Language and text in contemporary Chinese poetry of the ‘third generation’
Exploring the possibilities of poetic language and language in general is one of the crucial points in contemporary Chinese poetry. According to the differentiation of strategies for language comprehension and perception in the works of the ‘third generation’ (authors of the late 1980s) it is possible to single out two creative paradigms. The first, ‘intellectual’, paradigm is linked to the construction of a complex subject, due to which the independent nature of the language itself is exposed. The second, ‘popular’ or ‘ minjian ’, is based on the idea of maximizing the similarities between the language of poetry and colloquial speech. Both are based on the ‘philologism’ of the poetic text in XX-XXI centuries, on the poets’ concentration in their reflection on the word, grammatical form and the logic of meaning formation. The representatives of the two paradigms share a general perception of poetic language as a measure of language in general, complicated by the ‘textocentrism’ of Chinese tradition and the late formalization of the literary standard. This conceptualization of poetic language ignores the deviant nature of poetic expression, thus creating the paradox of perception of language and text in contemporary Chinese poetry.