(working title; book manuscript in progress)

Since the turn of the millennium, the rapid development of the Sinophone internet in and beyond China has given fresh impetus and revitalized the writing of poetry in classical genres. Despite its marginalization by the institutionalized discourse of literary modernity established since the New Culture Movement, this type of poetry never ceased to be written and read, and even served specific ideological agendas during the Maoist era and the post-Maoist cultural thaw. The cyberspace, however, has enabled the birth and growth of a kind of avant-garde movement in lyric classicism, a “bastard child” (in the deliberately provocative sense) of the classical traditions and literary modernism. Like a unicorn, it is a chimerical, rare, and magical creature born in chatrooms and BBS (bulletin board system) forums. Its advent responded to a critical historic moment, when tech-savvy young women and men outside of the literary establishment found their peer groups for the first time to explore novel possibilities that would rejuvenate ancient poetic genres marginalized by the institutions of modern Chinese literature, just when AI “verse machines” were starting to threaten their sense of originality and authenticity. Like the visual arts, as Walter Benjamin keenly observed, must abandon verisimilitude to respond to the challenges of the photographic lens, classicist poetry must now abandon routine sonic, linguistic, and imagistic combinations that follow the rule of probability easily grasped by a learning machine. The result is a poetry that is strictly classical in prosody, contemporary in vocabulary,  modernist in aesthetics, and often subversive in ideology. I explore the complicated interactive dynamics between the semiotic functioning of the digital media and the semantic memory of China’s lyric traditions. I argue that the development of this poetics is intimately tied to material and transmedia factors. While the technological affordances of the BBS-era provided the critical digital infrastructure for the formation of this form of poetry, it is now threatened by the transition of reading interface from the personal computer to the smartphone, by the capitalist consolidation of Chinese cyber-literary platforms, and by the tightening grip of digital censorship increasingly empowered by artificial intelligence. I will further investigate questions of gendered lyric voices and of digital reading.

The four poets investigated in this book are pioneers of digital classicist poetry and are reacting to the winds and tides of this new marketplace of literary economy in their own unique and unyielding ways. They were chosen not only for their creativity and uniqueness, but also for their adamant refusal to compromise or to instrumentalize their poetry, for either ideological or commercial interests. They have paid, and are still paying, the price for remaining outsiders to literary establishments, in China and beyond. They are well-known, however, among Chinese classicist poetry writing circles by their sobriquets: Lizilizilizi 李子栗子梨子 (“Plum Chestnut Pear”; hereafter Lizi), Dugu-shiroushou 獨孤食肉獸 (“Lone Carnivore”; hereafter Dugu), Tianxuezhai 添雪齋 (“Studio of Cascading Snow”; hereafter Tianxue), and Xutang 噓堂 (“Hall of Vital Breath”). This book tells their stories. It is about where they stand in the long river of Chinese poetry, simultaneously resisting the emerging phantoms of Chinese cultural nationalism and the homogeneity of the global digital literature. It is also about the technological change that helped launch another “subtle revolution” (borrowing the term from Jon von Kowallis), which has breathed fresh life into the millennia-old Chinese lyric tradition, while leaving a trail of devastation on a barbed wire landscape.

At the end of this book, I will first transcribe an intriguing conversation with ChatGPT before asking whether their poetry offers a new opportunity for us to reflect on the meaning and definition of “world literature” in the digital age. Today, all cultural memories appear to have become a “standing-reserve” (in Heidegger’s words), ready to be exploited by artificial intelligence as “training materials.” Digital classicism—a kind of recreation and reimagination of a culture’s classical past—thus faces bifurcating paths: it can regurgitate or recycle worn clichés, with the assistance of generative AI, reaffirming cultural identities for nativist or nationalist agendas, or creatively redeploy the past as a kind of “anti-modern modernism” (in Milan Kundera’s words) that challenges the notion of perpetual progress as the new status quo. An intensive investigation of lyric classicisms in the digital era thus proposes to reexamine the temporal movement in literature not as a linear progression from the past to the present and further into the future, but rather as eternal reversals to find the roots of linguistic creativity from a repertoire of cultural memories. In the age of Instapoetry and AI-translation, when “passports” that enable literary works to travel across borders are cheaper than ever, we need to start reconsidering untranslatability not as a hurdle to, but as an affordance for, reinventing a kind of “world literature” that worlds (welten in Heidegger’s term), that opens up new horizons for our linguistic being in the digital world.