Sinophone verses from lyrical (e)scapes: an account of poetics and poïesis in distress
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Simona Gallo [1]
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[1] University of Milan
University of Milan
Milán, Italia
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- Localización: Altre Modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, ISSN-e 2035-7680, Nº. 28, 2022, págs. 286-302
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The initial outburst of the pandemic, in early 2020, forced China and the rest of the world into seclusion, anxiety, social alienation. In the Sinosphere, a human response to the aporia of isolation is the lyrical production, a prosperous literary activity through which the individual gives shape to a collective consciousness.
The present paper examines a collection of Sinophone verses sprung from the Covid-19 threat and dismay, as a psychic necessity to re-organize the perception of the outer world. Specifically, it studies a body of fifty-two poems composed by twelve lyrical Sinophone voices, published in Chinese in a spring number of the respected literary journal Jintian 今天. This investigation primarily focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, and psychological value of a lyrical polyphony embodied by unchained Sinophone voices, which sing against the background of a common predicament. In parallel, it reads the collection as a collective memory and a cultural repository, engendered by a narrative projection of experience: to that end, it combines a narratological approach with the observation of certain lyrical features of a “poetics of distress”.
