The Personal is Political: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Chinese and American Confessional Poetry

This article looks into the making of a Chinese confessional poetics, especially of a discourse of women's poetry, in interaction with American confessional poetry, as a cross-cultural literary construct. I am arguing that both Chinese and American confessional poetry feature both as aesthetic categories in particular intracultural and intercultural contexts and as manifestations of personal politics. American and Chinese confessional poetry can indeed be read as a showcase of politicized self-expression at odds with established powers. The author is particularly interested in how the confessional discourse relates to the acts of self-positioning, self-defining, self-articulating, and self-interpreting and in how these Chinese and American confessional poets wrestle with politics to carve out a discursive space of their own, on the margins of the sociopolitical domain.