Formations of Taiwanese Subject Consciousness during the Cold War (1960-1972):George Kerr, Peng Mingmin, and Chen Yingzhen

• Main Authors: LU, YI TING, 呂怡婷
• Other Authors: 陳光興
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11851929782732690553

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 100 === This thesis investigates the formation of Taiwanese subject consciousness under the influence of America and the Cold War during the 1960s. Today, subject consciousness has been discussed primarily in the context of Taiwanese colonial history as a national consciousness in resistance to the influence of Chinese culture or Chinese nationalism. But this nationalist view, on one hand, freezes the agency of subject consciousness in intervening in social and historical processes; on the other hand, it also overlooks the influence of the binary Cold War ideology created by the U.S. For this reason, I contend that Taiwanese subject consciousness cannot be properly understood without seeing the domination of the Cold War and that the contextualization of the Japanese colonial memories, the U.S. influence, and Chinese heritage in Taiwanese society is necessary for liberating Taiwanese subject consciousness from the national perspective. In this thesis, I focus on three different texts which were composed during the 1960s and the early 1970s when the social structure in Taiwan began to change. These texts— George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, Peng Ming-min’s A Taste of Freedom, and Chen Yingzhen’s short stories, “The Country Village Teacher” and “The Last Day to Summer”— discuss Taiwanese subject consciousness and the Taiwan-U.S. relations in the 1960sto probe into the different cultural positions in imaging Taiwan’s history and the role of America. This thesis concentrates on the political ideologies in these texts, by asking how these ideologies are represented, and what imaginations they provoked to justify their claims. By putting these three positions in conversation with each other, I attempt to manifest the tension and complexity that America imposes on the formation of Taiwanese subject consciousness. Also, this thesis attempts to provide a different set of analytic language to understand Taiwanese subject consciousness as created during the Cold War. Through a historically grounded analysis of these texts, while remaining attentive to the “literary qualities” of their political ideologies, the thesis also suggests the possibility that an examination of Taiwanese subject consciousness can serve as a starting point not only for overcoming the division of China and Taiwan as embedded in the Cold War structure but also for understanding America as a Cold War empire that took Asia as its prey.