“Misunderstanding” Western Modernism The Menglong Movement

Abstract I have in the last two chapters focused on the manifestations of Occidentalism in such popular media as television and the professional theater in post-Mao China. Yet the same phenomenon can also be traced in media and traditions that are anything but popular. Consider, for example, the case of recent lyric poetry and its relationship to Western literary texts. Ezra Pound’s Orientalism, or his “discovery” of the Chinese ideograph, thought to have resulted from a “misunderstanding” of Chinese language and culture, is a familiar story in the West. What has not been widely known, however, is the twin story of the reception of Pound’s modernist poetics in post-Mao China and the way in which it has paradoxically affected the rise and fall of menglong poetry. This chapter is devoted to an examination of a recent Occidentalist “misunderstanding” of Poundian modernist poetics by Chinese poets and critics that would surprise Pound and Ernest Fenollosa. I will defend what might seem at first a surprising claim: that Chinese literary production of the 1980s-and particularly the critical debate on menglong poetry-is based on and conditioned by an Occidentalism and a “misunderstanding” of Western modernism that is as profound as its better-known Western Orientalist counterpart. From the perspective to be sketched here, we will see that it is impossible to speak of contemporary Chinese literature and its reception in the 1980s without taking into serious account the indispensable role that, as a form of ideology in the voice of a counter