探測文學生活的第一步──台灣作家人口的調查分析

The First Step to Measuring Literary Life: A Survey on Writers' Population in Postwar Taiwan

文學社會學研究的最基本任務之一就是對一個社會的文學生產狀況進行 最基礎的調查，其中又以生產者的作家人口調查為最。而文學社會學正在台灣 興起之際，本文嘗試補足台灣文學研究長期最缺乏關於台灣作家人口整體的 基礎研究：社會人口學的分析。利用國立台灣文學館「2007台灣作家作品目 錄」資料庫所收集的2,638位作家小傳，加以結構化並補充父親職業資料後， 我們也以傳記集合法（prosopography）獲得為台灣作家人口的整體資料。這 使得原本只是補助性背景的文學生活資訊，得以轉化成能夠以社會科學方法去 量測（measuring）整個作家人口的強大且結構性的資料。本文因此將台灣作 家人口視之為一個社會群體，試圖以簡單易懂的量化方法來描述這個社會群體 的基本社會特徵：性別、省籍分布、世代、教育能力等；我們也仔細分析了其 中1/3作家人口的家庭背景了解其社會出身的來源，也討論了社會群體最特殊 的雙重或多重的職業活動特徵。

One of the fundamental tasks of literary sociology is to offer a survey of the conditions of literary production within a society; furthermore, a survey of the writers' population is the first and the most important step in understanding the literary life of a society. In response to the rise of literary sociology studies in Taiwan, this article underlines the importance of this fundamental which has long been neglected and understated. Using the database ''2007 of Catalog Taiwan writers and their works'' established by the National Museum of Taiwan Literature, which has collected 2638 writers' biographies, we have created a structured prosopography of Taiwan's writer population, and also added their fathers' occupations. This makes it possible to convert the writers' biographical accounts from accessory background information into powerful structured data which allows us to measure the writers' population with scientific methodology. This article considers Taiwan writers as a whole social groups, and attempts to describe their basic social characteristics: sex, provincial distribution, generation, education, and social origin (for which there was information available for roughly 1/3 of the total profiles). Finally, we discuss the unique occupational characteristics of those who engage in dual or multiple trades.