Date of Award

12-10-2024

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Comparative Literature

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Type

Dissertation

Abstract

This is a hybrid dissertation required by International Writers' Track of the program of Comparative Literatuee at Washington University in St. Louis. It includes the creative part, a poem titled "Anti-Communism 2020" and the explanations given in the fourth section. Whereas, it is the scholarly inquiry that plays the central body of this document. The scholarly reseach investigates anti-Communist literature, the propaganda production and campaign of Chinese Nationalist Party 中國國民黨 (hereafter the KMT)KMT characterized by banality through Chen Jiying 陳紀瀅 (1908-1997) its top-ranked literary author with the focus on the early 1950’s decade, when the Party lost the civil war with Communist, fled to Taiwan, and implemented its authoritarian rule. This study places KMT statecraft at center of its analysis, thanks to little innovation in literature Chen Jiying accomplished. In the analyses on Chen’s novel and his participation in KMT literary campaigns, the intra-text and extra-text discoveries align one with another ─ the obscured message in the propaganda novel and the extensive use of bribing tactics in the campaigns weakened the Party’s absolute monarchy in post-war Taiwan literature. Drawing on the philosophy of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), this study sets out to complicate the consensus that KMT anti-Communist literature as pure evil, responsible for stifling post-war Taiwan literature. This study wrestles with biases regarding anti-Communist literature through theoretical reevaluation, historical investigation, and literary criticism. Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into Play (1956) allows for the political phenomenology as the criterium to re-evaluate the subject. Subjectively, the “intrusion” aims at the awe at the historic through the anomalous plot, which mesmerizes the judgment of the readers and to return them to the undifferentiated collective. Objectively, the intrusion sentiment counts on the intermediary agent. He performs his identification with the highest authority in public, that is, before his audience in the sub-stratum so that the sentiment may extend to wider population and represent them as a political collective. Schmitt’ theory points to the misplaced criterium of the attack on anti-Communist literature. We should not measure the literature, against the existing order of liberal democracy, but the founding act of that order. That is, anti-Communist literature pertains to the speech acts of institutionalization. In the light of institutionalization, the history study delves into Chuangzuo yanxibu xiaoshuozu 創作研習部小說組 (Fiction Forum of the Department of Creative Writing and Research, 1951), a KMT workshop Chen Jiying served as mentor. The Forum, with training producers of KMT literature as its goal, illuminates the grassroots reality of the KMT literary institution. I focus on the practice and consequence of bribery, the primary tactic Chen Jiying employed in training students and from which he personally benefited during the Republican era. Bribery reduced the encompassing institution to personal ties between briber and bribed, therefore blurring KMT ideology. The literary criticism on the other hand, examines Chen Jiying’s Dicun Zhuan 荻村傳 (The Chronicles of Silvergrass Village, 1951). It is first through a critical reading, aiming at the novel’s deficiencies, and then through literary historical research on KMT “village fiction” in the mainland years. Dicun zhuan embodies all the weaknesses of the genre. It affirms no great Chinese history nor the cause of fighting Communism. It promotes individualism instead of the reader’s identification with anti-Communism. Rather than “anti-Communist,” “non-Communist” accurately describes the KMT propaganda novel, as I show. Accordingly, not only did Chen Jiying fragment the singular chain of command within the KMT literary institution, he also failed to foment an awe at Chinese history which could add to KMT authority. The top-ranker author represented Party intellectuals who unwittingly undermined Party organization and ideology. “The masses are simply a shapeless material. Only under the hand of an artist can a people be shaped from the masses, and a nation from the people. ” When Dr. Joseph Goebbels so proclaimed in 1931, he might have anticipated the failure of the KMT as Nazi emulator. This research project concludes that anti-Communist literature, with irresponsible individualism its defining feature, benefited Taiwan democracy by weakening KMT dictatorship from within. Exemplified by Chen Jiying, anti-Communist literature sinned in its banality, not its evil.

Language

English (en)

Chair and Committee

Robert Hegel

Committee Members

Jiayi Chen; Lingchei Chen; Lynne Tatlock; Robert Henke

Available for download on Wednesday, December 18, 2030

Share

COinS