Literary Studies #

Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics #

I was, quite happily, surprised by the quality of Owen’s argumentation and philological rigor. However, one point I kept on returning to was the idea of 機 (ji, moment of change). Throughout, Owen sticks to an ontology of presence—to borrow Derrida’s phrase—rather than of dynamicism, which would be closer to the Chinese cosmology. Patterns exist, to be sure; yet each pattern is preceded temporally by a moment of change. (I suspect, at least, that) the instability of the pattern—the tentativeness of each moment of recognition—is crucial to “traditional Chinese poetry and poetics.” And it is on this front that Owen does not give the Chinese poets their due.