In Dialectics of Spontaneity, Zhiyi Yang examines the aesthetic and ethical theories of Su Shi, the primary poet, artist, and statesman of Northern Song.
Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue reexamination ofWang's impact on cultural memory of WWII in China. In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang's lyric
"Stopping" and "seeing" are sometimes referred to as the yin and yang of Buddhist meditation—complementary twin halves of a unified whole. In essence, "stopping and seeing" refers to stopping delusion
