Title: The Making of Modernity in Vietnam’s Literary Field since Đổi Mới: Discursive Modernity, Institutional Mediation, and Endogenous Dynamics

Abstract: This study examines the transformation of Vietnam’s literary field since Đổi Mới (Renovation) and develops an analytical framework of discursive modernity, institutional mediation, and endogenous dynamics. It argues that the defining shift in post-Đổi Mới literature is not simply the individual displacing the collective, but a reconfiguration of literary subjectivity: from a totalizing subject subordinated to a singular historical telos to a relational subject embedded in historical memory, familial ethics, market relations, and identity difference. Institutions of publishing, criticism, literary awards, education, and cross-cultural circulation selectively translate emergent discourses, generating a recurrent cycle of conflict, formal translation, public feedback, and re-bounding. An “elastic boundary,” defined by permeability, selectivity, and reversibility, accounts for how the literary field absorbs new experience while revising its own norms and sustaining aesthetic judgment. The rise of digital platforms further internalizes the tension between professional legitimacy and algorithmic visibility as a new source of contradiction within the field. By tracing these mechanisms, the Vietnamese case offers an empirically grounded framework for theorizing the relationship among literary autonomy, cultural governance, and platform-based circulation across comparative post-socialist contexts.

Keywords: Đổi Mới, literary field, discursive modernity, relational subject, institutional mediation

Author: Viet Hoan Ngo, Assistant Professor, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.03.014