| This dissertation addresses three issues that characterize the development of modern Chinese poetry: the construction of subjectivity, the controversy of Chinese modernity, and the relevance of Western response to modern Chinese national identity. These three issues are intertwined: the search for subjectivity emerge from the modernization of cultural production, which is itself a symptomatic response to the global "Westernization.".;The controversial "Misty Poetry" written in Post-Cultural Revolution China by a group of poets, including Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Shu Ting, Yang Lian and others, is highly distinct from its predecessor. These poets try to seek new values and new forms of expression through their works. I view Misty Poetry as an appropriation of Western modernist poetry, deployed to resist Communist China's ideological discourses. Misty Poetry is also a retrieval of China's cultural past, reviving an incomplete project of modernity begun during the May Fourth Movement, the official landmark of the birth of Chinese modernization. By reading the unprecedented popular reception of Misty Poetry in the West, I also scrutinize the ideological underpinnings of the Western reaction to Chinese literary texts.;The emergence of Misty Poetry, accompanied with the appearance of the Fifth Generation cinema and subsequently followed by the rise of Root-searching fictions, designates an intense change of modern Chinese arts and literature. Yet, this paradigm shift in modern Chinese cultural history is established on the basis of resisting the orthodox Maoist discourse and of excluding the popular culture which is also undergoing a period of transition entailed by the market economy of the 1980s. On the one hand, the Chinese (intellectual or elitist) culture of modernity constitutes itself as a new farce to replace the dominant position of the declining Maoist literature; on the other hand, it privileges its sense of superiority to silence the increasingly engulfing mass culture. Only with the double movement of substitution and oppression can this newly-emerged Chinese high culture of modernity construct a space for itself to represent the putative identity of a nation which is still searching far its anchorage in the process of drastic changes. |
