Lecture | China Seminar
To World Poetry and Back: Avant-garde Classicist Poetry in the Sinophone Cyberspace
- Date
- Tuesday 14 October 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.27
Abstract
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 The answers, however, seem quickly outdated in the era of digital literature.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.
Biography
Zhiyi Yang is professor of Sinology at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research investigates how Chinese classical lyric traditions intersect with aesthetics, history, intellectual history, cultural memory, as well as media and culture. She is the author of Dialectics of Spontaneity: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in Poetry (Brill, 2015) and Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times (University of Michigan Press, 2023). She is currently writing a monograph on avant-garde classicist poetry in the Sinophone cyberspace and collaborating with scholars on an interdisciplinary project of global Sinophone classicisms.