To World Poetry & Back: Avant-garde Classicist Poetry

Vortrag: To World Poetry and Back: Avant-garde Classicist Poetry in the Sinophone Cyberspace

Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt.

What is (or is not) world literature (or world poetry)? This was the central question of a debate raging in the early 2000s. The answers, however, seem quickly outdated in the era of digital literature. In this paper, I will first revisit this debate, before offering a guided tour to an “ethnic digital bookshelf” in the World Wide Web, where you may find a subgenre of literature that I call “sinophone avant-garde classicist poetry,” a bastard child of the classical Chinese lyric traditions and literary modernism. Yet, due to domestic biases entrenched in national literature and to its intrinsic resistance to translation, this poetry has so far won few readers beyond classically educated sinophone readers and academic specialists.