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A.J. Carruthers reviews Experimental Chinese Literature by Tong King Lee

Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics

by Tong King Lee

Brill

ISBN: 978-90-04-29338-0

Reviewed by A.J. CARRUTHERS

 

Debates have been raging, in avant-garde studies, over the terms that we might deploy to describe such cultural productions and the longevity of such terms. How do we name unusual literatures in the near present? “Avant-garde” or “neo-avant-garde,” or “avant-garde” and the “contemporary experimental”? Does the historical specificity of the vanguard then preclude usages outside of this, and if so, does “experimental” then sound better historically; the history of experimental literature then to be figured as including many historical moments and contexts rather than stemming from one, what sometimes, and irritatingly gets called the “historic avant-gardes” (as if any other vanguard was not also historic)?

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