Abstract
Abstract In today’s East Asia, where the wars have ended for a long time, how do we perceive anti-communist literature in the 1950s? This paper attempts to use "war" as a discussion framework and to re-examine the ideology and psychostructure exhibited by anti-communist writers in Taiwan, 1950s. After WWII and Chinese Civil War, the Taiwan society was shaped by the international cold war situation and anti-communism idea as the fundamental principle of state. The whole society has always been in an active "state of war". Involved into the war mobilization in the name of nationalism and building of a modern nation-state, Taiwanese people also have needed to deal with a large number of war legacies from the Chinese Civil War. As an epistemological framework, war affects people's mental state, interpretation of the war and its aftermath, recognition of state power and the ways in which it manifests. With this new framework, first, the paper explores the expression and writing effects of trauma traits in anti-communist literature written in 1950s, and the necessity of writing trauma in the state of war. Second, as a technique of "truth effect", how did the anti-communist fictions participate in the governance in policies on the literature and arts set by the KMT government in 50’s, and what kinds of transformation of the truth effect produced by anti-Communist fictions have extended in its subsequent history? Last, how could women’s anti-communist writing reach an interactive relationship with the governance and the national war mobilization system through a flexible application of the traditional Chinese female images?