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Title |
The Carnivalesque, the Playful and the Comical: Guan Guan’s Urchin Poetics |
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Author |
Yang, Xiao-Bin |
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Research Fellow, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica |
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Abstract |
This essay observes the rhetorical characteristics and the cultural spirits in Guan Guan’s poetry from Lacanian psychoanalytic semiotics and other contemporary theoretical perspectives. Guan Guan’s surrealistic aesthetics is usually blended with his carnivalesque style, challenging the originally majestic signs in base and grotesque ways. In many of his poems, Guan Guan practices an incessantly sliding or leaping strategy of speech, displaying the perpetual shifts with diachronic surreal displacements. In any case, the subjective destitution in Guan Guan’s poetry can be seen as a reactivation of the unrestrained and self-mocking mindset of traditional Chinese literati. The childish taste and playful spirit in his poetry must be understood as the ceaseless dialectical movements between trauma and the effort to symbolize it. |
