Frau Prof. YANG Zhiyi vollendete ihr Bachelorstudium in der Chinesischen Sprache und Literatur und ihr Masterstudium in der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft an der Pekinger Universität und promovierte an der Princeton University im Bereich der vormodernen chinesischen Literatur. Frau Prof. YANG ist seit 2015 Professorin an der Goethe-Universität und spezialisiert sich u.a. im Bereich der vormodernen chinesischen Lyrik und der modernen chinesischen klassizistischen Dichtung.
Abstrakt: 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 The answers, however, seem quickly outdated in the era of digital literature.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 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. In the end, I propose 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. I argue 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.