Wymyślanie poezji od nowa. Awangardowy dyskurs poetycki w Chinach końca XX wieku
Inventing Poetry Afresh: Avant-Garde Poetic Discourse in Late-Twentieth-Century China

Summary/Abstract: Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) is a woman poet whose debut in the mid-1980s marks the beginning of the process that Jeanne Hong Zhang, in her eponymous book, called “the invention of a discourse,” meaning the discourse of women’s poetry in contemporary China. Due to the perennial marginalisation of the female poetic voice in China, this invention was significantly inspired by foreign literary trends, of which American confessional poetry is a prominent example. Once this largely exogenous discourse was invented, it had to be sensibly linked to the millennia of written Chinese history. The present paper discusses three strategies, termed here as “archaeology”, “arachnology”, and “alchemy,” which Zhai deploys in her mature work to integrate women’s poetry into cultural memory of Chinese society and into the bloodstream of the Chinese literary discourse to establish a solid foundation for the further development of her “invention”.

• Details
• Contents