05 Jun 05.06.2024
Vortrag: „To World Poetry and Back: Avant-garde Classicist Poetry in the Sinophone Cyberspace“
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 The answers, however, seem quickly outdated in the era of digital literature.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 her lecture as part of the Sinological Colloquium on May 5th, Prof. Dr. Yang Zhiyi first revisited this debate, before offering a guided tour to an “ethnic digital bookshelf” in the World Wide Web, where readers may find a subgenre of literature that she calls “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. In the end, Prof. Yang proposed to redefine “world” as a verb, “to world” (welten), hereby providing new perspectives to the ongoing reconceptualization of “world literature” in general and “world poetry” in particular in the digital age. She argued that only poetry that demands its readers to overcome the cultural and linguistic differences and actively create a new worldly space can be called the genuine “world poetry,” regardless of its media, popularity, translatability (or the lack thereof). Sinophone avant-garde classicist poetry, through its active reengagement with the Chinese literary traditions, its literary modernity, and its contemporaneous reality, creates fresh and dynamic relations between the reader and the text, opening new dimensions to appreciate the power and vitality of the Chinese lyric language in the digital era. It hereby becomes a poetry that worlds by facing back at the past while stepping into the future.
