Politics of Punctuation, Poetics of Ambiguity: Rethinking Punctuation Through Modern Chinese Poetry

This essay examines the formative period of modern Chinese poetry from the 1910s to the 1930s. These years saw the surge of Western-style punctuation in Chinese poems. The imported marks were embraced by the first generation of modern Chinese poets as a device for disambiguation. The ensuing generation of Chinese modernist poets, however, repudiated punctuation to recover ambiguities. This essay traces the shifting uses and significations of punctuation to foreground the contestations on ambiguity and subjectivity that shaped the changing (and often conflicting) conceptions of modernity in Chinese poetry. It contends that Chinese poets’ vacillation between punctuation and unpunctuation was not merely a result of foreign influences but also an active response to the aesthetic and political predicaments of early twentieth-century China. The essay thus presents a twofold intervention into the relationship between punctuation and modernity: in offering a new lens on Chinese poetic modernity, the essay also utilizes modern Chinese poetry to defamiliarize the ubiquitous, seemingly universal punctuation marks originating from Western languages. The goal of the essay is to rediscover the expressive potentialities of these marks and the ideological baggage they carried in different yet interconnected literary contexts.