Opus Magnum grants fund homoerotic verse and Chinese internet poetry studies

Two humanities scholars at Goethe University Frankfurt have each secured an “Opus Magnum” grant from the Volkswagen Foundation, freeing them from university teaching obligations for eighteen months so they can devote themselves entirely to lyric poetry. Romance scholar Christine Ott will examine homoerotic poetic communities of the early modern period, while Sinologist Zhiyi Yang will research the evolution of Chinese poetry in the internet age. The funding works by providing a replacement for their teaching duties, allowing both researchers to concentrate on their respective major book projects for the duration of the grant.

Ott, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe University, is preparing a book titled “Michelangelo and His Brothers: Homoerotic Poetry in the Early Modern Period.” Until now, the love poems that the painter and sculptor Michelangelo Buonarroti addressed to young men were considered unique, and his poetry was regarded as the first major collection of texts in the vernacular to articulate such forbidden feelings. In an era when homosexual acts could be punished by death, there was ample reason to keep such inclinations secret. Ott intends to demonstrate in her forthcoming book that Michelangelo was by no means the only man to take this risk. Drawing on previously unexplored sources from fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy, she aims to show that poetic communities in which relationships between men played a role had formed roughly 150 years before Michelangelo.

“I am interested in the function of these poems and how they were received and passed down,” Ott explains. Beyond the analytical monograph, she plans to publish an edition of approximately 100 selected short texts, making the material accessible for further study. She is already convinced that the concepts of masculinity contained in these poems will prove surprisingly relevant, a suggestion that connects the project’s literary-historical focus to questions about gender and desire that remain contested today.

Yang’s project addresses Chinese poetry from a more recent era and aims to correct what she sees as a flawed narrative in current literary scholarship. Until now, literary scholarship assumed that traditional Chinese poetry, characterized by strict rhythm and meter, had been displaced by formally and linguistically free poetry starting in 1917, in the wake of the New Culture Movement. Yang is convinced that traditional poetry continued to be practiced even after that supposed displacement. Moreover, since the late 1990s, the rapid development of the Chinese-language internet both inside and outside China has revitalized the writing of poems in classical genres according to pre-modern rules. Non-professionals began imitating traditional forms, in stark contrast to the official poetry of literary modernism, and this eventually led to an avant-garde movement of lyrical classicism that combined classical tradition with literary modernism.

“It is a kind of chimerical, rare, magical animal, born in chat rooms and bulletin board systems (BBS),” Yang describes. Tech-savvy young poets outside the literary establishment founded a new direction online with like-minded peers, just as AI-generated verses began to threaten their sense of originality and authenticity. According to Yang, this poetry is strictly classical in meter, modern in language, modernist in aesthetics, and subversive in ideology. The encrypted criticism and subversion it contains, however, are now threatened by the censorship capabilities of artificial intelligence, adding a contemporary political dimension to a project that might otherwise appear purely literary-historical.

Yang also plans a trip to China as preparatory work for her book. She states that it is essential to establish direct contact with poets rather than interacting with them solely via the internet, a methodological choice that reflects how much of the movement she studies originated in online spaces. Taken together, the two projects show the range of work the Opus Magnum funding makes possible: one reaches back to Renaissance Italy to reframe the origins of vernacular homoerotic poetry, while the other traces a living classical tradition through chat rooms, bulletin boards, and the emerging pressures of machine-generated text and AI-enabled censorship.

Subject of Research: Opus Magnum grants supporting research on early modern homoerotic poetry and classical Chinese poetry in the internet age

Article Title: Modern poetry in China and homoerotic texts prior to Michelangelo

Article References: Modern poetry in China and homoerotic texts prior to Michelangelo. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: Opus Magnum, Volkswagen Foundation, Goethe University Frankfurt, Christine Ott, Zhiyi Yang, Michelangelo, homoerotic poetry, early modern period, Chinese poetry, internet poetry, lyrical classicism, literary history