Poets, What Can We Do? Picerni, Federico
Azijske študije (Spletna izd.),
01/2022, Volume:
10, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Open access
The present paper investigates poetry written in China on the theme of the COVID-19 pandemic following the outbreak in January 2020, considered both as a social phenomenon and as literary texts. The ...analysis is primarily interested in considering the impact of the pandemic on poetry’s interaction with social reality. In order to do so, the essay follows two trajectories. Firstly, it explores the public role performed by poets in the nationwide popular mobilization that sustained the party-state’s effort to curb the epidemic, with a strong emphasis on poetry as a social practice, specifically in a time of crisis, as outlined by both the state and the authors themselves. Secondly, a close reading of selected texts shows the heterogeneity of standpoints adopted by poets in their individual understandings of their role during China’s anti-COVID mobilization effort, especially in relation with the “master narrative” advanced by the state. The paper demonstrates that the final configuration of China’s pandemic poetry was made possible by Chinese poetry’s longstanding tradition of social responsibility, and that the transgression of boundaries between the official and unofficial poetry scenes, and “amateur” and “professional” authors, was instrumental to promote poets’ public engagement.
China's campaign against the COVID-19 epidemic has triggered an upsurge in literary creation and animated discussions on writing about disaster. This essay explores the emergence of a disaster ...poetics in the COVID-19 war which considers poetry as revelatory, ameliorative and cathartic in both personal and national terms. This strand of poetry, which blends humanism, philosophical exploration, and a skeptical impulse, reexamines the isolated state of being, resists glorification, concerns individual lives and redefines heroism as quiet courage, love and compassion in despair among ordinary people, displaying a Chinese forbearance, wisdom and wry humor in facing grim reality. These poetic voices register admirable artistic courage, spiritual depth, self-critical reflection and stylistic ingenuity.
Poets, What Can We Do? Federico Picerni
Azijske študije (Spletna izd.),
01/2022, Volume:
10, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Open access
The present paper investigates poetry written in China on the theme of the COVID-19 pandemic following the outbreak in January 2020, considered both as a social phenomenon and as literary texts. The ...analysis is primarily interested in considering the impact of the pandemic on poetry’s interaction with social reality. In order to do so, the essay follows two trajectories. Firstly, it explores the public role performed by poets in the nationwide popular mobilization that sustained the party-state’s effort to curb the epidemic, with a strong emphasis on poetry as a social practice, specifically in a time of crisis, as outlined by both the state and the authors themselves. Secondly, a close reading of selected texts shows the heterogeneity of standpoints adopted by poets in their individual understandings of their role during China’s anti-COVID mobilization effort, especially in relation with the “master narrative” advanced by the state. The paper demonstrates that the final configuration of China’s pandemic poetry was made possible by Chinese poetry’s longstanding tradition of social responsibility, and that the transgression of boundaries between the official and unofficial poetry scenes, and “amateur” and “professional” authors, was instrumental to promote poets’ public engagement.
In May 2017, Xiao Bing, a popular Chinese chatbot built by Microsoft Research Asia, made her debut as a poet with
, a collection marketed as the entirely created by artificial intelligence. She ...learnt the art of poetry by “reading” the works of 519 modern Chinese poets, and her “inspiration” comes from pictures provided first by her programmers and later by netizens, who upload photographs through her website. Xiao Bing’s emergence made a splash in Chinese society and raised grave concerns among the poets, who polemicized with her engineers. This essay traces Xiao Bing’s literary and media career, which includes both notable literary failures and notable commercial success, exploring her complex connections to technologies of power/knowledge as well as cultural phenomena that range from traditional Chinese poetry and poetry education to postmodern camp aesthetics. From within the renegotiation of the nature of poetry at the threshold of the posthuman era, I propose the critical notion of reading-as-playing to help poetry take advantage of its various entanglements and strictures in order to survive and co-shape the brave new world.
This essay is an exploration of some of the social and cultural factors that have played a role in the production, publication and reception of English translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, ...from the beginning of the 1980s to today. The aim is to link translations to the broader context, highlighting modalities and expectations of reception that have evolved within the social structures through which the translation of contemporary Chinese poetry has been circulating: the publishing industry, universities, the periodical press, public intellectual debates, and the market. The article does not try to establish if this or that expectation are either real or perceived features of the source texts. Nor does it deal with translators’ individual interpretations, their private readings. Instead, adopting a wider sociocultural approach, the analysis proposes to shed light on the industrial and commercial dimension—the public life—of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation.
Contemporary critics who study women's literature often focus on the very act of speaking, or the possession of a voice. The speaker in a poem seems to lend the women of her time a voice to express ...their feelings and in so doing offers a female perspective on social and cultural aspects of life. Adopting ideas from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" as well as Hélène Cixous's notion of "writing the body," this article explores how women poets find a private space in their own rooms for examining "liberated" selves. A new conception of body and space is presented in these lyric voices. In contrast, in the voices of many critics, we hear a glaring double standard that exposes the persistence of patriarchal inhibition of women's freedom of expression. This dialogic tension between the voices reveals women's predicaments and their strong protests against the status quo in contemporary China.
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