In recent decades, highly heterogeneous literary and artistic articulations harking back to China's classical past have gained increasing currency in the global Sinophone space and cyberspace. Instead of dismissing them as “fetishisms” or authenticating them as “Chinese traditions,” I propose “Sinophone classicism” as a new critical expression for conceptualizing this diverse array of articulations. It refers to the appropriation, redeployment, and reconfiguration of cultural memories evoking Chinese aesthetic and intellectual traditions for local, contemporary, and vernacular uses, by agents identified or self-identified as Chinese. This essay proposes a subjective, intimate, and reflexive way to experience an individual's culturally acquired “Chineseness” that is temporal, mnemonic, and often mediated by digital media. It joins recent scholarly efforts to dismantle the view of “Chinese modernity” as a monocentric and homogenous experience by refocusing on classicism as a kind of “antimodern modernism.” It also joins the post-Eurocentric turn in global academia by hinting at a future of “global classicisms.”
Žižek, in turn, is inspired by Hegel's notion absoluter Gegenstoss. 3 Given the accessibility of Su Shi's biography in any academic language, I will not give an account of his life here. His first English biography, The Gay Genius, was written by Lin Yutang and published in 1947. Since then multiple biographies, dissertations, and monographs on Su Shi and translations of his poetry have appeared in the English language. For an account of his life, an interested reader can start with George C. Hatch's long entry "Su Shih" in Sung Biographies (ed. Herbert Franke. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1976) and progress eventually to Ronald C. Egan's extensive Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of
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