Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, 2022This dissertation is an investigation of three primary issues in the writing of the Syrian male poet Nizar Qabbani and the Chinese female poet Zhai Yongming: the relationship between the author and reader, the combination of life writing with poetry, and the articulation of a feminine voice from a marginalized space. While I rely on some of their prose works to better understand their views of gender and poetry, my primary focus for comparison are the two poetry collections: Qabbani’s The Journal of an Indifferent Woman (1968) and Zhai’s Jing’an Village (1985). During his diplomatic stay in Beijing, Qabbani wrote The Journal in the form of a diary depicting the voice of a frustrated, rebelling Arab woman condemning the suppression of women’s rights in the Arab tradition. On the other hand, Zhai’s Jing’an Village contains twelve poems named after the twelve lunar year months and is the epitome of her two-year life as a rusticated youth. Thematically, The Journal and Jing’an embody the authors’ misplaced personal experiences as an outsider in a foreign country or a strange village. In form, these two collections are both poems disguised in the format of life writing. This innovative form combines two less studied genres, i.e., poetic diary and verse biography. With an interdisciplinary and cross-genre methodology, I use Arabic, Chinese, and Western literary theories, such as psychoanalytic criticism and Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic judgment, to demonstrate the transportability of the feminine voice in the text. My purpose is to use Qabbani’s and Zhai’s poems, as well as related theories, to testify that a feminine text is not necessarily written by a female author. The scarce differences in the texts due to the gender differences between Qabbani and Zhai are overcome by their same ambition to produce a feminine text that best illustrates women’s sufferings in a patriarchal society.