiated major institutional reforms and changed the approach to studies of English and American literature in Taiwan. He also established the country’s first doctoral course in comparative literature.
Leung Yan-wing (梁欣榮), the current dean of the department, said that Yen, whom he had studied under, was a highly respected professor whose reforms changed the teaching and course content of the nation’s foreign language studies.
“The reform consolidated the university’s position as the leader for English and American literature education in Taiwan. It also directly influenced studies of foreign languages in Tamkang University and other schools,” Leung said.
He said Yen was not only an educator, but also a prolific essayist and a renowned literary critic.
Yen was seen as the leading figure in literary criticism of English and American literature in Taiwan, founding two academic journals, Tamkang Review (淡江評論) in 1970 and Chung Wai Literary Quarterly (中外文學) in 1972, along with a magazine that guided students on reading English-language newspapers and magazines.
Yen was a familiar name even outside English and American literature studies circles.
Many students and readers of English texts in Taiwan have used dictionaries and books edited or written by Yen, including A Dictionary of Western Literature (西洋文學辭典), A Dictionary of English Usage (英文字彙用法字典) and Selected English Readings (英文閱讀精選), among others.
“When Yen was dean of the department, it was the custom for the dean leaving the post for promotion to become chairman of the faculty. However, Yen was the first exception,” Leung said.
Yen wrote an article criticizing the government at the time over its treatment of retired military personnel, and he also spoke up for some politically persecuted individuals, so Yen lost the faculty chairman position, Leung said.
“This showed his character,” Leung said. “He was not afraid to express views that were not in line with the political leaders, and he was not willing to compromise his principles to hold on to a high position.”
After retiring from National Taiwan University, Yen went to China and purchased land to build a house in his family’s ancestral homeland. From there, he divided his time between Taiwan and China.
Yen tripped and fell while in Shanghai in June. When he returned to Taiwan for a physical examination, it was found that he was already in the late stages of liver cancer. Yen died on Dec. 26 from respiratory failure and complications arising from the cancer.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching