Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on New Findings in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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From the “Symbolic Real” to the “Real Real”: On Taiwan New-Generation Poetry
YANG, Xiaobin
ABSTRACT:
“New-generation” poets, born in the 1980s and the 1990s, have recently emerged as a major phenomenon in Taiwan’s literary world. This paper examines, based on Žižek’s Lacanian theoretical perspective, the aesthetic trends of the new-generation poetry which can be characterized as the “Real Real,” as opposed to the “Symbolic Real” that may define the middle-generation poetry (Xia Yu, Chen Li, Tang Juan, etc.). That is to say, new-generation poetry shifts attention from playing with ruins of language to expressing mental and bodily affects of trauma. If middle-generation poetry focuses on revealing the ambiguous or chaotic core within modes of signification, new-generation poetry turns shattered subjective discourses into the horror of symptoms, yet still closely linked to jouissance. I will discuss and analyze poems by Liao Ren, Xiao Ling, Chen Changyuan, Cao Yubo, Zheng Wanrong, Zhang Shiqin, Chai Bosong, Pan Jiaxin, Xia Xia, and Huang Xi.
keywords: Taiwan poetry, new-generation, the Real, Žižek, trauma