Reading Chen Yingzhen: why and how

Since 2009, there has been a renewed trend in Taiwan's intellectual circles to explore Chen Yingzhen. In this lies a strong and unprecedented inclination to explore in Chen Yingzhen's literary works the enormous resources he provides as a thinker. As one of the researchers who has undertaken such an approach, I intend to address three issues in this article: first, his relation with people of my generation and the reason to re-read him at this moment; second, how I, as an amateur in terms of literary works or literary criticism, read literary texts. I address this issue in terms of methodology and theory, and propose a reading method consisting of a triple intersecting process among the text, the author and the history. Thirdly, and perhaps the most importantly, I address the issue of "why do we have to read Chen Yingzhen now" from three levels: history, thinking and literature in order to explore the particular situation his literary works have in contemporary literature, as well as its intellectual meaning in the contemporary world.