Comparative Poetics in Chinese

Summary

Abstract: In their article “Comparative Poetics in Chinese” Xiaolu Wang and Yan Liu describe the development of comparative poetics by sketching major publications and the general institutional situation of the discipline. Wang and Liu suggest that comparative work remains impulsive although dynamic. Like other fields in the humanities, the study of poetics—comparative or other—in Chinese is no longer traditional in terms of a discursive form, but copied from the West. Although the scholarly achievements in the field within the past thirty years are considerable, problems remain including the issue of translation of Western theories and the approaching foreign scholarship with narrow minded nationalism. Wang's and Liu's postulate that the role scholars working in Chinese ought to knowledge from the ways of how the issues and questions studied would cross cultural boundaries.

Poetics (shixue), like most of the frequently used literary terms with a long history, does not necessarily carry a strict definition. In both China and the West, poetics has long been used as a technical term referring to different approaches to composition, interpretation, and the exegesis play in the humanities in general and in comparative poetics in particular. According to Webster's New World Dictionary of American Language, poetics is “the theory or structure of poetry” (1100), whereas in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics it is defined as “theory of literature,” theory of literary discourse,” and “theory of poetry” (930).