avant-garde poetry from china 59the text to be realized in various ways in its encounter with a variety of
readers. McDougall recognizes the complexity of the issue when she
urges the scholar-translators not to accept domestic canons uncritical-
ly.^69
Theory and MethodologyIn light of the variety of the poetry studied in this book, I haven’t ad-
opted one single literary-theoretical angle throughout. Instead, I draw
on the work of various theorists as it speaks to questions I believe are
raised by the material: John Glad on exile, Marjorie Perloff on in-
determinacy, Amittai Aviram on rhythm and so on. One issue that
informs several of the case studies is that of the synergy of form and
content, which I view as neither a dichotomy nor two simply equatable
concepts, and rather as relative to and dependent upon one another.
I take the position that poetry is art before anything else, that any
socio-documentary or generally representative function it may have
is secondary, that its form is essential to its realization, and that we
should be alert to the pitfalls of content bias and what Chow calls the
informationalization of literature.^70
My methodology is best summed up as close reading. I read not
for completeness but for coherence, which is not the same thing as
all-encompassing, rigid consistency, and often emerges in unresolved
tension rather than closure. In this respect, too, the material doesn’t
always ask the same questions. Close reading makes more sense for
Sun Wenbo’s poetry, for instance, than for Shen Haobo’s. Several
years ago Kirk Denton said of a journal article containing an earlier
version of chapter Five, on Xi Chuan, that it showed that close read-
ing was “still a valuable activity.”^71 That this needed to be said illus-
trates the extent to which close reading has been discredited since the
mid-twentieth century. To some extent this has happened through as-
sociation with caricatures of blinkered New Critics in exclusive wor-
ship of the literary text in the narrowest sense, grudgingly admitting
that the words on the page might have a generally accepted referential
value. This is not what I do. The development of literary and cultural
(^69) McDougall 2003: 9 et passim in ch 1-2.
(^70) Chow 1993: 132.
(^71) Denton 1999.