Female Writing And Poetics

Zhai Yongming is a famous poet in contemporary China and is known as the"leader" of female poetry.Since the mid-1980s,Zhai has always maintained a strong creativity,contributing important poetic works in every historical stage.This dissertation takes Zhai’s poetry of more than 30 years as the research object,makes an in-depth and comprehensive interpretation of her poems,combs the evolution track of her poetry writing in more than 30 years,analyzes her unique poetic themes and artistic exploration,and then discusses her deep relationship with the process of Chinese Contemporary Poetry since the 1980s.The thesis consists of four chapters.The introduction first clarifies the research origin and problem awareness of this dissertation,and then summarizes the representative achievements and related research findings of Zhai Yongming.On this basis,it summarizes the existing research deficiencies and explains the research ideas,methods and academic expectations of this dissertation.The first chapter focuses on Zhai Yongming’s personal experiences and related poetry writing.This dissertation divides Zhai Yongming’s poetry creation into three stages:"eruption"(1984-1990),"fission"(1991-1999),and the "integration"(2000-2020).The first stage is full of strong "trauma experiences" of her childhood With the literary accumulation in her youth and the induction of the western modernist poetry in the 1980s,Zhai Yongming appears in the poetic world with her unique "Night" and"Death" consciousness and the exquisite and complete structure of her group poems.During this period,her writing has the characteristics of"monologue",and her female perspective mainly focuses on the life of female individuals and their sufferings and struggle in the male dominated world.The second stage runs through the whole 1990s.In the rapid transformation of social context,Zhai Yongming constantly seeks for changes in her poetry and begins expanding to communication with the real world.Zhai Yongming’s poems at this stage have turned to the outside world.While extensively involved in "the public",she discriminates and extracts the"personalized" experience from it,hence establishing a new way of dialogue with the complex reality.This stage can be called the "fission period" of Zhai Yongming’s poetry writing:in the process of"useless" and"sinking",she constantly adjusts her writing strategies,releasing the vitality of poetry.The third stage refers to poetry writing since the new century.Starting from "white night",Zhai Yongming’s writing appears to be more free and open.She constantly interacts with the present reality and the tradition,and even makes interactive criticism with works of art,reflecting the characteristics of the poet’s communication poetics in this period.Zhai has entered a more free and comprehensive period of poetry writing,corresponding with the reality and returning to tradition being the main contents of this period.The forms of her poems becomes varied and the language tends to be simple,paying more attention to the rhythms.Zhai Yongming’s poems in the three stages are not only closely related to the transformation of the times,but also the transformation of her mentality and her constant pursuit of the artistic refinement of poetry.The second chapter interprets the female images in Zhai Yongming’s poems,and studies the excavation and writing of female experience in her poems.The first section analyzes women’s sense of body in Zhai’s poems from the perspective of their female experience.On this basis,this dissertation examines her dialogues with Western women(mainly Plath and Frida Kahlo)in her poems.Finally,Zhai Yongming starts from "listening and watching" in her poems,constructing the female images on her understanding of the world.The second section analyzes the "mother" in Zhai’s poems and the spiritual communication between the lyric subject and the mother as a human.The interaction with her mother is a penetrating theme in Zhai Yongming’s poems,which is reflected in the poems Mother,Fourteen Songs and so on.Zhai Yongming’s writing of "mother" has experienced the evolution from monologues to dialogues.Through the overlap and conflict of female experiences between mother and daughter,the common tragedy of women’s survival is revealed.The third section analyzes Zhai Yongming’s poems on ancient Chinese women.Through the multiple artistic forms of juxtaposition of time and space,soul dialogues and cultural perspectives,Zhai Yongming writes about Yu Xuanji,Li Qingzhao,Yang Yuhuan,Yu Ji,etc.,opening up the hidden female experiences in ancient times,and looking back on the current female poetry from the the perspective of history.Zhai Yongming’s writing of women originates from her individual experiences,but the range of subjects is gradually expanded,and her writing techniques are constantly adjusted.She has constructed a group of female images with a large time span and a wide range of space.The third chapter explicates Zhai Yongming’s poetry through Color Poetics,Space Poetics,Time Poetics,Dramatic Poetics and other key words to explore the internal texture and text construction of her poetry.The first section is the"Color Poetics".Firstly,with a statistical analysis of the use of colors in Woman,mainly black,white and red,we can find that Zhai effectively mobilizes the suggestive function and metaphorical meaning of colors,and constructs her unique "Color Poetics".The second section concerns her "Space Poetics".Referring to the space poetics theory of French thinker Gaston Bachelard,this thesis interprets the multiple space writing of Zhai Yongming’s poetry.From the early closed space such as the"black room" and "Jing’an Village" to the open space such as the "coffee shop" and"bar" in the consumption era,Zhai’s space writing has undergone an obvious transition.Zhai Yongming’s interest in and writing about"architecture" has made her recast her poetic view from the perspective of Buildings on Paper,which has profoundly influenced her poetry writing since the late 1990s.The third section focuses on the"Time Poetics".Zhai’s perception and writing of time has developed from "tension" to "expansion",from "gender" based to "super gender".The fourth section talks about Zhai Yongming’s "Dramatic Poetics",which aims to investigate the stylistic exploration and structural consciousness of her poetry.This dissertation interprets and analyzes the "allusion" and "polyphony" in her poems,emphasizing her skills in organizing group poems and long poems.Zhai Yongming has been keen on drama since she was a child.She develops and transforms it in her later poetry writing and creatively uses it in her dialogue with reality,forming her own "Dramatic Poetics".The fourth chapter aims to reveal Zhai Yongming’s value in the history of contemporary Chinese poetry.The first section analyzes her participation and contribution to the theory and criticism of female poetry.Since the "consciousness of night" was put forward,Zhai has always been the supporter and introspective thinker of female poetry and her penetrating insight has affected its development.In addition,Zhai Yongming has conveyed a lot of research on Chinese traditional women.She has composed a number of prose anthologies casting female poets in ancient China,a way to trace the history of female poetry,and significant for the construction of female poetics.The second section examines the relationship between Zhai Yongming and the contemporary poetry.In the past 40 years,Zhai Yongming has been changing with the times,constantly adjusting the relationship between poetry and reality,and always sticking to her own standards of individual value and aesthetics.At the same time,Zhai has made great achievements in painting,architecture,films and other fields in art.She has also been committed to the cross-border integration of poetry and other artistic forms,which is of great significance in today’s era of media integration.Zhai Yongming is an independent poet.She has not only integrated into the specific region(Sichuan)and generation(the third generation poets),but also drifted away to a certain extent.Zhai Yongming’s "overflow" and"flight" relative to specific generations and regions has made her a poet difficult to label.The conclusion of the dissertation summarizes the whole thesis and Zhai Yongming as a great poet,prospects the possibility of Zhai Yongming’s poetry in the future,gives a conclusion to "Zhai Yongming phenomenon".