Post-Mao new poetry and 'Occidentalism'

Abstract

In their attempts to come to grips with the accelerated process of reform and globalization, Chinese intellectuals, poets, and critics have employed a discursive pracetied which could be called Occidentalism, the reverse of Said's well-known Orientalism. The purpose of this essay is to examine the manifestation of this change through the discursive practices employed by post-Mao new poets of the mid-1980s in relation to their projection of Western modern and postmodern thinking. In particular, I wish to focus on the Chinese poetic transformation of certain aspects of existentialism, Structuralist linguistics and the post-structural critique of language as implemented by these poets.