avant-garde poetry from china 9erary historiography as well as in poetry’s general impact, domestic
and international. In this light, Lü Zhouju’s and Luo Zhenya’s clas-
sification of the unofficial scene as a subculture (Ѯ᭛࣪) is open to
debate.^9
Of course, historiography can be disproportionally dominated by
particular interest groups. In the present context, an obvious example
would be the repression of popular literature from late in the Qing dy-
nasty and early in the Republican era (1911-1949) by the May Fourth
(Ѩಯ) and New Literature (ᮄ᭛ᄺ) paradigms, whose near-monopoly
over “the modern” has only come to be seriously questioned since the
1980s. Early in the twentieth century, however, the fact that literary
reform was part of a nation-building project gave its proponents sin-
gular purchase on the making of literary history. No such thing is true
for the contemporary avant-garde.
Avant-Garde PoetryWhat goes by the name of avant-garde poetry in post-Cultural-Revo-
lution China is a mixed bag of texts. Their designation as such in this
particular socio-cultural framework has little to do with the various
meanings of avant-garde in discourse on, say, modern Western litera-
tures, Chinese literature from the Republican era and the Mao years
and in Taiwan, and modernism at large. And while one could explore
interfaces of contemporary avant-garde poetry in China with what is
known as the avant-garde fiction (ܜ䫟ᇣ䇈) of the late 1980s and early
1990s—for instance in each genre’s negotiation of social change—in
this case poetry and fiction are distinct if not separate operations that
hardly interact. A more meaningful comparison might involve trends
called avant-garde across literature and other art forms in contempo-
rary China, but this lies outside the scope of the present study.^10
Especially in the early years the poetics of the avant-garde was neg-
atively defined, by dissociation from and exclusion of the thematics,
imagery, poetic form and linguistic register that appear in the products
of orthodoxy. Since the mid-1980s, however, avant-garde poetry—at
(^9) For the cultural purge and the “gloomy backdrop” argument, see Barmé 1999:
ch 2 and 206. Kong Shuyu demonstrates the importance of the “second channel”
(Ѡ⏴䘧ǃѠ⏴䘧) in the publishing business (2005: ch 3 et passim); cf Yeh 2007a:
- Lü 2001: ch 4, Luo Zhenya 2005: 25-35.
(^10) Cf Huot 2000: ch 5.