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"Modernist" culture is a complex constellation of cultural phenomena-the qualities of economic goods based upon desire rather than need, aesthetics and experiential values, horizons of possible ways to understand the world, and social formations-that effect and assign value to human experience. The growing imbrication of consumerism with poetics can be seen both in the poetry ofthe late twentieth-century Chinese poet, Mang Ke (..., 1950-) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and their respective poetic movements: menglong (...; "misty" or "obscure") poetry in China in the late twentieth century and the poetry of Imagism in the early twentieth century in the West. Juxtaposing these poets and movements shows that the spirit of modernism, once caught within material, historical and economic phenomena, does not belong to any particular culture. Its conjunction of relations among things creates the conditions of sensibilities for emerging affects imbricated with new modalities of feeling, understanding, and social organization.
Keywords: Mang Ke / Ezra Pound / Imagism / consumerism / affect theory
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When examining late twentieth-century Chinese poetry (and particularly the poetry of Mang Ke [1950-]) in relation to early twentieth-century Imagism (notably in Ezra Pound), one should consider the changing notions and experiences of feeling or affect as they are provoked and expressed in poetry. In many ways, it is appropriate to do so now in the twenty-first century because twentieth-century Chinese poetry warrants re-reading and re-thinking in the light of the enormous transformations in China in the last generation. During this period, beginning under Deng Xiaoping, who studied in France during the time of Western cultural modernism, China has faced transformations of social life, individual and collective experience, and material abundance comparable to similar world-changing transformations that faced Western Europe and the United States during the long turn of the twentieth century. In the last generation many scholars have noted that Western literary modernism was a social and epistemological event as well as an aesthetic transformation, and the same emergence of a new order of cultural values can be discerned in late twentieth-century China.1
Before we begin our analysis, we want to offer readers unfamiliar with Mang Ke a sense of emotion and affect that can be found in his later poetry. He begins the "Overture"...