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.