Recite and Refuse

"'Recite and refuse' is a genre study of contemporary mainland Chinese prose poetry that focuses on work produced after 1949. It reads prose poetry through its compositional processes, primary among which are the acts of recitation (the re-performance of prior texts) and refusal (the assertion of difference from prior art). These processes have their origin in the orthodox socialist poetics of the Hundred Flowers Movement, during which poets ventriloquized and subjectivized official party prose; over the course of several decades, they have migrated uneasily into the avant-garde, in which artists use recitation and refusal as a way to make prose something quite different from the trustworthy, transparent literary form it is sometimes assumed to be. The book also serves as a small anthology of translations: it includes pieces by Ke Lan, Guo Feng, Liu Zaifu, Xi Chuan, among others, and contains the first complete English version of the intricate, epic prose poem 'Hanging coffin' by Ouyang Jianghe"--