Chinese Poetic Modernisms

This volume explores Chinese poetic modernism from its origins in the 1920s through 21st century manifestations. Modernisms as a title reflects the full complexity of the ideas and forms which can be associated with this literary-historical term.

Chinese culture held a well-known fascination for modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. What is less known but is made fully clear by Zhaoming Qian is the degree to which oriental culture made these poets the modernists they became. This ambitious and illuminating study shows that Orientalism, no less than French symbolism and Italian culture, is a constitutive element of Modernism. Consulting rare and unpublished materials, Qian traces Pound's and Williams's remarkable dialogues with the great Chinese poets--Qu Yuan, Li Bo, Wang Wei, and Bo Juyi--between 1913 and 1923. His investigation reveals that these exchanges contributed more than topical and thematic ideas to the Americans' work and suggests that their progressively modernist style is directly linked to a steadily growing contact and affinity for similar Chinese styles. He demonstrates, for example, how such influences as the ethics of pictorial representation, the style of ellipsis, allusion, and juxtaposition, and the Taoist/Zen-Buddhist notion of nonbeing/being made their way into Pound's pre-Fenollosan Chinese adaptations, Cathay, Lustra, and the Early Cantos, as well as Williams's Sour Grapes and Spring and All. Developing a new interpretation of important work by Pound and Williams, Orientalism and Modernism fills a significant gap in accounts of American Modernism, which can be seen here for the first time in its truly multicultural character.

This collection of papers is the outcome of the symposium "Modernism and Postmodernism in Chinese Literature", which took place at Aarhus University, Denmark in October 1991, was arranged by Bei Dao and Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg of the Institute of East Asian Studies. One of the guiding ideas behind this initiative was to bring together scholars from Europe and America with China in the 1980s, as scholars, critics, editors or as writers. Those who study China, regardless of national origin, are increasingly abandoning the "objective" stance of writing about culture, and insisting on their own right to become participants in the creation of culture. This book brings together essays written by those who breach the categories -- scholars, cultural critics and writers, ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese. All of the contributors are working or studying in Western universities, and many have published in the overseas literary journal "Jintian". This mix marks the study of Chinese literature as a new space where Chinese literary discourse is not only studied, but also created. Although contributions to this volume are diverse, a central theme is the attempt to discover how literature is changing in definition and social function. Essays analyse the concepts of the autonomy of art and creativity, modernism and subjectivity, and the form and structure of narrative language. The focus on theory and rhetoric that informs these essays highlights a concern with the way in which literary discourse is represented by intellectuals, and the way in which this representation itself becomes a frame that constructs literary meaning. Investigations into the Mao Wenti (the Maoist literary style) that persists even in post-Mao writers, the seemingly contentless language of Can Wue's work, the concept "pure literature" and the anti-modernity stance of the poetic Feifei (No-no) school all provide clues to the developing cultural consciousness of contemporary China.

This book examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world works. Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner. Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption.

The Modernist Response to Chinese Art is a work of both erudition and sympathy that reveals the root of modernist poets' otherwise baffling interest in and use of Chinese art. Most impressive, perhaps, is the depth of their embrace of it, as Qian has so convincingly documented. --Patricia C. Williams.

"Quite apart from her contributions as a literary critic, Shu-mei Shih is able to historicize literary developments of the period most persuasively. Her analysis of Shanghai, the city, and the literary movement it spawned, is crafted with great sensitivity to both history and literature. In many ways, it is the most inclusive historical study of modern Chinese literature in its formative period."—Prasenjit Duara, author of Rescuing History from the Nation "Tracing the spectral production of 'Chinese' identity as it is disseminated globally, Shih boldly moves away from using place (ethnicity) and the body (race) to anchor Chinese identity, to argue that the visual (film) and the verbal (language and linguistics) are the most salient ones in the modern and contemporary historical formation. She succeeds brilliantly."—David Palumbo-Liu, author of Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier "This is the most thoroughly researched study of Chinese modernism published to date. The author's theoretical interventions greatly enrich our understanding of colonial modernity and the stakes of comparison in cross-cultural studies. The book is a major contribution to modern Chinese literary studies and comparative literature."—Lydia Liu, editor of Tokens of Exchange

This book is a cross-cultural study of two major literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It traces the confluence of American and Chinese literatures in the early twentieth century, when modernism reached its full powers in Europe and America, and to a lesser extent, in China. The author examines how classical Chinese literature affected the birth of American modernism as represented by Ezra Pound; he also investigates how American literature contributed to the formation and development of China's New Poetry.