Cheng Yu-yu (National Taiwan University)

Once Chinese poetry becomes “modern poetry,” its so-called modernity must be discussed in the context of the modernity of “Chinese language” itself. From the late Qing and early Republican periods on, when confronted with the invasion of such things as new lexicon, new academic disciplines, alphabetic languages, and English grammar, the Chinese language, Chinese characters, and the cultural tradition to which it belongs have never ceased responding to and reflecting upon such foreign forces. In examining this “modernizing” process of Chinese poetry, which progressed from the question of “how to speak to the new world” to that of “how to reestablish a new relationship with the world,” one cannot overlook the new ways of thinking of the Chinese language that emerged from and were constructed by various disciplines, including grammatology, philology, phonology, psychology, and rhetoric studies.