Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.2, 2019

 

Somatic Poetics: A Theoretical Schema Based on the Concept of Body

(Abstract)

 

Wang Xiaohua

 

Ever since the 1990s, the subjectivity of Chinese academic research has been accentuated with more and more original discourses. These initiatives have been developed to be concrete theoretical constructions in the 21st century. This paper attempts to introduce somatic studies into the study of poetics in order to construct an original scheme of somatic poetics, which includes: (1) “body-action-object” as the basic structure for original poetry; (2) somatic imagination as the motive for poetic formation; (3) the stimulation of physical experience as the primary purpose for poetic production. An interpretation of this scheme will justify the following propositions: (1) the subject of poetic creation is the sensitive, proactive and productive body; (2) the poetic effect originates from and is sustained through the bodily action (both real and imaginative); (3) poetics will ultimately be actualized as the poetics that is rooted in body. Out of these comes a somatic poetics that returns to the physical-living world, which transcends the Western prevalent research paradigm that takes body as the object. Somatic poetics shows the path for reconstructing poetics.