Crisis-Structures of the Lyrical Self: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese Thơ Mới and Western Modernist Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1511.06Keywords:
lyrical self, crisis-structure, Thơ Mới, modernist poetry, symbolic fragmentation, comparative literatureAbstract
This study investigates the emergence and fragmentation of the modern lyrical self across two structurally analogous poetic traditions: Vietnamese Thơ Mới (New Poetry, 1932–1945) and Western modernist poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on existentialist philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and cultural semiotics, it develops the theoretical model of “crisis-structure” to conceptualize the lyrical subject as a fractured, ontologically destabilized construct shaped by global disruptions to symbolic order. Through close readings of seminal works by Xuân Diệu, Hàn Mặc Tử, Baudelaire, and T. S. Eliot, the analysis demonstrates that the lyrical self in both traditions ceases to function as a coherent center of meaning. Instead, it emerges as a site of rupture—where symbolic disintegration, linguistic instability, and metaphysical absence intersect. While Thơ Mới preserves a residual yearning for transcendence through love, religion, or aesthetic idealism, Western modernist poetry—particularly Eliot’s—pursues a more radical dismantling of redemptive frameworks, employing irony and intertextual fragmentation as existential strategies. Rather than framing the crisis of subjectivity in Thơ Mới as derivative of Western modernism, the study contends that both traditions constitute structurally convergent responses to globalized ontological upheaval. Within this framework, poetry functions not as ornament but as a philosophical medium that interrogates the very conditions of selfhood in modernity.
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