中文與跨文化健康人文學

Individual and Well Being: The Representations of War Trauma in Classical Chinese Poetic Tradition 

Funded by Initiation Grant for Faculty Niche Research Areas (FNRA-IG), HKBU (24 months, HK$ 934,968)

Chinese dynastic history alternated between periods of stability and growth and those of civil war, some of which lasted for decades and caused widespread destruction to all levels of society. Poetic accounts about the experiences of war shared many themes with other literary genres – the horrors of death and destruction, the pain of loss and displacement, human vulnerability, and nostalgia of the past – but through lyrical voices and highly stylized language that set them apart from prose accounts. Though the periods of war were intermittent, wartime poetry was a part of a broader continuous poetry tradition where earlier texts and literary conventions played a role in shaping the poetic accounts of war, while wartime poetry, in turn, was an important factor in pivoting new developments in the history of poetry.

Poetry in the Chinese classical tradition, including both shi and ci, has properties that make them unique grounds to explore the interactions between trauma and literary language. The genres give pre-eminence to unite the emotive, the sensory, and the rational dimensions of experience in highly stylized language, mediated by the poetic subject. Thus, Chinese poetry about the experience of war and its aftermaths pushes the limits of literary trauma theory and test its fundamental assumptions.

The current project differs from past scholarship by treating wartime poetry as a genre from the perspective of psychic trauma, which allows us to pursue our inquiry on the cross section between psychoanalytic, literary, and cultural studies down the line of literary historical perspective. We will focus on the poetry from the fall of the Northern Song, the Yuan-Ming transition, and the Taiping Rebellion. In each of these periods, we ask the following questions on the relationship between war, trauma, and literature:

1. What are the ways in which poetry-writing contribute to psychic healing and regrowth, both individually and on the communal level?
2. How has the traumatic experience impacted the writing of poetry, and in turn, if traumatic experience is made accessible and communicable through literary language, to what extent and in what ways does the medium affect the representation and transmission of trauma?
3. What material effect would the choice of poetic genre – along with its set of literary conventions and expectations – have on writing of traumatic experience?
4. How has the writing of trauma in each of these periods influenced the development of poetry?