Yulia Aleksandrovna Dreyzis

The paper examines how contemporary Chinese avant-garde poets structure their oeuvre regarding the perception of language based on the presence of several different modes of forming a poetic text. The existence of two distinguishable artistic paradigms (“minjian” and “intellectual”) not only sets the formal criteria for differentiation of the poetic space, but also enriches the content of the experiments, linking them with the Chinese autochthonous tradition, “new literature” tradition dating roughly from the beginning of the 20th century and Western models of language appropriation.

Contemporary Chinese poetry demonstrates a tendency towards converging word and image. Many authors use this convergence of visual and verbal as a means of renewing their poetics. It reflects not only orientation towards a creative dialogue with the art of previous periods, but also emergence of new expressive means that implicate language experiments (incl. words as asemantic images). Examples of this approach include formal experiments of poet-cum-artist Yan Li, calligraphic explorations of Ouyang Jianghe, and works of several poetry groups and circles, among others — the ‘marvelous enlightenment’ calligraphy school (miao wu). This use of hybrid formats for information presentation captures new ways of visual-verbal interaction in rethinking of the literati tradition. At the same time, it constitutes a part of our need for surviving in a global text field, where misunderstanding of the text language in constant crossing of linguistic borders is increasingly becoming an important part of our practice.

The article examines the early development of a writing system for Yue Chinese.

The paper centers on the problem of conceptualization of death in the novel “Cries in the Drizzle” (Zai xi yu zhong huhan) by modern Chinese writer Yu Hua. The analysis of the phenomenon is carried out from a triple perspective: in terms of influence of traditional Chinese worldview, Western philosophies and totalitarian (maoist) discourse on the views of Yu Hua. The author comes to a conclusion that the simultaneous search for a kind of existential truth, historical authenticity and attempts to re-think Chinese tradition lie at the core of the writer’s art world.

The article analyzes Chinese authors’ experiments with the recitation and performance of modern poetry in the 1920s and 1930s and the relation between oral and written forms.

The paper centers on finding a “common ground” in the works of such authors working in the mainstream of postmodern and avant-garde trends as Vladimir Sorokin and Yu Hua. The analysis is conducted from the point of view of the general ontological foundations of their works, their aesthetic guidelines and the immediate implementation of afore-mentioned in the textual reality. Thus stable complexes with a clear predominance of artistic phenomena of the grotesque and the absurd are revealed.