• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

THE MAKING OF MINJIAN Yi Sha’s Poetics and Poetry Activities BY YUJING LIANG 梁余晶 A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington (2020) Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Luo Hui and Prof. Yiyan Wang, for their great patience, consistent support, and immense knowledge. As my primary supervisor, Dr. Luo provided sustained guidance, through numerous stimulating discussions, on the step-by-step development of my dissertation during the entire course of my research, while Prof. Wang, as my secondary supervisor, read through my complete draft and gave valuable and detailed feedback at the final stage. Without such helpful supervisors, I would not have achieved what I have today. Besides my supervisors, I would like to thank the examiners of my dissertation: Duncan Campbell (Victoria University of Wellington), Dr. Lorraine Wong (University of Otago) and Prof. Dian Li (University of Arizona). What I learned from their erudition, expertise and critical insight will continue to inspire and benefit me in my future career. I would like to thank the Chinese poet Yi Sha, the subject of my research, for accepting my interview request and kindly posting me a full carton of his poetry books from China, including many unofficial publications of limited circulation, which became important sources for my research. My gratitude also goes to Prof. Maghiel van Crevel (Leiden University), who showed great interest in my research and acted as a helpful friend. We had many interesting and enjoyable conversations on Chinese poetry via email and Wechat. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family in China for their enormous support. My special thanks go to my mother and wife, who looked after my son for six years during my absence, a task more painstaking than completing a PhD. i Abstract This thesis investigates and critiques the notion of minjian through a case study of Yi Sha 伊沙 (b. 1966), a key figure of Chinese minjian poetry since its emergence in the 1990s. The term minjian became a focal point during the Panfeng Polemic in 1999, a most significant event in the history of contemporary Chinese poetry, when minjian was adopted to name one of the rivalling poetry groups and triggered an influential debate that shaped the contour of contemporary Chinese poetry in the ensuing decade. Minjian became a prevailing keyword on the Chinese poetry scene of the 2000s and inspired numerous unofficial poetry groups both in print and online. Though the term was frequently evoked and widely discussed, its connotations remained uncertain. Through my study of Yi Sha’s poetry and poetry activities, I identify two major elements of minjian: colloquial poetics and unofficial stance. Both elements harken back to the classical tradition and had long manifested in contemporary Chinese poetry, yet it was not until the Panfeng Polemic when they were explicitly joined together to defend and define a group that was to be called the minjian poets. Yi Sha rose to prominence after the Panfeng Polemic and became an outstanding representative minjian poet largely responsible for the ‘making’ of minjian into a literary and cultural phenomenon. By combining discourse analysis with a critical biography of the poet, this research demonstrates the complex relationship that minjian poetry has with China’s cultural establishment, the literary avant-garde, and world literature. I argue that Yi Sha’s minjian is both a political stance and an aesthetic choice, with broad cultural and ideological repercussions; understanding the concept of minjian is imperative to the understanding of contemporary Chinese poetry. Keywords: minjian, Yi Sha, colloquial poetics, unofficial stance, world poetry ii Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter One Minjian in Polemics: From Panfeng to Yi Sha ……………………21 1. Intellectual Poets vs. Colloquial Poets …………………………………………... 22 2. The Panfeng Polemic: The Naming of Minjian …………………………………. 24 3. The Panfeng Polemic in Critical Assessment …………………………………… 27 4. Two Key Connotations of Minjian: Colloquial Poetics and Unofficial Stance …. 32 5. Yi Sha: The Making of a Minjian Hero …………………………………………. 50 Chapter Two Minjian in Poetics: Yi Sha’s Colloquial Poetry …………………. 58 1. Colloquial Poetry Beyond Colloquialism: An Anti-Lyrical Poetics …………….. 58 2. Yi Sha’s Poetry: Profanity, Playfulness, Political Incorrectness ………………… 73 3. Poetry of Facts: From ‘Pre-Colloquial’ to ‘Post-Colloquial’ ………………..…... 99 Chapter Three Minjian in the Digital Age: Yi Sha’s Poetry Activities ……… 114 1. Poetry Jianghu: Performing the Unofficial in Digital Space ……………….…. 115 2. Chang’an Poetry Festival: The Institutionalization of Minjian ………..……….. 129 3. ‘New Poetry Classics’: Canonization of the Minjian Poetry …………………… 139 Chapter Four Minjian in Global Context: Yi Sha and the World ………….… 152 1. From Ginsberg to Bukowski: In Search of a Minjian Role Model …………… 153 2. From Bukowski to Tagore: Extending the Minjian Canon Through Translation. 170 3. Yi Sha’s Poetry Overseas: Chinese Minjian Made in Australia ……………….. 175 4. Yi Sha in Translation: Minjian Brotherhood Through ‘Gift-Exchange’ ………. 184 5. Embracing Translatability: Minjian and World Poetry …………………………189 iii Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………... 197 Appendix: Yi Sha Interviewed by Liang Yujing ……………………………….. 209 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………… 249 iv Introduction This thesis is a study of contemporary Chinese poetry with a focus on the Minjian group through the trajectory of its outstanding representative, Yi Sha 伊沙 (b. 1966). It covers the time span of about twenty years since the emergence of the Minjian Poets in the 1990s. The main issues discussed include the concept of minjian, Yi Sha’s colloquial poetics, Yi Sha’s unofficial stance in his poetry activities, as well as Yi Sha’s interactions with world poetry. This study will contribute to a better understanding of minjian as a major presence, a combination of both an aesthetic choice and a political stance, in contemporary Chinese poetry. Research Question The term minjian first appeared in the context of contemporary Chinese poetry during the Panfeng Polemic in 1999. The polemic involved two rival groups: the Zhishifenzi 知识分子 (Intellectual) poets and a cohort of poets loosely affiliated with Colloquial Poetry (kouyu shi 口语诗). During the Polemic, for want of a collective identity, the latter group was named the Minjian 民间 Poets. The name was accepted with enthusiasm and the poets quickly rallied around it. Since then, minjian has become a prevailing keyword on the Chinese poetry scene and inspired numerous unofficial poetry groups both online and offline, particularly during the 2000s. Though the term has been widely used and discussed, what minjian means for contemporary Chinese poetry remains open to question. Despite, and because of, the multiplicity in its meaning and usage, minjian has become a key term with regards to the development of contemporary Chinese poetry. This thesis, therefore, seek answers to the following two- fold research questions: 1. What is the historical formation of minjian as a literary concept and how has it been re-imagined in contemporary Chinese poetics? 2. How has 1 Yi Sha built his career as a representative Minjian Poet through his writing and literary activities and thus positioned himself at the forefront of the power dynamics and critical debates that shape contemporary Chinese poetry? The word minjian contains two characters: min 民 (the people) and jian 间 (among), and it literally means ‘among the people’. In popular usage, the word takes on multiple shades of meaning depending on the context. It has been variously translated as ‘among the people’, ‘folk’, ‘unofficial’, ‘non-governmental’, ‘popular’ and ‘grassroots’. Attempts to define minjian can be found in essays by the poets Yu Jian 于坚 and Han Dong 韩东, two forerunners of the minjian group; but they both lack theoretical grounding and critical distance, and their arguments often slip into emotional venting or vague manifestos. Among the critics and scholars, discussions on minjian have often pivoted around its differences or similarities with zhishifenzi. Since zhishifenzi literally means ‘intellectual’, it is tempting to understand minjian as everything that is opposite to the intellectual. The Minjian-Intellectual division was articulated in an early study in 1994 by the Chinese critic Chen Sihe 陈思和.1 In some ways anticipating the Panfeng Polemic, Chen identifies three dynamic forces—the official, the intellectual and minjian— interacting with each other in modern Chinese literary history. Chen’s concept of minjian refers to the ‘popular space’ that, similar to Habermas’s ‘public sphere’, resists the power of the nation-state. Chen’s discussion relies heavily on examples from folk literature, which makes his minjian roughly identical to the traditional notion of the folk.2 Though sharing the same word minjian, the Minjian poetry that appeared in the late twentieth century can hardly be put into the category of folk literature, nor can it be considered part of Chen’s popular space. Nearly all the Minjian Poets graduated from renowned universities in China. Their writings have little to do with folk literature. 1 Chen Sihe 陈思和. ‘Minjian de fuchen’ 民间的浮沉 (The ups and downs of minjian). Shanghai wenxue 上海 文学 (Shanghai Literature), no. 1, 1994,

Load more

  273

Copy Link