Rocky Mountain Review
76-1 Spring 2022
CONTENTS
Guidelines for Submission for Articles and Book Reviews
Chinese Feature Issue
Guest Editor: Christopher Lupke
The Poetry of Zhai Yongming
Introduction by Guest Editor Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta
Posthumanism, Temporality, Ecofeminism, Femininity, and Visuality in the Poetry of Zhai Yongming: An IntroductionChristopher Lupke, Guest Editor for this Chinese Feature Issue and Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature Editorial Board Member for Chinese, introduces the historical setting and literary significance of the poetry of Zhai Yongming and gives an overview of the five essays dedicated to this outstanding contemporary poet.
Joanna Krenz, Adam Mickiewicz University and University of Zurich
Regrowing Divine Trees: Zhai Yongming’s “The Eighth Day” as a Reflection on the Intellectual and Ethical Ecosystem of Posthuman Eden
Published in 2009, “The Eighth Day” is a poetic sequel to the Biblical myth of creation. Zhai sketches a landscape of the posthuman world in
which “scientists replaced God” and continue His work populating the earth with transgenic species, cyborgs, and humanoids. Inviting readers
for time travel to a future society, the poet prompts them to reflect on the most fundamental big questions concerning ontology, epistemology, and ethics of the newly emergent “natureculture,” to use Donna Haraway’s term, including problems such as the relationship between science and religion or between matter, intelligence, consciousness, and conscience. This study unpacks these big questions and traces possible answers to them in other works from Zhai’s oeuvre and beyond, mobilizing cultural contexts inspired by her poem “The Eighth Day.”
Yanhong Zhu, Washington and Lee University
Performing a Poetic Temporal Weave: Gender and Femininity in Zhai Yongming’s Poetry
This paper examines Zhai Yongming’s articulation of gender and femininity by exploring themes and imagery of poems written in different stages of her literary career, ranging from the early 1980s to the present, and argues that Zhai’s poetic representations of femininity are closely tied to her evolving temporal consciousness. Her poetic career originated from a strong sense of gender awareness, which she defines as “dark night consciousness,” explored in her early poems through the poetic representation of what Kristeva calls “Women’s time” that is cyclical and eternal. In later poems, Zhai strives to create new forms of poetic expression by interweaving the past and present. Such experimentation helps articulate a new poetic voice that moves beyond the male/female gender binary, a voice that is at once feminine and beyond femininity.
Géraldine Fiss, University of Southern California
Black Night Consciousness and Ecofeminist Poetics in the Works of Zhai Yongming
As we read Zhai Yongming’s poetry from the 1980’s to the present, we observe a transformation of her inward-oriented “black night consciousness” to a more outward-looking poetic mode that endeavors to shed light on social and environmental injustice. Her early poetry collection, Woman, articulates the unique nature of women’s experiences and perceptions by foregrounding the interconnectedness between feminine subjectivity and the natural world. In some recent poems, by contrast, Zhai adopts a strong ecofeminist stance to engage in ecological critique of ills like prostitution, urban poverty, and crime, while as a poet she plays the role of sympathizer, observer, eyewitness, and mediator.
Wenzhu Li, University of Alberta
Femininity in Zhai Yongming’s “Lightly Injured People, Gravely Wounded City”Contemporary poetry critics have hastily accepted Zhai Yongming’s negative attitude towards femininity in her essay “Night Consciousness” to build a feminist poetics against the so-called feminine tradition of Chinese women’s poetry. However, Zhai confessed later that in order to shed the sentimental elements of femininity, she ended up perpetuating the feminine trait. This essay offers a careful reevaluation of the notion of femininity in Zhai’s poetry and prose. Revealing Zhai’s endeavor to rewrite the past and ponder the present from a “feminine” perspective in her poem “Lightly Injured People, Gravely Wounded City,” this paper argues that Zhai’s paradoxical intervention speaks not of her rejection of the so-called feminine tradition but her resistance to oppression.
Laura L. Velazquez-Velazquez, University of Alberta
When a Woman Looks at a Woman: Poetics of the Look in Zhai Yongming’s Ekphrastic Writings
This essay explores how the rhetorical device of ekphrasis is used in a series of essays and poems by Zhai Yongming. Taking as its starting point the ekphrastic essay “A Mexican Woman,” this paper suggests that, through ekphrasis, Zhai’s narrative voice creates intimate female bonds between the narrator and the subject of her narration. By doing so, Zhai’s implied narrator explores new ways of seeing other women that rely on intimate recognition and that offer an alternative to a male gaze that denies women an active role in the dominant regimes of visuality.
Hong Kong Writing
Fang-yu Li, New College of Florida
The Role of the Writer and the Making of Hong Kong in Dung Kai-cheung’s The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera
This paper illustrates how The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera reflects critically on the role of the writer and the meaning of writing Hong Kong after the 1997 handover. By challenging the relationships between writer and character, human and things, creator and creations, the novel seeks to break the binary structure of the colonizer and the colonized and advocate for a new mode of writing that is decentralized, collaborative, and forward-looking. Dung proposes to see Hong Kong not as an object of representation passively defined through looking into the past, but as a subject of creation that comes into existence through the collaborative act of imagining the future. This new mode of writing not only generates a textual “space of appearance” that encourages the collective making of “possible” Hong Kongs, but also seeks to assert Hong Kong’s autonomy through the creation of spaces for self-definition.
Reviews
Reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed.
Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers, by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Ngai Pun.
Reviewer: Lishu Tang
Bird Talkand Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic, by Frederik Green, translator and editor.
Reviewer: Pu Wang
Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women’s Tanci Fiction, by Li Guo.
Reviewer: Christopher Lupke
Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw, by Hua Li.
Reviewer: Tonglu Li
A History of Taiwan Literature by Ye Shitao, by Christopher Lupke, translator and editor.
Reviewer: Géraldine Fiss
Chinese Poets since 1949, by Christopher Lupke and Thomas Moran, editors.
Reviewer: Frederik Green
The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1961-1906, by Shaoling Ma.
Reviewer: Fangyuan Huang
Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature, by Jiwei Xiao.
Reviewer: Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu
Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, by Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, editors.
Reviewer: Huang Yiju
Maoist Laughter, by Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, editors.
Reviewer Howard Y. F. Choy
CONTRIBUTORS
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