Ethical Power from “the Human Heart by Which We Live”
Sui Gang
School of English Language, Literature and Culture, Beijing International Studies
University, No.1, Dingfuzhuang (S), Chaoyang District, Beijing 100024, China
Confucius Institute, School of Journalism, Language and Communication
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK
Email: [email protected]
Abstract In a way, this article is a brief thematic summarization of the recentlyheld
Sino-British Conference on ethical literary criticism — “Ethical Power in
Chinese and English Romantic Poetry” — characterized by stimulating dialogical
approaches. It also serves as an introduction to Project P-O-E-T-R-Y as conducted
at the Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI) in
the UK, and showcases one of the Project’s significant outcomes — Julie Callan’s
forthcoming book of poetry, which is titled I Could be Chinese, and imbued with
intercultural implications. Furthermore, this article attempts to verbalize the
very source of ethical power — “the human heart by which we live” (in William
Wordsworth’s words), and to emphasize its functions to reconnect, to recollect, to
revive, to recreate, and to reshape.
Key words ethical literary criticism; ethical power; dialogical approaches; Project
P-O-E-T-R-Y; intercultural implications
Author Sui Gang (Ph.D. in literature) is professor of English at Beijing
International Studies University in China, and currently works as Chinese Director
of the Confucius Institute at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK.
His teaching and research interests focus on English Romanticism, American
Transcendentalism, creative writing, bilingual creativity, and intercultural
communication. His articles appear in journals such as Foreign Literature Studies,
and English Today (Cambridge University Press), and his book-length publications
include American Renaissance: Revelations and Influences (2014), On the
Ambiguity of Imagery and the Mutability of Self (2011), and Poetry and Fiction
Writing in English: A Guidebook (2003).
In 1807, William Wordsworth published his monumental poem “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality”, which ends with the following celebratory lines — “Thanks to the
human heart by which we live, / Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, / To
me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears” (Wordsworth 274). More than 200 years later, in 2015, the Wordsworthian
commendation of the human heart was echoed and reaffirmed enthusiastically
by a group of Chinese and British literary scholars and poets gathering in his
home country — eventually at his home village — to discuss the unique value of
literature as a mode of ethical enquiry, or “as a distinctive mode of thought about
being human” (Haines 21), to reconsider the inextricable link between the ageold
metaphor of the human heart and the contemporary jargon of “deep culture” as
“human sameness beneath difference” (Pieterse 85), and to explore in Chinese and
British literature how the ethical power as generated from the human heart would
work effectively to reconnect multiple cultures, recollect primordial images, revive
poetic traditions, recreate worthy literary critiques, and reshape today’s intercultural
trends.
1. Ethical Power as Manifested in Intercultural Communication
On the 22nd and 23rd July 2015, a Sino-British Conference on Ethical Literary
Criticism — “Ethical Power in Chinese and English Romantic Poetry” — was
jointly held in Preston and Grasmere, UK, by the Editorial Department for Foreign
Literature Studies of Central China Normal University (CCNU, China), and the
Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI, UK).
Leading the Chinese delegation was Professor Nie Zhenzhao, Founding Director of
the International Centre for Ethical Literary Criticism (CCNU), and Editor-in-Chief
of two literary journals of international renown, Foreign Literature Studies and
Forum for World Literature Studies.
Officially launched by Dr Paul Elmer, Acting Dean of the School of
Journalism, Language and Communication (UCLan), and chaired by Ms Yu
Feixia, British Director of UCLan CI, the Conference provided a platform for a
diverse group of Sino-British scholars, editors, and poets (from UCLan, Lancaster
University, York University, Edinburgh University, CCNU, Beijing International
Studies University, etc.) to take dialogical approaches to the ethical implications
of Chinese and British literary classics, to critically examine perspectives on
ethical literary criticism in relation to such issues as social narratives, personal
expressions, artistic critiques, educational purposes, and poetic creations, and to
address the importance of interdisciplinary and intercultural communication within
literary circles and beyond. There seemed to be a consensus among the Conference
participants — “Only when diverse people come together and interact can they
unify rather than separate. Unity is impossible without communication. Intercultural
communication is a necessity” (Neuliep 9). As “constructive marginal people”
“[recognizing] the significance of being ‘in between’” (Martin and Nakayama 202),
through mutually beneficial scholarly dialogues, they collaborated to “develop a
universal ethic that also grants the relativistic nature of cultures” (Samovar et al
357), basically agreeing that “it is the similarities among people and cultures that
can serve as an ethical guide” (Samovar et al 358). In this case, as in almost all the
other cases, the unifying factor once again proved to be “the human heart by which
we live” (Wordsworth 274) — the very source of ethical power.
“Communication,” in Claudio Baraldi’s opinion, “may be intercultural either
because it highlights certain cultural differences, or because it produces evidence
of hybrid cultures and transcultural realities” (70). For example, human nature,
metaphorically crystalized as the human heart by Wordsworth, and theoretically
defined by Professor Nie as “man’s moral qualities and virtues that decisively
make him human” (271), is just a transcultural inner reality of this type that can be
negotiated, modified, testified, reinterpreted, or even elevated in dynamic processes
of personal growth, historical development, and intercultural communication.
As a matter of fact, the following major principles of ethical literary criticism as
established by Professor Nie represent such an understanding of human nature, and
a firm belief in literature’s positive influence on human nature — “The fundamental
means of ethical education is literature…. Ethical selection is realized through moral
teaching, which is necessarily accomplished through literature. Literature provides
guidance for human ethical selection” (1-2).
At the Conference in Preston, Professor Nie elaborated on the ethical power
as embodied in Qu Yuan’s Li Sao and Wordsworth’s Prelude, and highlighted the
decisiveness of ethical selection; Dr Yvonne Reddick undertook an ethical analysis
of Sambo’s gravesite, and championed the human capacity to pity, to love, and
to endure; Professor Su Hui gave utterance to her comparative study on Chinese
and British nature poetry, and presented diverse ways of dramatization of a given
poet’s self-concept as an ethical being; Ms Yu Feixia philosophized Chiang Yee’s
Wordsworthian Odyssey in A Silent Traveller in Lakeland, and drew inspiration
from his ethical ordeals; Professor Luo Lianggong described the reception of
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in China, and accounted for its ethical appeals; Mr Frank
Pearson expounded his views on the relationship between science and poetry
in representations of the underground from 1700 to 1820, and created “caverns
of the mind” as metaphors of ethical significance; Associate Professor Du Juan
explained the ethical structure in Byron’s Don Juan, and articulated the specified
features of moral naturalism; Professor Sui Gang introduced Project P-O-E-TR-
Y as conducted at UCLan CI, and commented on the ethical connotations of
British students’ creative writings…. Speaking about ethical literary criticism
from multiple perspectives, all the Conference participants cherished a vision of
“global multiculture”(Pieterse 94), and benefited from one another by sharing
their agreements and disagreements in an intellectually enriching atmosphere of
intercultural communication.
Besides having fruitful dialogues at the conference venue in Preston, all the
Conference participants enjoyed the opportunity to go beyond the UCLan campus
to the Wordsworth Museum at the world-famous poet’s home village, Grasmere,
and to read, sing, and perform the selected poems from the treasure-house of world
literature there to honour not only Wordsworth, not only the Lake Poets, not only
multiple national poetic traditions, but also contemporary international endeavours
of poetic creations. Mr Jeff Cowton, Curator of the Museum, showcased the
rare manuscripts by Wordsworth, his relatives and friends, and exemplified the
ethical influence of poetry on ordinary people for personality creation by telling
touching stories taken from real life. Respectfully and passionately, the Conference
participants in turn gave reading, singing, and dancing performances of poetry in
four different languages — Chinese, English, Japanese, and Russian! Some of them
used Chinese parasols and fans as props while performing poetry. Julie Callan,
a British poetess, even played zhong ruan (a Chinese musical instrument) onsite
to dub in background music for her China-themed song-poems…. Intercultural
communication was thus made poetically attractive, and artistically charming.
2. Ethical Power as Manifested in Poetic Creation
P-O-E-T-R-Y is one of the creative projects that we have undertaken at the
Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI) since
September 2012. Among other things, it features Pluralism (P), Open-mindedness
(O), Exchange (E), Transcultural Awareness (T), Recurrent Themes/Images (R),
and Yield-oriented Education (Y).
To be specific, within the framework of Project P-O-E-T-R-Y, we UCLan
CI teachers have been teaching “Modern Chinese Literature” (including modern
Chinese poetry and fiction) in English to British students, with cultural pluralism
functioning as a major principle. It is our conviction that a knowledge of
modern Chinese literature (in English translation) is not only a help for a deeper
understanding of the modern Chinese mind, but also a help for the individual’s
ethical understanding of the universals and constants generated from the human
heart, that it is feasible to conduct a parallel study of pre-modern/modern
Chinese and Western literary texts, and integrate close reading techniques with
any other literary approaches, and that it is significant to promote transcultural
communication based on textual analysis and cultural pluralism to globalize and
localize today’s literary education at the same time. In class, therefore, we attempt
to expound the dual influence upon modern Chinese literature — traditional
Chinese literature and Western literature, take practical approaches to its stylistic
diversity and thematic depth, and develop appropriate teaching methods according
to the British students’ mentalities and aptitudes on purpose to train them to be
sensitive, imaginative, and creative — as interculturally competent communicators,
who “generally have a profound respect for many varied points of view and are
able to understand others and to communicate appropriately and effectively with
people from a variety of cultures”, and who “are able to project a sense of self that
transcends any particular cultural group” (Lustig and Koester 167).
Apart from discussing poetry in class, we UCLan CI teachers and students
have participated actively in various poetry reading and performing events at
Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, and at Harris Library, Preston, etc. For most of
us, poetry reading is writing-oriented reading, or in other words, yield-oriented
education, and poetry writing as creative output is by nature a sharing or exchange.
At the international cultural market, we exchange words, sometimes in poetic form,
just as we exchange money, in the hope that our lives as ethical beings will be
further enriched and fulfilled.
Practically speaking, for British students, it is recommendable to study
Chinese poems in the light of English poems that have similar recurrent themes and
images, cultivate their transcultural awareness, and adopt an open-minded approach
to an “aesthetics of ethics” (Beshty 12) in poetic creation, readily taking the
ethical responsibility “that comes with the acquisition of intercultural knowledge
and insights — that this educational experience is not just transformative for the
individual but should also benefit the larger society and other cultural groups in the
increasingly interdependent world” (Martin and Nakayama 37).
Ms. Julie Callan, whose new book of poetry I Could Be Chinese 1 is
forthcoming in the second half of 2015, exemplifies such an effective approach. She
had already been an accomplished poetess when she began to attend our weekly
classes of modern Chinese literature in September 2013. Since then she has been
characteristically active in classroom discussions and presentations. In particular,
she has digested the theoretical foundations of modern Chinese poetics, and is
fully acquainted with its up-to-date trend. She can apply its essential elements
creditably and justifiably in her own creative writings — as well as in her academic
research from textually/contextually comparative and contrastive perspectives. In
Chinese literature and culture, she has found another meaning system to refer to,
and another pattern of images to work with, and has ethically empowered her own
poems by making them relational, inspirational, and transformational all at once.
Julie’s poems are relational. In her forthcoming China-themed book of
poetry I Could Be Chinese, she follows a “non-detached, responsive way of
being-in-relation” (Adamson 107) to be passionately engaged in conversing with
the past, the present, and the future of China, and in vivifying typically Chinese
figures, settings, events, images, and motifs, which are well selected, presented,
and substantiated. At the same time, however, she poetically shows the wider
implications of those figures, settings, events, images, and motifs — beyond
China’s boundaries, and beyond the limits of any time. As a “multicultural person”
“who comes to grips with a multiplicity of realities” (Martin and Nakayama 201),
Julie has visited China for several times, and got in close contact with real people,
routines, and objects there; more importantly, she shapes them into poetic realities,
that is, expressive and suggestive images, and reveals in her imagistic poetry her
personal and transpersonal relations with them through interactive intercultural
experiential activities — walking the Great Wall, cruising down the Yangtze
before the completion of the dam, watching lion dances, seeing a mini-opera about
peacock lovers, contemplating on the terracotta warriors in Xi’an, strolling into the
oldest teashop in Shanghai, hugging a panda as her mantra, and so on.
Julie’s poems are inspirational. Inspired by ancient Chinese poets and their
poems, paradoxically, she has imaginatively written back to them in poetic form
so as to inspire contemporary Chinese poets and scholars to reexamine traditional
Chinese culture from fresh perspectives — “not as one thing or another, not as
a thing at all, but rather as a heuristic … a ‘tool for thinking’” (Scollon et al 3).
For instance, Julie describes Bai Juyi as a great conversationalist, a good host, a
pleasure to visit, and a comparable drinking companion in “A Great Poet”; she
reuses the Chinese form of poetry on objects (yong wu shi) to humanize what is
nonhuman, and to poetize what is seemingly unpoetic in “Stove” and “Chair”; she
re-contextualizes Chinese dramatic figures, natural scenes, and ethical dilemmas
in “Reply to the Tune ‘On the Water Clock at Night’ by Wen Tingyun,” “Reply to
‘Autumn Songs of the Hall of Abiding Faith’ by Wang Changling,” and “Reply to
the Tune ‘Audience at Golden Gate’ by Wei Zhuang.”
Julie’s poems are transformational. In the very process of writing her Chinathemed
poetry, she has experienced a dynamic self-transformation from a cultural
identity to an intercultural identity, and succeeded in keeping both, proving to
be one of those who are “able to move beyond the limits of their own cultural
experiences to incorporate the perspectives of other cultures into their own
interpersonal interactions” (Lustig and Koester 171). As Young Yun Kim observes,
“there is no contradiction between maintenance of a positive cultural identity and
the development of a flexible intercultural identity” (qtd. in Baraldi 70). In her
poem “I Could Be Chinese,” Julie says as the “I,” or the first-person speaker, “I
could sing of silkworms, / rice fields, lotus flowers. / I could tell of forbidden love
/ over tea and bamboo. / I could dance with the cranes, / run with the wind and
mountain streams. / I could tend my goats and plant my crops, / let off firecrackers
in my new house / to scare away the ghosts….” The subjunctive mood of this
poetic statement of hers does not indicate that she is Chinese, but it suffices to
acknowledge the shared humanity in what is perceived to be Chinese. Actually, in
Julie’s case, an intercultural identity never negates a cultural identity. In “Dancing
with the Pink Ladies of the Beijing Hutongs,” another poem of hers, the firstperson
speaker is keenly conscious of her own original British identity in a Chinese
local setting, but genuinely rejoices at her good fortune of having fun in an ethical
environment full of sisterly love in Beijing — “ … When the dance ends, I’m
congratulated. / My dance teacher, smiling politely, / shakes my hand. / I can’t help
but give her a hug. / Perhaps it’s too much. / But she can’t help being Chinese / and
I can’t help being British. / I have danced with the Ladies of the Beijing Hutongs /
and made the air turn pink!”
Conclusion
If it is true that “[the] greatest danger to our future is apathy” (Jane Goodall,
qtd. in Samovar et al 361), or heartlessness, it must be also true that we do need
a turn to sympathy and empathy, or simply a turn to the human heart. A turn to
the human heart is in fact a turn to ethics — “a turn to the affirmative question
of art, not art as negation, allegory or critique, but the description of an art that
operates directly upon the world it is situated in…” (Beshty 19). “Stripping away
surface differences,” according to M. K. DeGenova, “will uncover a multiplicity
of similarities: people’s hopes, aspirations, desire to survive, search for love, and
need for family — to name just a few” (qtd. in Samovar et al 359). Probably, the
metaphorical meanings of “the human heart” as celebrated in Wordsworth’s “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality” can be renewed to suggest the “oneness of the human
family” (Samovar et al 359) in an ethical sense. It is the human heart that generates
ethical power to create “good art,” and it is the “good art” thus created that in return
“provides work for the spirit” (Iris Murdoch, qtd. in Dipple 1) — for the human
heart to be consoled, saved, and hopefully uplifted.
Note
1. All the excerpts of Julie Callan’s poems are taken from her forthcoming book of poetry — I
Could Be Chinese — to be published through Culturescape Press (Preston, Lancashire, UK) at
the end of 2015.
Works Cited
Adamson, Jane. “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy.” Renegotiating
Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Eds. Jane Adamson, Richard Freadman, and
David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 84-110.
Baraldi, Claudio. “Intercultural Studies.” Hybrids, Differences, Visions: On the Study of Culture.
Eds. Andrea Borsari, Claudio Baraldi, and Augusto Carli. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group,
2011. 67-79.
Beshty, Walead. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Ethics.” Ethics. Ed. Walead Beshty.
London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. 12-20.
Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. London: Methuen, 1982.
Haines, Simon. “Deepening the Self: The Language of Ethics and the Language of Literature.”
Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory. Eds. Jane Adamson, Richard
Freadman, and David Parker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 21-38.
Lustig, Myron W. and Jolene Koester. Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication
across Cultures. 5th ed. Boston MA: Pearson Education, 2006.
Martin, Judith N. and Thomas K. Nakayama. Intercultural Communication in Contexts. 4th ed.
New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 2007.
Neuliep, James William. Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach. 5th ed. Thousand
Oaks, Calif. and London: SAGE, 2011.
Nie, Zhenzhao. Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism. Beijing: Peking UP, 2014.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. “Global Multiculture.” Hybrids, Differences, Visions: On the Study of
Culture. Eds. Andrea Borsari, Claudio Baraldi, and Augusto Carli. Aurora, Colo.: Davies
Group, 2011. 81-96.
Samovar, Larry A., Richard E. Porter, and Edwin R. McDaniel. Communication between
Cultures. 6th ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing, 2006.
Scollon, Ronald, Rodney H. Jones, and Suzanne B. K. Scollon. Intercultural Communication: A
Discourse Approach. 3rd ed. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The New Oxford Book of Romantic
Period Verse. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993. 269-274.
School of English Language, Literature and Culture, Beijing International Studies
University, No.1, Dingfuzhuang (S), Chaoyang District, Beijing 100024, China
Confucius Institute, School of Journalism, Language and Communication
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK
Email: [email protected]
Abstract In a way, this article is a brief thematic summarization of the recentlyheld
Sino-British Conference on ethical literary criticism — “Ethical Power in
Chinese and English Romantic Poetry” — characterized by stimulating dialogical
approaches. It also serves as an introduction to Project P-O-E-T-R-Y as conducted
at the Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI) in
the UK, and showcases one of the Project’s significant outcomes — Julie Callan’s
forthcoming book of poetry, which is titled I Could be Chinese, and imbued with
intercultural implications. Furthermore, this article attempts to verbalize the
very source of ethical power — “the human heart by which we live” (in William
Wordsworth’s words), and to emphasize its functions to reconnect, to recollect, to
revive, to recreate, and to reshape.
Key words ethical literary criticism; ethical power; dialogical approaches; Project
P-O-E-T-R-Y; intercultural implications
Author Sui Gang (Ph.D. in literature) is professor of English at Beijing
International Studies University in China, and currently works as Chinese Director
of the Confucius Institute at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK.
His teaching and research interests focus on English Romanticism, American
Transcendentalism, creative writing, bilingual creativity, and intercultural
communication. His articles appear in journals such as Foreign Literature Studies,
and English Today (Cambridge University Press), and his book-length publications
include American Renaissance: Revelations and Influences (2014), On the
Ambiguity of Imagery and the Mutability of Self (2011), and Poetry and Fiction
Writing in English: A Guidebook (2003).
In 1807, William Wordsworth published his monumental poem “Ode: Intimations
of Immortality”, which ends with the following celebratory lines — “Thanks to the
human heart by which we live, / Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, / To
me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears” (Wordsworth 274). More than 200 years later, in 2015, the Wordsworthian
commendation of the human heart was echoed and reaffirmed enthusiastically
by a group of Chinese and British literary scholars and poets gathering in his
home country — eventually at his home village — to discuss the unique value of
literature as a mode of ethical enquiry, or “as a distinctive mode of thought about
being human” (Haines 21), to reconsider the inextricable link between the ageold
metaphor of the human heart and the contemporary jargon of “deep culture” as
“human sameness beneath difference” (Pieterse 85), and to explore in Chinese and
British literature how the ethical power as generated from the human heart would
work effectively to reconnect multiple cultures, recollect primordial images, revive
poetic traditions, recreate worthy literary critiques, and reshape today’s intercultural
trends.
1. Ethical Power as Manifested in Intercultural Communication
On the 22nd and 23rd July 2015, a Sino-British Conference on Ethical Literary
Criticism — “Ethical Power in Chinese and English Romantic Poetry” — was
jointly held in Preston and Grasmere, UK, by the Editorial Department for Foreign
Literature Studies of Central China Normal University (CCNU, China), and the
Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI, UK).
Leading the Chinese delegation was Professor Nie Zhenzhao, Founding Director of
the International Centre for Ethical Literary Criticism (CCNU), and Editor-in-Chief
of two literary journals of international renown, Foreign Literature Studies and
Forum for World Literature Studies.
Officially launched by Dr Paul Elmer, Acting Dean of the School of
Journalism, Language and Communication (UCLan), and chaired by Ms Yu
Feixia, British Director of UCLan CI, the Conference provided a platform for a
diverse group of Sino-British scholars, editors, and poets (from UCLan, Lancaster
University, York University, Edinburgh University, CCNU, Beijing International
Studies University, etc.) to take dialogical approaches to the ethical implications
of Chinese and British literary classics, to critically examine perspectives on
ethical literary criticism in relation to such issues as social narratives, personal
expressions, artistic critiques, educational purposes, and poetic creations, and to
address the importance of interdisciplinary and intercultural communication within
literary circles and beyond. There seemed to be a consensus among the Conference
participants — “Only when diverse people come together and interact can they
unify rather than separate. Unity is impossible without communication. Intercultural
communication is a necessity” (Neuliep 9). As “constructive marginal people”
“[recognizing] the significance of being ‘in between’” (Martin and Nakayama 202),
through mutually beneficial scholarly dialogues, they collaborated to “develop a
universal ethic that also grants the relativistic nature of cultures” (Samovar et al
357), basically agreeing that “it is the similarities among people and cultures that
can serve as an ethical guide” (Samovar et al 358). In this case, as in almost all the
other cases, the unifying factor once again proved to be “the human heart by which
we live” (Wordsworth 274) — the very source of ethical power.
“Communication,” in Claudio Baraldi’s opinion, “may be intercultural either
because it highlights certain cultural differences, or because it produces evidence
of hybrid cultures and transcultural realities” (70). For example, human nature,
metaphorically crystalized as the human heart by Wordsworth, and theoretically
defined by Professor Nie as “man’s moral qualities and virtues that decisively
make him human” (271), is just a transcultural inner reality of this type that can be
negotiated, modified, testified, reinterpreted, or even elevated in dynamic processes
of personal growth, historical development, and intercultural communication.
As a matter of fact, the following major principles of ethical literary criticism as
established by Professor Nie represent such an understanding of human nature, and
a firm belief in literature’s positive influence on human nature — “The fundamental
means of ethical education is literature…. Ethical selection is realized through moral
teaching, which is necessarily accomplished through literature. Literature provides
guidance for human ethical selection” (1-2).
At the Conference in Preston, Professor Nie elaborated on the ethical power
as embodied in Qu Yuan’s Li Sao and Wordsworth’s Prelude, and highlighted the
decisiveness of ethical selection; Dr Yvonne Reddick undertook an ethical analysis
of Sambo’s gravesite, and championed the human capacity to pity, to love, and
to endure; Professor Su Hui gave utterance to her comparative study on Chinese
and British nature poetry, and presented diverse ways of dramatization of a given
poet’s self-concept as an ethical being; Ms Yu Feixia philosophized Chiang Yee’s
Wordsworthian Odyssey in A Silent Traveller in Lakeland, and drew inspiration
from his ethical ordeals; Professor Luo Lianggong described the reception of
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in China, and accounted for its ethical appeals; Mr Frank
Pearson expounded his views on the relationship between science and poetry
in representations of the underground from 1700 to 1820, and created “caverns
of the mind” as metaphors of ethical significance; Associate Professor Du Juan
explained the ethical structure in Byron’s Don Juan, and articulated the specified
features of moral naturalism; Professor Sui Gang introduced Project P-O-E-TR-
Y as conducted at UCLan CI, and commented on the ethical connotations of
British students’ creative writings…. Speaking about ethical literary criticism
from multiple perspectives, all the Conference participants cherished a vision of
“global multiculture”(Pieterse 94), and benefited from one another by sharing
their agreements and disagreements in an intellectually enriching atmosphere of
intercultural communication.
Besides having fruitful dialogues at the conference venue in Preston, all the
Conference participants enjoyed the opportunity to go beyond the UCLan campus
to the Wordsworth Museum at the world-famous poet’s home village, Grasmere,
and to read, sing, and perform the selected poems from the treasure-house of world
literature there to honour not only Wordsworth, not only the Lake Poets, not only
multiple national poetic traditions, but also contemporary international endeavours
of poetic creations. Mr Jeff Cowton, Curator of the Museum, showcased the
rare manuscripts by Wordsworth, his relatives and friends, and exemplified the
ethical influence of poetry on ordinary people for personality creation by telling
touching stories taken from real life. Respectfully and passionately, the Conference
participants in turn gave reading, singing, and dancing performances of poetry in
four different languages — Chinese, English, Japanese, and Russian! Some of them
used Chinese parasols and fans as props while performing poetry. Julie Callan,
a British poetess, even played zhong ruan (a Chinese musical instrument) onsite
to dub in background music for her China-themed song-poems…. Intercultural
communication was thus made poetically attractive, and artistically charming.
2. Ethical Power as Manifested in Poetic Creation
P-O-E-T-R-Y is one of the creative projects that we have undertaken at the
Confucius Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan CI) since
September 2012. Among other things, it features Pluralism (P), Open-mindedness
(O), Exchange (E), Transcultural Awareness (T), Recurrent Themes/Images (R),
and Yield-oriented Education (Y).
To be specific, within the framework of Project P-O-E-T-R-Y, we UCLan
CI teachers have been teaching “Modern Chinese Literature” (including modern
Chinese poetry and fiction) in English to British students, with cultural pluralism
functioning as a major principle. It is our conviction that a knowledge of
modern Chinese literature (in English translation) is not only a help for a deeper
understanding of the modern Chinese mind, but also a help for the individual’s
ethical understanding of the universals and constants generated from the human
heart, that it is feasible to conduct a parallel study of pre-modern/modern
Chinese and Western literary texts, and integrate close reading techniques with
any other literary approaches, and that it is significant to promote transcultural
communication based on textual analysis and cultural pluralism to globalize and
localize today’s literary education at the same time. In class, therefore, we attempt
to expound the dual influence upon modern Chinese literature — traditional
Chinese literature and Western literature, take practical approaches to its stylistic
diversity and thematic depth, and develop appropriate teaching methods according
to the British students’ mentalities and aptitudes on purpose to train them to be
sensitive, imaginative, and creative — as interculturally competent communicators,
who “generally have a profound respect for many varied points of view and are
able to understand others and to communicate appropriately and effectively with
people from a variety of cultures”, and who “are able to project a sense of self that
transcends any particular cultural group” (Lustig and Koester 167).
Apart from discussing poetry in class, we UCLan CI teachers and students
have participated actively in various poetry reading and performing events at
Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, and at Harris Library, Preston, etc. For most of
us, poetry reading is writing-oriented reading, or in other words, yield-oriented
education, and poetry writing as creative output is by nature a sharing or exchange.
At the international cultural market, we exchange words, sometimes in poetic form,
just as we exchange money, in the hope that our lives as ethical beings will be
further enriched and fulfilled.
Practically speaking, for British students, it is recommendable to study
Chinese poems in the light of English poems that have similar recurrent themes and
images, cultivate their transcultural awareness, and adopt an open-minded approach
to an “aesthetics of ethics” (Beshty 12) in poetic creation, readily taking the
ethical responsibility “that comes with the acquisition of intercultural knowledge
and insights — that this educational experience is not just transformative for the
individual but should also benefit the larger society and other cultural groups in the
increasingly interdependent world” (Martin and Nakayama 37).
Ms. Julie Callan, whose new book of poetry I Could Be Chinese 1 is
forthcoming in the second half of 2015, exemplifies such an effective approach. She
had already been an accomplished poetess when she began to attend our weekly
classes of modern Chinese literature in September 2013. Since then she has been
characteristically active in classroom discussions and presentations. In particular,
she has digested the theoretical foundations of modern Chinese poetics, and is
fully acquainted with its up-to-date trend. She can apply its essential elements
creditably and justifiably in her own creative writings — as well as in her academic
research from textually/contextually comparative and contrastive perspectives. In
Chinese literature and culture, she has found another meaning system to refer to,
and another pattern of images to work with, and has ethically empowered her own
poems by making them relational, inspirational, and transformational all at once.
Julie’s poems are relational. In her forthcoming China-themed book of
poetry I Could Be Chinese, she follows a “non-detached, responsive way of
being-in-relation” (Adamson 107) to be passionately engaged in conversing with
the past, the present, and the future of China, and in vivifying typically Chinese
figures, settings, events, images, and motifs, which are well selected, presented,
and substantiated. At the same time, however, she poetically shows the wider
implications of those figures, settings, events, images, and motifs — beyond
China’s boundaries, and beyond the limits of any time. As a “multicultural person”
“who comes to grips with a multiplicity of realities” (Martin and Nakayama 201),
Julie has visited China for several times, and got in close contact with real people,
routines, and objects there; more importantly, she shapes them into poetic realities,
that is, expressive and suggestive images, and reveals in her imagistic poetry her
personal and transpersonal relations with them through interactive intercultural
experiential activities — walking the Great Wall, cruising down the Yangtze
before the completion of the dam, watching lion dances, seeing a mini-opera about
peacock lovers, contemplating on the terracotta warriors in Xi’an, strolling into the
oldest teashop in Shanghai, hugging a panda as her mantra, and so on.
Julie’s poems are inspirational. Inspired by ancient Chinese poets and their
poems, paradoxically, she has imaginatively written back to them in poetic form
so as to inspire contemporary Chinese poets and scholars to reexamine traditional
Chinese culture from fresh perspectives — “not as one thing or another, not as
a thing at all, but rather as a heuristic … a ‘tool for thinking’” (Scollon et al 3).
For instance, Julie describes Bai Juyi as a great conversationalist, a good host, a
pleasure to visit, and a comparable drinking companion in “A Great Poet”; she
reuses the Chinese form of poetry on objects (yong wu shi) to humanize what is
nonhuman, and to poetize what is seemingly unpoetic in “Stove” and “Chair”; she
re-contextualizes Chinese dramatic figures, natural scenes, and ethical dilemmas
in “Reply to the Tune ‘On the Water Clock at Night’ by Wen Tingyun,” “Reply to
‘Autumn Songs of the Hall of Abiding Faith’ by Wang Changling,” and “Reply to
the Tune ‘Audience at Golden Gate’ by Wei Zhuang.”
Julie’s poems are transformational. In the very process of writing her Chinathemed
poetry, she has experienced a dynamic self-transformation from a cultural
identity to an intercultural identity, and succeeded in keeping both, proving to
be one of those who are “able to move beyond the limits of their own cultural
experiences to incorporate the perspectives of other cultures into their own
interpersonal interactions” (Lustig and Koester 171). As Young Yun Kim observes,
“there is no contradiction between maintenance of a positive cultural identity and
the development of a flexible intercultural identity” (qtd. in Baraldi 70). In her
poem “I Could Be Chinese,” Julie says as the “I,” or the first-person speaker, “I
could sing of silkworms, / rice fields, lotus flowers. / I could tell of forbidden love
/ over tea and bamboo. / I could dance with the cranes, / run with the wind and
mountain streams. / I could tend my goats and plant my crops, / let off firecrackers
in my new house / to scare away the ghosts….” The subjunctive mood of this
poetic statement of hers does not indicate that she is Chinese, but it suffices to
acknowledge the shared humanity in what is perceived to be Chinese. Actually, in
Julie’s case, an intercultural identity never negates a cultural identity. In “Dancing
with the Pink Ladies of the Beijing Hutongs,” another poem of hers, the firstperson
speaker is keenly conscious of her own original British identity in a Chinese
local setting, but genuinely rejoices at her good fortune of having fun in an ethical
environment full of sisterly love in Beijing — “ … When the dance ends, I’m
congratulated. / My dance teacher, smiling politely, / shakes my hand. / I can’t help
but give her a hug. / Perhaps it’s too much. / But she can’t help being Chinese / and
I can’t help being British. / I have danced with the Ladies of the Beijing Hutongs /
and made the air turn pink!”
Conclusion
If it is true that “[the] greatest danger to our future is apathy” (Jane Goodall,
qtd. in Samovar et al 361), or heartlessness, it must be also true that we do need
a turn to sympathy and empathy, or simply a turn to the human heart. A turn to
the human heart is in fact a turn to ethics — “a turn to the affirmative question
of art, not art as negation, allegory or critique, but the description of an art that
operates directly upon the world it is situated in…” (Beshty 19). “Stripping away
surface differences,” according to M. K. DeGenova, “will uncover a multiplicity
of similarities: people’s hopes, aspirations, desire to survive, search for love, and
need for family — to name just a few” (qtd. in Samovar et al 359). Probably, the
metaphorical meanings of “the human heart” as celebrated in Wordsworth’s “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality” can be renewed to suggest the “oneness of the human
family” (Samovar et al 359) in an ethical sense. It is the human heart that generates
ethical power to create “good art,” and it is the “good art” thus created that in return
“provides work for the spirit” (Iris Murdoch, qtd. in Dipple 1) — for the human
heart to be consoled, saved, and hopefully uplifted.
Note
1. All the excerpts of Julie Callan’s poems are taken from her forthcoming book of poetry — I
Could Be Chinese — to be published through Culturescape Press (Preston, Lancashire, UK) at
the end of 2015.
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