Here I question the view that Chinese lyric is a unique (Non-Western) form of expression by “deconstructing” the models of poetic meaning of three Chinese critics. Thus while Wai Lim Yip holds for a purely “natural” poetic meaning beyond language, I suggest that this is an impossible (selfcontradictory) claim. While Pauline Yu sees Chinese lyric as a “contextual response’ to the immediate environment, I show that the monistic, “immanent” world-view she presupposes reveals itself on closer examination to be a dualistic view. And while Wong Kin-yuen distinguishes Chinese “metaphor”—by stressing the metonymic, carrying-across force of the phor—from Western meta (“beyond”)-phor, 1 emphasize the common linguistic ground of metonym and metaphor. My argument in each case is based on a view of language as open-ended, inclusive but indeterminate, a signifying network grounded in its own self-difference. Thus I conclude that all poetic models are finally equivalent because inevitably grounded in a language itself ‘‘un-grounded.”

lyric, aporia, meaning, metaphor, model, metonym, immanence, self-difference, transcendence, un-grounded