Memesis and Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Abstract

This chapter proposes a conception of world literature based around the idea of distribution. Advancing the idea of memes, it rescales the notion of translation into a more inclusive rubric for imagining the multimodal trajectories of works as their semiotic potentialities are unraveled into assemblages of myriad texts. Using examples from concrete poetry in translations and remediations of contemporary Chinese poetry on new media, it argues that an enlarged notion of translation is needed in respect of world literature. The crosslingual, intersemiotic, and transmedial instantiations of contemporary Chinese writing demonstrate that world literature must take into account the potentialities of translation beyond language as such, that is: where a work may distribute itself across linguistic as well as modal and medial repertoires to herald a new global literary imaginary.