Chinese Labor Poetics - Rhythmanalysis & Zheng Xiaoqiong's Migrant Worker Poetics
Between Iron and Flesh: Rhythmanalysis in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Migrant Worker Poetics
Thesis: This paper situates Lefebvre’s theory of rhythmanalysis within the realities of post-reform China to show how Zheng Xiaoqiong’s work exposes the limits of his model when applied to the female migrant-worker body. Zheng’s poetry and ethnographic writing enact a form of rhythmanalysis that both documents the violent disruptions of industrial labor and constructs a collective memory for women workers. In doing so, her work extends rhythmanalysis into a practice of solidarity and social witnessing.
Dialogues with the Departed: Mourning & Literary Philosophy
The Resurrected Consciousness: Negotiating the Self & Other in Plath and Li
Thesis: Through a comparative reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, this paper examines how literature constructs “dialogues with the dead” to rethink the boundaries between self and other. Plath stages a Hegelian struggle for recognition, transforming the suicidal subject from an objectified Other into an agentic Self through performative resurrection. Drawing on Levinas’s philosophy of alterity, Li reimagines mourning as an ethical relation—one that honors silence, irreducibility, and the unbridgeable distance between selves. Together, the texts illuminate how posthumous voice becomes a space where grief, agency, and the limits of understanding are held in tension.