EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Modern Literature 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 52 overseas, especially in foreign languages. Through nearly forty years of evolution, research on Chinese literature abroad has produced a large number of studies, both at the level of theory and at that of practice. How did Mainland Chinese scholars develop research in the field of overseas Chinese literature? What is the place occupied by Chinese literature written in foreign languages? How does Chinese academia relate to Sinophone Studies? This paper will outline the evolution of research in the field of overseas Chinese- language literature (haiwai huawen wenxue) conducted in Mainland China. Moving from the issues of its definition and methodology, this study will then focus on the categorisation of foreign-language Chinese literature. Given the breadth of the geographical area covered by the discipline, the scope of this study will be narrowed to Chinese authors writing from North America and from Europe, taking Ha Jin (United States) and Dai Sijie (France) as particular cases. Finally, this paper will address the theoretical conflict with the Sinophone approach, examining differences and possible synergies between the two strategies, which are representative of the two main poles of contemporary research on Chinese literature: Mainland China and the United States. Dreyzis Yulia (Moscow State University) Problematizing Language in Contemporary Chinese Poetry Key words: Chinese poetry, Chinese language, poetic language, contemporary poetry Exploring the possibilities of poetic language and language in general is one of the focal points in contemporary Chinese poetry. Current research aims at identifying how different ways of thinking about language are actualized in the works of Chinese poets — in poetry and essay-manifestos, theoretical and critical works, and interviews that make up the main information media in the controversy about the lan- guage of “new poetry”. According to the differentiation of strategies for language perception in the works of the ‘third generation’ (authors of the late 1980s) it is possible to single out two creative paradigms. The first, ‘intellectual’, is linked to the construction of a complex subject, due to which the independent nature of the language itself is exposed. The second, ‘popular’ or ‘minjian’, is based on the idea of maximizing the similarities between the language of poetry and colloquial speech. Both are based on the ‘philolo- gism’ of the poetic text in XX–XXI centuries. The representatives of the two paradigms share a general perception of poetic language as a measure of language in general, complicated by the ‘textocentrism’ of Chinese tradition and the late formalization of the literary standard. This conceptualization of poetic language somewhat ignores the ever-present deviant nature of poetic expression, thus creating the paradox of perception of language and text in contemporary Chinese poetry. Analysis of this material in connection with the traditional notions of language present in Chinese philosophy and Western philosophy of 20th century allows to conclude that the quest for a new philosophy of the poetic word in contemporary Chinese poetry goes two ways — through the accommodation of Western ideas about language and through the reinterpretation of the classical tradition. Interaction between the two occurs both in authors gravitating to the direction of ‘popular’ poetry and in authors belonging to the ‘intellectual’ camp.The study was sup- ported by RHF (project № 16–24–10001 “Parallel processes in the language of contemporary and modern Russian and Chinese poetry”) Hunt Pamela (SOAS) Unruly Bodies: Grotesque Masculinity and Transgression in Feng Tang’s Beijing Trilogy Key words: Feng Tang, grotesque realism, postsocialist literature, masculinity, bodies, transgression Declaring himself an ‘audacious writer’, Feng Tang is a provocateur in the Chinese literary world, most recently gaining attention for his inflammatory translations of Tagore’s poetry. Despite Feng’s growing infamy, there has been very little discussion of his work within anglophone Chinese studies. This paper will turn to Feng’s earliest work: The Beijing Trilogy, published between 2001 and 2007, which charts the boisterous coming of age of Qiu Shui, a teenage boy in Beijing during the early years of market reform.