Living in the Failure of Time: Life Rupture in Xu Lizhi's Poetry
Abstract
This paper examines how Xu Lizhi's poetry turns time into a central site of social violence. The paper does not simply view Xu as a tragic individual case but suggests that his poems are a sign of more general temporal crisis of the new generation of migrant workers in reform-era China. Taking close reading and the idea of time poverty, work-discipline and time-space compression, the analysis reveals that the factory schedules, assembly-line rhythms and the repetitive migration of labor restructures life into pieces, which no longer sustain rest, growth, and meaningful future. Day and night in the poems of Xu are deprived of their natural order, sleep is imposed in the position of work, and youth is not the time of growth but of untimely fatigue. The paper goes on to suggest that this broken temporality creates an identity crisis, where migrant workers are lured into the city as a source of labor force and excluded as a part of the social fabric. Xu Lizhi's poetry is therefore read as a testimony to the failure of time itself, that is, a condition in which time no longer enables life to unfold but instead becomes a medium of exhaustion, suspension, and rupture.
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