Friday, February 7, 2014

Presenter: Emily Goedde, Comparative Literature
Faculty Discussant: David Porter, English and Comparative Literature

Abstract:
“The Humming of Radios, the Explosion of Bombs: The Search for Everyday Sounds in Poetry from Kunming During the War of Resistance”

What were the effects of air raids on the sensorium? How did the sonic intensity of air warfare, joined with the very real danger of the events themselves, provoke an existential crisis within those who experienced it? In this paper I explore these questions through close readings of two poems written in Kunming during the first half of the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-1945), when the city was frequently bombed: Mu Dan’s “Lyric from an Air Raid Shelter” (1939) and Zhao Ruihong’s “Portrait of Kunming: Spring 1940” (1940). Both poems are meditations upon how experiences of ordinary sounds are transformed by wartime violence, and they demonstrate the ways in which pre-war poetic language is no longer adequate.

Although scholars such as Kirk Denton, Xin Ning and Jianyi Mi have examined shifts in the relationship between Chinese writers’ wartime identities and the literary modes in which they wrote, there has yet to be an examination of the ways in which direct experience with violence, particularly air warfare, changed writers understanding of their subjectivity and compelled them to approach their work differently. I argue that Mu Dan and Zhao Ruihong’s poems trace how violence, particularly sonic violence, is a decisive element in their changing poetics. The poems underline the need for a transformation in both poetic form and in the nature of lyric poetry itself.

Bio:

Emily Goedde is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where she is researching Chinese poetry from the 1930s and 40s. She received an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, and her work has been published in 91st Meridian, The Iowa Review, eXchanges and Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review as well as in the anthology Jade Mirror: Women Poets of China (White Pine Press, 2013).