A
Critique of Pure Intolerance: Recent Chinese Poetry
Xiaobin
Yang
My
paper intends to examine how recent Chinese poetry (from
the
last decade of the 20th century to the present)
manifests
a tolerant attitude toward traumatic memory and
fragmented
reality. Unlike its rebellious predecessor, which
strives
to subvert the existing social ideology, it is both
an
acknowledgement and a parody of the dominant discourse.
Tolerance
here does not mean repression. Rather, it can be
understood
as working-through in the psychoanalytic sense,
in
which the poetic subject accepts certain repressed
elements
and frees himself from the grip of mechanisms of
repetition.
Representative poets include: Zang Di, Xiao
Kaiyu,
Sun Wenbo, Chen Dongdong, Hu Xudong, Han Bo, Ding
Liying,
etc. Textual and theoretical comparisons with
Menglong
poetry and Third-Generation poetry will be part of
the
paper.