Thank you very much, Erling, for this friendly and nice introduction.

And thank you everybody here present in the room and everybody who follows online for

joining this lecture.

I'm very much looking forward to the lecture and I'm very grateful for the time I have

been granted to spend here at EKGF in Erlangen, a time that I think is very precious to me.

As I, as Erling already mentioned, just have finished a manuscript on one of the most outstanding,

well, neoclassicists in the Chinese cyberspace.

I will mention him toward the end of this lecture, so we will read some poems or two

poems actually written by Li Zi.

So after having completed this work now, this is a great opportunity for me to go on with

that research because I will actually do that, what I would have not dreamt of still a couple

of years ago, let's say four years ago, before I even started with research on new old style

poetry on the China net or neoclassicist poetry.

Now it has become a new field for me and a field that is so far largely unexplored.

There are of course a couple of colleagues who are working on the same topic from diverse

angles and I will mention them during this lecture.

But let me first give you a brief sketch of the lecture I'm going to read now.

Of course, as the topic is well basically unknown to most of those who are listening

now, I have to make a sort of basic introduction into it.

That will be the beginning and I prepared this part quite thoroughly.

The introduction also will include some considerations about ways how to find also a theoretical

report to the, sometimes it is called phenomena, let's call it also a phenomena now of neoclassicist

cyber poetry in China because when we as people from outside the Chinese communicational space

basically try to find the right approach to this new sort of poetry which appeared first

about 20 years ago, then well of course translation is something we are basically lacking there

are basically no translations and this is something we have to work on and I'm also

doing that.

A part of this lecture will also present you with translations, not only my own ones but

also by other researchers into English and actually for those who are going to participate

in the reading session tomorrow, I have already prepared a handout containing also lots of

translations by myself into German language so translation is the one thing we need at

least as far as I think about the issue but the other thing is also of course concepts,

we need concepts, ideas how to fathom this so-called phenomena of neoclassicist cyber

poetry.

As you see for this lecture I have chosen the concepts of mankind and existence.

Because during my readings in neoclassicist cyber poetry I found that these are concepts

that are of course maybe because they are modern concepts, concepts of the 20th century

that are often present, not immediately present in a literal sense, not as words, sometimes

also this is the case but as we are talking about poetry these concepts are often present

in the imagery, in the language of the poetry and I'm going to try to show you today how

this can be understood and in order to do so I will now start with the first part of

this lecture, the second excuse me let me say that will very closely deal with the selection

of texts so in that case in the second part I will speak free and while in the first part

I have prepared a particular text for the lecture.

Now I will now start with giving you a survey on how the research on neoclassicist cyber

poetry actually has started.

So in 2009 Xiaofei Tian from Harvard University has published an article titled Muffled Dialect

Spoken by Green Fruit, subtitled an alternative history of modern Chinese poetry.

In this article Tian presents the reader with three different poets of three different

generations.