Some scholars, most prominently Joan DeJean, have argued that the modern novel was created by the self-empowerment of French women writers of the 17th century. A particular characteristic of these novels – such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s – is that, regardless of (male) poetic regulations, they openly create fictional, even allegorical worlds in which the characters are equally openly factual persons behind fictional masks.

Conversely, the various 19th century concepts of realism – realism, naturalism, the psychological novel, not only in France but also in their European counterparts – create worlds that correspond as closely as possible to the empirical, but in which openly fictional characters operate, that, however, develop such a force that they seem to materialize – in accordance with the maxim “Life imitates Art”, as Oscar Wilde wrote.

Against the backdrop of the female “Tender Rhetorics” as stimulants against the fear of fiction, my contribution comparatively analyses the scientific rhetoric justifying the - vastly predominantly male - realist and naturalist fiction of Balzac, Zola, but also Bourget and Barrès and their various European counterparts like Wilhelm Bölsche.

If this scientific rhetoric is generally interpreted as an attempt to appropriate factual text models and textual generators that justify the mimetic access to the world, it is interpreted here as a reassuring antidote to 19th century currents of thought critical of fiction, which thus gain contour ex negativo.

As early as Genji Monigatari, a novel by Murasaki Shikibu, written around the year 1000 in Japan, the hero forbids his daughter access to novels, because she might believe that the love stories in them exist in reality. He also criticises the female readers, who are absorbed in their reading, for not paying attention to their hairstyles.

Lack of awareness of fictionality, which is detrimental to the conduct of life, especially in the realm of love, indifference to appearance caused by fictional absorption, which disrupts amorous and social exchanges: these grievances, which are surprisingly stable and transcultural, are open to a number of variations and numerous developments. We need to distinguish between several themes, even if they often combine: love training, inadequacy to reality (fictional immersion being understood as a cognitive deficit) and disruption of social and family relationships. One of the hypotheses of this contribution is the deflation of the passion drive argument in favour of the other two grievances (the woman who reads novels is maladjusted to reality and fails in her duties as mother, wife and woman of the world).

Although the paradigm of conduct and brains disturbed by the reading of novels was initially male (Saint Augustine, Don Quixote), from the mid-eighteenth century onwards (notably with Sophie Lennox's The Female Quixote ), the dangers induced by fiction seemed to be aimed more specifically at women, at the very time when they were gaining wider access to writing and reading. This paper will focus on a few nineteenth-century texts. The arguments against fiction, for those who read or wrote it, will find their climax in the theme of the “bas-bleus” (blue stockings). Moreover, surprisingly enough, women authors often developed this theme themselves: Delphine de Girardin, for example, took up the argument of the reader's inadequacy to the world in an exacerbated form. Nor were these themes developed in particularly conservative circles: a Saint-Simonian socialist, Pierre Leroux, who defended women's access to all knowledge (including law and astronomy), insisted on the danger of fiction, which he felt was due to the physiological characteristics of female brains. Since much has already been written about bovarianism, we will confine ourselves to a few comments on Flaubert's work (placed in perspective with this long tradition) and references to existing works.

Set during the tumultuous 1970s Troubles, Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman (2018) narrates the traumatic growth of eighteen-year-old “middle sister” in a closed, totalitarian Catholic community under nationalist paramilitaries’ rule. While critics have studied the female protagonist’s political resistance through her habits such as ambiguous naming, silence, and rumination, few of them notice the equally important power embedded in her weird reading-while-walking. Accused of being not “public-spirited”, her behavior constantly confronts critiques and interventions from everyone, irrespective of the family, communal people, dominant paramilitaries, or police forces the recognized enemy. This article believes that beyond a simple hostility to that uncommon behavior, the textual world actually exhibits a deep suspicion to the object of her reading: “ancient books” of literature written before the twentieth century. Drawing on political and gender theories, it offers a three-layer interpretation of the omnipresent distrust of fictional works during the conflict and examines as well middle sister’s limited but simultaneously transcendental agency in reading them.

The Swiss author Johanna Spyri (1827-1901) wrote two “Heidi”-novels in her lifetime. The first one, Heidi’s Years of Learning and Wandering, was published in 1880 and became immediately an international bestseller. This novel tells the story of the orphan girl Heidi, who lives happily in the Swiss Alps alone with her grandfather. At the age of eight, she must leave her homeland and go to Frankfurt, a big city in Germany. But she feels unhappy in this urban environment. At last, she becomes mentally ill because of her homesickness and has to be brought back to her home. In the second novel, Heidi can use what she has learned (1881), Heidi’s friend Clara, who is physically ill and cannot walk, always sitting on a wheelchair, comes from Frankfurt to Switzerland. Thanks to the healthy mountain air and fresh organic food in the Alps, she recovers miraculously and can now walk on her own feet.

These novels were made into a movie for the first time in 1920. Since then, numerous Heidi-movies and TV series have been produced in various countries. The most popular one among them is the Japanese animated version, Arupusu no Shōjo Haiji or Heidi, The Girl of the Alps, which went on the air for the first time in 1974. This series with 52 episodes was produced by Isao Takahata (1935-2018) and Hayao Miyazaki, young artists then, who would later establish the animation Studio Ghibli. The kawaii Heidi in this animation, designed by Yoichi Kotabe (also known as the designer of video games such as “Super Mario” and “Pokémon”), made a great success not only in Japan but also in European countries, most notably in Spain and then in Spanish-speaking areas in south America.

In my presentation, I am going to compare this animation series with the original novels. The most important change introduced by the director Takahata is about the role of Christianity. In her original novel, Spyri combined the story of Heidi’s homecoming with that of the reconciliation of her grandfather with God. This storyline which identifies the grandfather with the “Prodigal Son” in the Bible does not exist in the animated version. As Takahata himself admits, he deliberately “reduced” Christian elements for the Japanese audience who apparently do not have much knowledge about the Bible. Some scholars even believe that Takahata excluded every single Christian element from his animation. But it is a misconception which derives from the German synchronized version of the series (1977/78) which tells often a totally different story from that of Takahata’s. Actually, we can find a surprising scene in this animation where Takahata loyally follows Spyri and depicts how Heidi reads a hymn by the German poet Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), a deeply religious song, for Peter’s blind grandmother and brings her into tears of joy.

“Heidi, Girl of the Alps” (Arupusu no shojo Haiji) is a television animation series directed by Isao Takahata, which was aired in Japan in 1974. It was based on the children’s novel, Heidi written by the Swiss-born author Johanna Spyri, which was originally published in two parts under the German title: Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s learning and wandering years) and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (Heidi can use what she learned) in 1881. The original novel was translated in many countries including Japan and the Middle East and became a canon of children’s literature. The earliest Japanese translation dates from 1920 by Yaeko Nogami, and there is a Turkish translation published by Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel in 1927. Numerous film, television and theatrical adaptations were made as well. In the various adaptations, the strong Christian message of the original novel is toned-down or filtered out, but the animation series by Takahata is faithful to the original in this regard.

The Japanese animation version was dubbed in many languages and it also aired in Iran on the official state television, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. In this paper we will introduce a case of how Iranian students coming to Germany for the first time processed and embraced their new cultural experience by recalling scenes from “Heidi” that they have seen as a child in Iran. The fact that their previously harboured images of Germany and Europe were actually formed through the Japanese animation adaptation of a Swiss novel presents an interesting example of the role of Japanese pop culture in the global flow of cultural knowledge.

This paper examines the adaptation of literary works into visual media and the interpretation process, using the example of the popular 1985 Japanese television animation “Little Princess Sara”.

‘Little Princess Sara’ （Shokojo Sera） is the tenth in a series of animated television series, World Masterpiece Theater, based on foreign children's literature since “Heidi, Girl of the Alps” was first broadcast in 1974. The original novel, A Little Princess, was published by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1888 (reprinted with additions in 1905) and tells the story of Sara, the only daughter of a wealthy man who sends her from India to London to be enrolled in a boarding school. Following her father's death, Sara is reduced to the position of a servant and endures days of hardship. The narrative is a type of Cinderella story in which Sara eventually overcomes adversity and regains her high status.

In the original work, Sara is a proud and indomitable girl who bravely faces difficulties, but in the animation, Sara is portrayed as a kind-hearted, tearful, beautiful girl who silently endures bullying. Furthermore, while in the original story, Sara resolutely leaves Miss Minchin School for Girls , but in the anime she stays on and even donates a great deal of money to the seminary. This ending, where evil is requited with good, is a notable deviation from the original work.

At the time of the anime's production, Japan was experiencing the bubble economy, and bullying in schools had become a prominent social issue. The TV drama “Oshin” (1983–1984), which aired a year before “A Little Princess Sara”, depicting a girl enduring and overcoming poverty, bullying, and servitude, had already become a cultural phenomenon throughout Japan. The anime adaptation of “Little Princess” must be seen in light of such economic and social background.

Children are inherently in a vulnerable position within society. In literature and animation, how children are portrayed and treated is of primary concern to the young readers and viewers themselves. Little Princess has been repeatedly made into plays and films for more than 100 years since its original publication, and in the portrayals of Sara one can see the reflections of the situation of children of the times. By comparing British society at the time of the original novel with Japanese society at the time of the anime's production, this study aims to examine what elements of the original resonated with the viewers of Japan in the mid-1980s and what were the modifications that were introduced to meet their particular expectations and needs.

My presentation has three sections. 1 and 2 are an analysis of “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (“PdW”). 3 is a critical discussion of the ethical-political implications of Auerbach’s “World Philology” in a Postmodern setting.

Section 1 debates A.’s expectations about Literaturwissenschaft in a context of growing European intellectual influence across the globe and fast-paced uniformization under Cold War geopolitics. A.’s views were shaped by his intellectual background and personal experiences. He gave an Italian twist to the Neo-Kantian undercurrent of the early XX Century German Academia. His Idealism has a Crocean imprint (use of intuition, individual, Nation, etc.). His Historicism came from Vico (refusal of any ready-made “system”, absence of teleological orientation, etc.). His personal life pushed him to treat literature as a civilizational construct. The young A. subscribed to Prussian values. Later he was denied the career he deserved, enduring exile for the rest of his life in cultures different from his own. As a “stateless” person, he had to come to terms with his identity as a homme de lettres, hence the call to restore a “pre-national medieval Bildung”.

Section 2 is concerned with A.’s programmatic “synthetic-scholarly” philology. German techniques of philological work should be applied to world literature. Research should focus on stylistic topoi, specific issues that should “irradiate” fundamental features of the literary tradition (as genres, ages, national literatures, etc.). A. remained a Romanist during his entire life, never receiving training, or doing research, on non-Western languages/literatures. The “Realism” of his longer texts on Dante and Mimesis depends on the interplay between the (Western) Classical canon and Christianity, e.g., his argumentation on Figura and essays about sermo humilis. Such “Realism” is at odds with the “Islamic, Chinese, Indian” literatures mentioned briefly in PdW. The cosmopolitan orientation of his project is avowedly indebted to the unique five centuries of Western rise to modernity. At key junctures of PdW, A. dwells on a crucial topic in pre-War Germany intellectual debate, the demise of European “late-bourgeois humanistic Kultur” and its replacement by specialization.

Section 3 explores a Postmodern interpretation of A.’s cosmopolitanism. An ideal “inner history of Humankind” could be worked out by a Global République des Lettres. Philological methods would have to be domesticated by every tradition. World literature could be more easily oriented towards the future, under a secularized purview and authorized by values of coexistence. Retrospectively, it would aim at a non-hegemonical account of how traditions have flourished in their own terms, including their claims to influence. However, there are trade-offs. No “outer” (overarching) narratives would be admissible. Such ethos would demand “real love for the World” from scholars, but also Victorine detachment from one’s culture.

This paper brings Erich Auerbach and Abdolkarim Soroush into dialogue, aiming to comparatively study their methodological approaches toward ‘the literary’—philology in Auerbach’s case and translation in Soroush’s. Despite their vastly different historical and intellectual backgrounds, both thinkers share a similar worldview. They both perceive the present condition as one increasingly moving toward standardization and losing its diversity, a perspective shaped by their experiences of exile and unhomeliness. In response to this condition, Auerbach turns to ‘philology,’ exemplified in his seminal work Mimesis, while Soroush develops ‘translation’ as a method, articulated in his masterwork Expansion and Contraction. In both of these works, the notion of ‘the literary’ plays a central role, providing a strong ground for comparison. This paper argues that rereading Soroush's ‘translation’ as a method grounded on his theory of interpretive pluralism through Auerbach’s philological lens not only sheds new light on Soroush’s theological-literary project, but also opens up opportunities to rethink and expand Auerbach’s philology in and for in the globalizing context of the 21st century. Ultimately, this dialogue, framed as ‘after philology,’ demonstrates how Soroush’s translational approach revitalizes Auerbach’s philology's ethical and political dimensions by highlighting its aesthetic aspects.

This paper examines how Auerbach and Ranciere transform the concept of "representation" and thus of "art" and "aesthetics" in the modern era. Auerbach's _Mimesis_ is the story of "realist" representation in language, defined not in ontological terms as a verbal approximation of reality, but in ethico-aesthetic terms as the serious (tragic and problematic) presentation of human reality in its everydayness. Auerbach uncovers the same underlying pattern in every instance of realistic representation: "Stilmischung," the mixture of styles, reveals the breakdown of "Stiltrennung," the hierarchical division/separation of style/subject matter (elevated style for heroes, kings, and nobles; comic style for low-born characters). In effect, realism, for Auerbach, is equality of representation: common individuals are represented with the same seriousness as high-ranking ones, and everyday reality is accorded the same aesthetic importance as exceptional or historically important events. This is also essentially how Ranciere defines his "aesthetic regime of art," the regime that defines modernity: "The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres" (Ranciere, _The Politics of Aesthetics_). (In effect, Stilmischung is Ranciere's "aesthetic regime," and Stiltrennung is Ranciere's "representative regime.") Art is secularized and democratized in both thinkers--hence its political import and impact. This essay explores how Ranciere uses Auerbach's framing to talk about the disruptions of art more generally, and in more explicitly political terms that can be applied globally, that is, in terms of "world art."

The translation process from the source text to the target text inevitably encounters the problem of untranslatability. This occurs because the semantic fields of one language differ from those of another due to cultural factors. The problem of untranslatability can be addressed through transformation and subjective correspondences, which, according to Lotman's theory, are described as myths. A myth refers to something that signifies illogicality, in contrast to logic. To explain mythicity, the concept of 'proper nouns' is employed. The name of an object is not based on a logical reasoning or justification, but represents a direct identification, becoming a unique entity in the world. This paper examines the poems of Yun Dong-ju and Lee Sang as case studies to demonstrate how untranslatability is resolved when these poems are translated into other languages. Poetry is a type of text in which untranslatability is maximized, thus highlighting its mythic qualities. Parts of the text that cannot be translated logically due to cultural or contextual factors are reinterpreted by the translator, creating the expression plane. Some parts are translated literally, others are left as they are, like proper nouns, and in cases of extreme cultural differences, translator's notes are added to complete the expression plane. Understanding the situations in which untranslatability arises and how the translator’s interpretation transforms these situations reflects how the culture of the recipient is expressed.

In this study, I analyze the English translation of The Genial Seed, which is an anthology of Japanese medieval planting songs. The English translation was published in 1971 by Frank Hoff(1932-2013) who was a scholar of comparative literature. The characteristic of The Genial Seed is that they are passed down orally. So, it is difficult to understand the meaning of the songs and it is not easy to match the rhythm. Nevertheless, this translation faithfully translates the original text in terms of form and content. Also, reading The Genial Seed through the translation brings diverse possibilities of the interpretation. In this presentation, I will compare and analyze the lyrics of The Genial Seed between the original Japanese and English translation and discuss expansion of interpretability.

Κοσμοπολίτης (cosmopolites) is a compound of the Greek words Κοσμος (Kosmos) and Πολίτης (politēs). Κοσμος is order, property, good behavior, ornament, world-order, world. Πολίτης means citizen, townsman. Thus, Κοσμοπολίτης is explained as “the citizen of the world”, which is widely accepted and applied.The vein of cosmopolitanism from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment has been carried away by reason, global justice, and university, and thus is in a tendency to be rootless from the locality and the individuals. Such an explanation, however, falls into the trap of neglecting its hidden layer of meaning: locality. Man is firstly the citizen of the πολίς and then of the Κοσμος. Namely, the men of the cosmos are always rooted in the city, community, and locality before they are the citizen of the cosmos.

The research of cosmopolitanism rarely lay their emphasis on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as this period is known as the century of nationalism. The late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century seem to be the age of nationalism, which bewildered the cosmopolitans to ignore this period. While the identity crisis in nihilism forced people to cling to the past and even turn to extreme nationalism, globalization demanded individuals to interact with the external and even international world with cosmopolitanism. The ontological forgetting trend of cosmopolitanism is readjusted by the prevailing nationalism, from floating to rooting. It is a momentous time-space when and where cosmopolitanism is revived and grounded.

The Small-town stories back then embodied this special glocalized or rooted cosmopolotanism.The small-town Bidwell in Sherwood Anderson’s depiction reveals the spirit of rooted cosmopolitanism, which is an open space with people crossing borders through empathy and achieving mutual understandings through conversations. An inclusive, mild, and empathetic air hung in the small-town Bidwell, an open space created in the interaction between the local and the global, the imagination and reality. The all-encompassing spirit in the small-town denotes the three layers of rooted cosmopolitanism: an open space (a small-town in the interaction between local and global, reality and imagination), empathetic (to cross the borders between different people, people and things through empathy), and conversational (to take root at a spiritual home after concrete conversations bond by shared vulnerability). Within the open space of the small-town, Anderson portrays the empathy through which people achieve an outward exploration and the conversation through which individuals practice inward exploration. Intermingling between the local and the global, the reality and the imagination, Bidwell is an open space with a cosmopolitan spirit.

Internet has shaped a new relationship with knowledge that has given rise to new forms of encyclopaedism. These are linked to the idea that we could access an exhaustive knowledge of reality thanks to a real-time archive of all the texts and images we produce. The computerisation of knowledge immerses us in an incessant digital flow that gives the impression of being able to ‘archive everything live, (...) in the present tense’ (Bertrand Gervais), with no delay or lag between the event and its preservation. Indeed, archiving in the present not only means preserving traces and remains, but also instantly recording all the texts and images we produce on a daily basis. Obsessed by the desire to capture time in its immediate dimension, digital culture is motivated less by the preservation of traces of the past than by the endless accumulation of unstructured, insubstantial data.

This development is not without consequences for our relationship with time and history, and for our ways of telling and reading. The transition from ‘digital reason’ to ‘graphic reason’ (Jack Goody) has generated new ways of presenting and organising knowledge, affecting both the scholarly forms of encyclopaedism (atlas, dictionarie, inventories, encyclopaedic novels, etc.) and their literary appropriations. Whether in digital or paper format, contemporary forms of encyclopaedism oscillate between a desire for exhaustiveness and an awareness of its impossibility, between readability and unreadability, mimicry and resistance to the data regime. This ambivalence in turn generates new ways of writing and reading knowledge, which we will try to highlight, on the basis on the work of Judith Schalansky, who, from one book to the next, has explored several forms of totalising knowledge: encyclopaedias, archives, atlases, schoolbooks, and so on. We will show how she reinvents these forms to exploit their cognitive and architectural potential, but also to thwart their principles and effects.

In his Poetry in a Global Age (2020), Jahan Ramazani presents Matt Rasmussen's poem "Reverse Suicide", which is composed like a film played backwards. Which the reader will probably realize sooner or later also because of the title. Until that moment the poem seems incomprehensible and strange, after this "media shift" it suddenly becomes clear and understandable. The second moment of recognition is that such a poem could only have been written after the advent of film, which brings a certain type of media capture of movement (and much of it can be seen just in the reverse movement of film). In my paper I will try to show some manifestations of this inner mediality of poetry, which is both virtual (poetry prefigures possibilities of other media) and influenced by the real effects of other media.

In its origins, as an oral expression or technique, poetry was a significant and dominant medium (in a narrower sense of a channel), especially of collective memory, as the research of M. Parry, Eric Havelock and others have shown for Greek and Western poetry. Poetry, however, gradually lost this role with the advent of writing and the development of writing techniques, becoming a medium in the broader sense of cultural practice (on the distinction see Baetens). The subject of my interest is poetry and its techniques as a secondary channel that mediates other media. In the first part of the paper I will briefly discuss the ancient ekphrasis, which is an example of complex virtual visuality. In Homer, Hesiod, and later authors we find verbal descriptions of representations (depictions on a shield, painting, etc.) that are characterized by great dynamism and use verbal visualization to capture scenes that would be impossible to capture in a static representation (such as a painting or a photograph) and, in some cases, even in a theatrical scene unfolding in time. In some ways, this verbal representation of visual imagery virtually contains the possibilities of, for example, film technique (not only movement, but also the trick manipulation etc.). In the second part of this paper, I will discuss some examples from modern poetry that work in contrast with the real influence of other media (such as Rasmussen's poem). Whereas in the first case poetry expanded the field of visuality, in this second form other media expand the field of poetry.

References:

Baetens, Jan. 2025. "I.2.Mediality and Materiality of Lyric." In Poetry in Notions. The Online Critical Compendium of Lyric Poetry, edited by Gustavo Guerrero, Ralph Müller, Antonio Rodriguez and Kirsten Stirling. https://doi.org/10.51363/pin.728c

Antonio Rodriguez and Kirsten Stirling. Lyre multimédia. Études de lettres, 2022, no 319. https://journals.openedition.org/edl/3969

The term ‘distant reading’ came up at the beginning of the new millennium and is generally attributed to Franco Moretti (cf. Moretti 2000). As a counter-concept to ‘close reading’ it applies computational methods to analyse large amounts of literary data. Instead of the detailed reading of individual texts, which focuses on the writing and reading subject, ‘distant reading’ processes masses of text according to certain recurring patterns or predetermined criteria. As such a tool that can work on much more texts than a single person would ever be able to, in terms of time, ‘distant reading’ takes on a new dimension in the current debate on AI-generated texts. Apart from the reading function of LMMs proposed by Hannes Bajohr (cf. Bajohr 2024), it could be a ray of hope in the “textpocalypse” (Kirschenbaum 2023) conjured up by Matthew Kirschenbaum. With ‘distant reading’, the flood of AI-generated texts that, according to Kirschenbaum, will soon be invading the Internet and our lives, would be manageable to a certain extent. We could at least filter recurring words, phrases or topics from the masses of text and thus get an idea of what they are about. However, that’s where the cat bites its tail, as the AI-generated texts were produced according to the same principle: on the basis of the most frequently used word sequences that result from the machine's sifting through huge text corpora. The machine “reads” what the machine has “written” in order to “write” new text from it.

My paper rtakes up this point and outlines an active role humans can have in this seemingly endless nonhuman feedback loop. Instead of being paralyzed by the oncoming “textpocalypse”, ‘distant reading’ is to be developed as a poetic instrument that, beyond identification-driven individual readings, enables a productive approach to unmanageable masses of text. I will show what this writing with and for ‘distant reading’ can look like using the collection "Halbzeug" (2018) by Hannes Bajohr and contrasting it to Raymond Queneau's "Cent Mille Milliard de Poèmes" (1961). Bajohr filters specific text corpora with ‘distant reading’ and collages new texts from the result, whereas Queneau develops a text, that can literally only be read at a distance or by a machine – because human lifetime is simply not long enough to do so.

- Bajohr, Hannes (2024): “Große Sprachmodelle. Machine Learning als Lese- und Schreibermöglichung“, in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. 16:31, pp. 142–146.

http://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/23149.

- Kirschenbaum, Matthew (2023); “Prepare for the Textpocalypse. Our relationship to writing is about to change forever; it may not end well”, in: The Atlantic. 08.03.2023

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/ai-chatgpt-writing-language-models/673318/

- Moretti, Franco (2000): “Conjectures on world literature”, in: New Left Review I:238.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii1/articles/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature

“In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds, if only for a few pages” (Banu Mushtaq). By these words what Mushtaq means is, of course, a process of separation of one from the other. There is something definitive through which people from a community segregates other people in the same community or people in a different community, based upon their differences. Generally, this act of division and categorization is done on the basis of ‘caste’, ‘class’, ‘sex’, ‘religion’ etc. The foundation of the process of dissociation lies in the perspectives of the self towards the other, the way one perceives ‘an other’ (‘an other’ is not like the self, but different). What literature does is, it helps us to understand the concept of other, the way ‘an other’ is transformed into ‘the other’, the otherness of the other and the self’s engagement with the other. I have selected two works by Tagore – ‘Chaturanga’ and ‘Streer Patra’ which solely deal with one’s relation with an other. This paper investigates how the process of othering is achieved and what are the criteria that are taken into account while objectification of an individual (Nanibala in ‘Chaturanga’ and Bindu in ‘Streer Patra’) and a group of people (Lower caste Chamars and Muslims in ‘Chaturanga’) occurs. This is the view of the paper to understand how efforts have been made to subsume the otherness of the other under the umbrella of the same. It also looks at the points of view of the ‘othered’, their responses to the process of making them different. The present paper addresses a lack of diversity and plurality and it investigates how humanist and ethical engagement with the other helps an individual to understand the world as a relation. The concept of ‘care’ helps us to comprehend the differences of the other and asserts that the others are not really others but the self’s imagination and product of excessive thought which is powerful enough to dismantle the power structure in a given society.

Based on the perspective of embodied-cognitive translatology, this paper takes Michael Nylan’s The Art of War in English translation as the research object, and explores the embodied-cognitive process of “interactive embodiment” and “cognitive processing” in its translation. The study finds that Nylan’s translation, by reconstructing the mapping relationship between the author’s space and the translator’s space, not only focuses on the deep understanding of the cultural connotation of the source text, but also fully considers the cognitive acceptance of the target readers.In terms of “Embodiment”of the physical world, the translator breaks through the traditional “author-centeredness” and reconstructs the physical world of the source text by critically reflecting on the author, usage and value of “The Art of War”, reflecting the “similar but not equal” interaction with the physical world. At the “Cognition” level of the mental world, the “mapping” and “creative imitation” strategies are used to achieve cross-cultural cognitive access through form-meaning mapping and context reconstruction. The study further verifies the theoretical value of the “Reality-Cognition-Language” principle of embodied-cognitive translatology, and the practical path of creative transformation in the translation of Chinese canonical books, which provides insights for the innovation of local translation theories and international cross-cultural communication research.

Once W.B.Yeats suggested J. M. Synge, “Give up Paris… go to Aran islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found an expression” (Synge 1968,63). In response to that Synge has written about the life of a distant world, which is segregated from the ‘big world’. Writing is an act, a process of knowing the people and understanding the universe. It gives voice to the voiceless and reveals the unrevealed. It brings out the hegemony and hierarchy between dominator/ dominated, colonizer/ colonized, able/disabled, white/black, have/ have- nots. Mahasweta Devi , an iconic, activist, remarkable vibrant writer of Bengali literature, much of whose work has been for the indigenous people and which deals with their misery, misfortune, suffering and exploitation. I have selected the fictional works – Draupadi, Aranyer Adhikar, Sishu, to analyze Devi’s representation of the subalterns and tribals. There is a history of representation and most of the writers maintain that style to present the dispossessed, marginalized, suppressed and oppressed. This paper seeks to discuss how Mahasweta’s representation of the subaltern and tribal differs from the other writers. It examines how ‘the act of resistance’ becomes a very much part of her writing which tries to subvert and challenge the mainstream dominant discourse.

This paper intervenes in the debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot regarding Charles Baudelaire’s so-called moral failure by situating the poet’s longing for refuge within the aesthetic rather than merely moral framework. Whereas Sartre condemns Baudelaire for retreating into bourgeois norms due to his “bad faith”, this paper argues that Baudelaire’s desire for refuge —whether physical, psychological, aesthetic, or moral—is fundamentally a search for the mediating conditions necessary for artistic creation. Baudelaire resists neither full immersion in the crowd nor complete surrender to boundless self-expansion. His struggle with mediation marks not his moral failure but his aesthetic endeavor to achieve the autonomy of poetic creation.

The longing for refuge—and the failure to find one—is carefully staged in a crescendo throughout Les Fleurs du mal, particularly in Tableaux Parisiens. To explore this argument, the paper closely reads a series of poems. Beginning with the motif of the window as a symbol of the dialectical tension between inside and outside, reality and imagination in the opening poem “Le Paysage.” The attic window circumscribes an internal space that shelters the poet from the external world. This conditions his exchange with the Parisian cityscape and his transformation of it into urban pastoral. However, this idyllic refuge progressively collapses, first in Les Sept Vieillards, then further in Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville." Finally, “Le Gouffre” portrays the total dissolution of the interior: as infinite emptiness floods through every window, the whole domestic space evaporates into an abyss, leaving the poet with no escape. Here, even dreams and imagination collapse alongside the stable existence of order and numbers.

By tracing the fragility of poetic mediation through spatial symbols such as the window, this paper reinterprets mediation as an aesthetic strategy for maintaining the precarious equilibrium between interiority and exteriority. Far from a moral shortcoming, Baudelaire’s struggle for refuge is essential to poetic creation’ independence from science and ethics.

From 1941 to 1951, Samuel Beckett’s metaphorical writing, influenced by the

international political climate, increasingly highlighted the conflict between the war’s deprivation of life and humanity’s instinct for survival. Drawing upon Beckett’s early poetic theories and their impact on his novelistic practice, the quartet of novels – Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable – all employ rhetoric such as paradox, pun, and repetition to construct a balanced and opposing binary “tension,” transcending the boundaries between content and form. This “tension” reflects the author’s conscious imagination of the connection between surface and deep meaning under the onstraints of censorship. It constitutes the poetic character of the novels’ linguistic structure, and this experiment in cross-genre writing reveals Beckett’s reflection on future narrative models.

In 1928, Japanese art historians began the reconstruction of the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum, which had been damaged in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. A restoration committee was established with the aim of building the “greatest Oriental museum.” Conventionally at the museum, the notion of the “Orient” encompassed China, Korea, and India. However, during the reconstruction, the committee decided to broaden this scope to include regions extending as far as Persia.

This paper examines the Keimeikai 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Oriental Art, held in September 1928, and argues that the representation of “Persian art” in this exhibition is pivotal in understanding the redefinition of the “Orient” within Japan’s art scene. By analyzing the categorization of “Persian art” and the lectures delivered by art historians, this paper explores how this event contributed to shifting Japan’s art historical discourses and expanding the boundaries of the “Orient” in the early 20th century.

Ruth St. Denis is recognized as a pioneer of modern dance in the early twentieth century. Raised in New Jersey, she had only indirect exposure to India and Japan, and her work has attracted criticism for its supposed Orientalism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that by incorporating an "Oriental" setting into her work, St. Denis created a dance-centric stage that transcended traditional narratives and musical constraints. A recurring theme emerges from her works, such as "Radha" (1906), which is centered around the Indian deity Krishna’s lover and "Omika" (1913), which focuses on a Japanese courtesan, where a woman initially perceived as profane ultimately transforms into a divine figure. During her press tours in Asia (1925-1926), Japanese audiences found the depictions of their own culture somewhat puzzling while still being captivated by dances that related to Eastern themes from outside Japan. It would suggest that St. Denis’s interpretation of the "Orient" likely aligns with theosophical meditation, which has fostered an interest in the concept of cosmic rhythm within her choreography.

The founder of macrobiotics, George Ohsawa (1893–1966), is also known as Sakurazawa Nyoiti. Rather than being recognised as a nutritionist, he is acknowledged as an important figure in the introduction of Far Eastern and Japanese cultures. His publication Principe unique de la Philosophie et de la Science d'Extrême-Orient in 1931 elucidated the distinctive origins of Asian thought in a readily comprehensible manner, attracting a considerable following of devoted French-speaking readers. Subsequent to the favourable reception of this publication, he proceeded to release le Livre des fleurs, which elucidates Japanese aesthetics through flowers. Far Eastern and Japanese cultures have hitherto been exclusively understood from a Western point of view in Europe. Sakurazawa employed French as a means of entering into and engaging with French discourse and endeavoured to transform the discourse of Japonisme, which expanded throughout France in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The concepts of modern Japanese art, such as ‘Japanese painting’, were introduced via contact with the ‘Occident’ in the early Meiji period. In the Taisho period (1912-1926), when such trends had somewhat settled down, discourses on Japanese art focusing on the ‘Orient’ began to flourish. The magazine Shirakaba (1910-1923), which was at the forefront of introducing 'Occidental' art into Japan, was interested in the art of the ‘Orient’ and later developed the ‘folk art movement’ using Asia as its starting point. Also, Toa Geijutsu (1914) was launched as the only magazine which specialize in ‘Oriental’ art, with the consciousness of ‘Occident’. By examining discourses on ‘Oriental’ art in these magazines, this study aims to examine how Japanese art around 1920 perceived and utilized the ‘Orient(s)’ and to understand how the concepts of the ‘Orient(s)’ were developed in Japan and Asia, in relation to the ‘Occident’, regarding the political, social and cultural context of the time.

In a century that claims to have defeated distance, cultural distances are growing. More than a question of technology or cartography, bridging them requires an effort of the temporal imagination. Building on Pheng Cheah’s (2016: 8) understanding of worlding as a “process of temporalization,” this paper argues that biofiction, whose insight into the past is doubled by a capacity to straddle temporal regimes and play with narrative conventions, provides unique tools for a layered perception of the world in time, irreducible to a one-world narrative but also dislodged from solipsistic nationalist fantasies or methodologies. Parallel to what Wai Chee Dimock (2006: 163), called the “non-standard mapping” of space, biofiction offers a “non-standard mapping” of time, reflecting rich interiorities through poetic licence or artifice. My two examples, Anchee Min’s "Pearl of China" (2010), a biofiction of Sinophile Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck, curiously “the only American author to make it into [Auerbach’s] Mimesis,” (de Graef 2015: 313), and Caryl Phillips’s "A View of the Empire at Sunset" (2018), a fictionalization of episodes from the life of Caribbean author Jean Rhys, each layer the temporalities and rhythms of two different cultures. Propelling each transnational narrative is the figure of the outsider female writer, whose rebellious response to being brought up in an alleged periphery and being instructed to aspire to an Anglophone centre unsettles the location of home and the meaning of exile. By staging Rhys’s return to her native Dominica in her mid-forties and Buck’s reconstruction of a Chinese garden on American soil as a consolation for not being allowed entry into Maoist China, the two novels unfold the promise of a feminine remapping of history, which departs from conventional biographical time and reintroduces the worlding temporality of storytelling, for which there is “no one way of comprehending truth” (Min 2010: 151). Though Phillips and Min share some aspects of their background with their protagonists, they are both aware of the contextual differences and of their subjects' biases (Phillips, in Tunca & Ledent 2020: 465, Min, in Lackey 2019: 146), which inform the artifices they use to represent the enmeshed cultural temporalities inhabited by the now canonized female outsiders. While Min's model is the Chinese parable with its plot twists, reshaping history as myth, Phillips opts for a more realist framing of flashbacks, inspired by Rhys's early novels, which he favours (Phillips, in Clingman 2017: 594). Though different, the two strategies converge in their resistance to a closed and univocal notion of history and in their ability to mold Life Writing into the protean forms of fiction, creating new possibilities for the cross-temporal mapping of cultures.

This paper examines the intersection between biofiction and the proletarian novel in Fernando Alegría's "Como un árbol rojo" (1968), a revised edition of the author's earlier work about the life of Luis Emilio Recabarren, pioneering union leader and founder of Chile’s Communist Party. It also aims to contribute to the renewed historical inquiry on Recabarren’s figure after the 100th anniversary of his death, which was recently commemorated in December 2024.

Utilizing Barbara Foley's criteria, Lorenzo Turrent Rozas' views, and Alegría's own reflections on revolutionary literature, this study argues that the book adheres to the tradition of the proletarian novel while also maintaining its place as biofiction. It further delves into the challenges posed by Georg Lukacs' Marxist critique of the biographical novel and its potential conflict with the proletarian novel's inherent political discourse. Additionally, the article analyses contemporary approaches to biofiction as a viable path to reconcile the content of proletarian content with the biographical format.

The paper also discusses the novel's reception and effectiveness as a revolutionary tool, concluding that although "Como un árbol rojo" faces certain structural limitations, the biographical format can still serve as an efficient vehicle for proletarian literature when executed with greater narrative flexibility.

In the history of literary and cultural exchange and mutual learning between China and foreign countries since modern China, if we choose one of the most representative western dramatists who can make continuous comparative study with Chinese classical drama, the first choice is undoubtedly Shakespeare. For more than 100 years, Shakespeare's plays have been frequently compared not only with the works of individual Chinese classical drama writers, but also with the Chinese classical drama as a whole. This century-old unconventional comparison is quite rare. Paying attention to this comparative phenomenon has very important theoretical value for us to further promote the exchange and mutual learning of Chinese and foreign literature and culture under the guidance of correct comparative concepts. A century of comparison between classical Chinese drama and Shakespeare's plays objectively and truly presents the inner journey of Chinese scholars from the perspective of Western literature, from the level of literature and culture to constantly understand themselves deeply, rationally correct themselves, and from respecting the West to pursuing equal dialogue and demonstrating cultural self-consciousness and self-confidence.

William Faulkner, as the peak of modern American literature and southern literature in the 20th century, has had an impact on literature all over the world. As a representative of Taiwan's modern literature, Pai Hsien-yung's own creations also show Faulkner's fingerprints in many ways. Pai Hsien-yung transformed Faulkner's modernist techniques of flashbacks, time philosophy and multi-angle narratives, southern gothic colors and mythological patterns into his own literary creations, and coalesced them with his personal life experiences and traditional Chinese cultural resources to form a literary world with Pai Hsien-yung‘s characteristics.Pai Hsien-yung learns and transforms Faulkner's various modernist novel techniques in his novels, especially Crystal Boys, and displays Faulknerian Southern Gothic colors in his homosexual writing, and uses Faulkner's usual mythological patterns, moving from “Faulkner's Myth” to Bai Xianyong's “New Park Myth”.

威廉·福克纳（William Faulkner）作为20世纪美国现代文学及南方文学的高峰，其文学影响遍及世界。白先勇作为台湾现代文学的代表，也在其自身创作中浮现出深深浅浅的“福克纳的指纹”。白先勇将福克纳的闪回、时间哲学与多角度叙事的现代主义创作技巧、南方哥特色彩与神话模式转化至自身的文学创作中，与个人生命体验与中国传统文化资源共同凝聚成具有白先勇特色的文学世界。白先勇在小说创作特别是《孽子》中对福克纳多种现代主义小说技巧的学习与转化，又在同性恋书写中展现福克纳式的美国南方哥特色彩，并使用福克纳惯用的神话模式，从“福克纳的神话”走向白先勇的“新公园神话”。

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian has been criticized for its "Western narrative traditions," reflecting the identity anxiety of East Asian literary scholars. This mirrors Tokiko Kitagawa’s question about why East Asian feminism must be conceived within the context of “East Asia.” The Vegetarian offers an answer by both echoing Western ecofeminism and being rooted in Korea’s historical trauma.

The motif of "flowers" runs throughout novel. While it superficially echoes the Western ecofeminist tradition that associates flowers with female fertility, Han Kang, as discussed in The Boy Is Coming, draws on the Buddhist perspective shared by her father, rooted in the Avatamsaka Sutra’s concept of "three thousand worlds of flowers." She transforms this symbol into a vessel connecting personal and national memories, pointing directly to trauma of war and politics. When the flower changes from a patriotic symbol to a relic of the Jeju Massacre, Han Kang critiques state violence and national trauma, moving beyond Western ecofeminism’s “nature-harmony” ideal.

The “tree-fire” motif merges Western eco-criticism’s nature-as-victim metaphor with Korean shamanic practices, where burning trees witness violence and release collective grief. As in The Boy Is Coming, Han Kang links the Gwangju Uprising with “blood and fire rebirth” imagery. Han Kang shows how suppressed ecological and gender violence transforms into resistance through local religious practices.

Han Kang（한강）, along with her surname "Han(한)" , has inherited the core concept of "Han(한)" , a concept deeply embedded in Korean literature, from her father Han Seungwon (한승원). Yeong-hye refuses to eat meat due to recurring dreams of violent bloodshed. Her action is not only a direct rebellion against her Vietnam War veteran father's patriarchal control but also a metaphor for military dictatorship under Park Chung-hee, which disciplined women's bodies during Korea's modernization, coinciding with the Vietnam War period. However, she adds an ecological dimension, expanding "Han(한)" beyond national humiliation. Novel critiques cultural anxiety of “eating dog meat” during Korea’s engagement with the West, rejecting both Western salvation narratives and nostalgic cultural essentialism. Han Kang uses the individual body’s awakening to expose power structures imposed by both indigenous traditions and foreign hegemony.

The Vegetarian anchors ecofeminism in specific Korean historical traumas. Han Kang suggests solutions must arise from “relational politics.” The Nobel Prize highlighted the novel’s confrontation with historical trauma, showing that East Asian modernity is a dynamic network of translation, naming, and narrative. Yeong-hye’s body becomes a battleground, rejecting ideological submission. Her resistance deconstructs cultural identity myths and transforms literature into a space for political resistance. Like I Do Not Bid Farewell, Han Kang uses embodied writing to critique collision of Eastern and Western power.

Wangdao, ou la voie royale: recherches sur l'esprit des institutions de la Chine archaïque written by Léon Vandermeersch is a monumental work that studied the transitions of the social institutions and the spirit of ritualism during the Yin and Zhou dynasties through comparison of the classics of Confucianism with oracle bone and bronze inscriptions. This book, originally completed in 1975 by Léon Vandermeersch as his doctoral thesis in France after twenty-year in-depth research, was a crystallization of sinology fused by resources from China, Japan, and France. Compared to Western sinologists who remained silent on the research and interpretations of Chinese and Japanese paleographers due to doubts about the authenticity of the oracle bone and bronze inscriptions or their inability to deal with these relevant materials, Léon Vandermeersch had already consciously absorbed these studies for his ancient history research in the 1970s. He attempted to shift the focus of the study of ancient Chinese social institutions from Marcel Granet's anthropologically flavored "Marriage Relations" to "Ancestor Worship" from the perspective of the sociology of religion. However, in contrast to the detailed classification and dating research on oracle bone and bronze inscriptions by Chinese and Japanese scholars, Léon Vandermeersch sought to create a comprehensive framework that would interconnect various dimensions of the Yin-Zhou Dynasty Institutions. This framework delineates a particular emphasis on the mutual influence among institutions. It examines the family institution, including the marriage system, from the perspective of the ancestral worship system, and describes the kingship system, while uncovers the production institution in the blind spot. The framework demonstrates the logical speculation, the grand multi-disciplinary vision, and the innovative spirit of "Yin-Zhou Institution Theory" by Léon Vandermeersch. Moreover, inspired by the methodological approach of the French Annales School's history of mentalities, Léon Vandermeersch, in contrast to Western juridism based on teleology-logic, unearthed the mentality of ritualism in the ancient Chinese based on morphology-logic during the long period of the transition from the Yin to the Zhou dynasty. Wangdao, which integrated the diachronic and synchronic perspectives of the new theory of the Yin-Zhou Institutions, is the basis of the dimension of "Social System" in Léon Vandermeersch’s sinology system. It has injected vitality into the reflection on the origins of Chinese institutions and deserves more attention and dialogues among the foreign and domestic researchers of sinology (or Chinese studies) and ancient Chinese history.

The New Zealander Rewi Alley was a visionary writer, translator, and poet. He lived and worked in China for 60 years, and wrote nine poems about Beijing. These poems describe the natural landscape, social reality, historical evolution and contemporary role of Beijing from three dimensions, namely, time, space and imagery. The consistent theme in these poems is a strong sense of community. The sense of community in these poems is mainly manifested in three aspects: first, the recognition of and optimistic attitude towards the community of common destiny as revealed in “Peking”, “Summer Thoughts”, “Peking Winter Scene” and “A May Morning in Peking”; second, the idea of opposing war and striving for peace as reflected in “An Afternoon of Peking Spring” and “Winter Dusk at the Summer Palace”; third, the longing for the world proletarian community as shown in “Red Leaves at Hsiang Shan”, “Spring Festival Eve, Peking, 1977” and “Peking, July 7, 1977”. These poems are products of a specific historical period, highlighting words such as “people”, “destiny”, “peace” and “world”, expressing the strong confidence of the Chinese people in building socialism, their friendship with and responsibility for the world’s proletarians. To some extent, these poems are epic poems about Beijing, which help us better understand the historical logic of modern and contemporary Chinese revolution and construction, and understand China’s position, development orientation, and vision in the contemporary world.

A key figure in the development of the Law and Literature movement, James Boyd White, proposed that the law ought to be conceptualized, not as a set of fixed rules, but as rhetoric. For White, rhetoric was not simply the art of persuasion, but an art that constitutes “a community of speakers perpetually renewing itself through argument.” Following White’s counsel that one must “read law as literature and literature as the law,” I present a reading of selected Philippine Supreme Court decisions and poems by Filipino anglophone poets Gemino Abad, Luis Cabalquinto, R. Torres Pandan, Victor Penaranda, Simeon Dumdum, Jr. and Ernesto Superal Yee—to demonstrate how law/literature (re)constitutes Philippine culture and communities in language.

T.S. Sungkit’s "Driftwood on Dry Land" centers on the mythic history of a Higaonon tribe, an Indigenous group in Mindanao. I argue that the novel utilizes the mode of marvelous realism to unsettle conventional “hierarchies of knowledge” (Pison 2005). These hierarchies of knowledge demean or disregard Indigenous histories, perspectives, and ways of being. The mode of marvelous realism allows the novel to challenge prevailing forms of canonical Philippine knowledge, including the sensibilities of Philippine fiction in English, which tend to be realist or otherwise possess a linear logic. The novel illustrates Kumkum Sangari’s thesis that the marvelous real is a sensibility that confronts the seemingly contradictory elements of colonial and postcolonial life, and the clash and syncretism of different belief systems. Ultimately, from this mode emerges a polyphonic voice which seeks to make meaning out of these discordant realities.

The role of translation (studies) in comparative literature is increasingly recognized, as translation has been identified as the primary means for texts to cross borders to find new, foreign readers. Simultaneously, there has been rising support for the translation of foreign literary texts to Filipino. This is evident in the Aklat ng Bayan project by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF), which includes paperbacks, each focused on a foreign author whose works are translated to Filipino. Among these is a translation by Alvin C. Ursua of seven short stories by Ernest Hemingway, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “Hills Like White Elephants”. By reading these two short stories as Ursua’s rewritings, as used by André Lefevere, this study seeks to determine how Ursua managed to translate texts written in English by an American into a language that would be ideal for the casual Filipino reader. Using Walter Benjamin’s notion of authorial intent vis-à-vis the task of the translator and Lawrence Venuti’s ideas of localizing and foreignizing, I aim to determine the losses and gains made by translating these two short stories. I will particularly be focusing on the issue of sexual politics, which is relevant in the short stories, and in this aspect, I argue, Ursua’s translations significantly alter Hemingway’s original short stories. Such alterations reveal key differences between the sexual politics of Hemingway’s world and that of ours, allowing for insights into the roles of language and translation in forming ideas about gender and sexuality.

In recent years, Russian scholars have shown increasing interest in the culture and literature of the Ewenki people of China. As an important component of Chinese ethnic minority literature, Ewenki literature first began to emerge in written form during the new historical era of socialist construction. The literary works of authors such as Ureltu (b. 1952), Tu Zhiyong (b. 1952), Anna (b. 1954), Qing Sheng (b. 1956), and Du Mei (b. 1963) have played a significant role in the development of Ewenki literature. Although only a few works by Ureltu and Qing Sheng have been translated into Russian, Ureltu remains the only author whose works have truly captured the attention and scholarly analysis of Russian academia. The first Russian translation of Ureltu's works can be traced back to the 1980s. Yet, it is only in the past five years that Russian scholars have begun to conduct academic research on his literary works. This phenomenon raises several questions: Why have Ureltu's works suddenly attracted the attention of Russian academia nearly forty years after their initial translation? How do Russian scholars understand and accept Ureltu’s literary creation? Are their interpretations of his works accurate? Are there instances of misinterpretation or omission in their readings of the texts? If so, what are the causes of such misreadings or omissions? By exploring these issues, we can gain a deeper understanding of the academic reception and dissemination of Ureltu’s works in Russia, and provide valuable insights for the cross-cultural transmission of Chinese Ewenki literature.

Prosaics is a new term proposed by American scholar Morson in 1988 during the study of Bakhtin's philosophy and literary ideas, as well as Tolstoy's novels. If Bakhtin proposed the polyphonic theory based on Dostoevsky's novels, then the prose nature of prosaic life in Bakhtin's theory is in line with Tolstoy's creative and philosophical aesthetics. This is a worldview prospect based on Bakhtin's Metalingustics or special prosaic disordered self-consciousness, by which to rethink the philosophy of life or creative philosophy. From Bakhtin's Literary theory to philosophical aesthetics, Bakhtin attempted to connect ethics with every moment of life, believing that all current perspectives on ethics are rigid, ignoring the most essential factors that deviate from the norm. Reflected in the following aspects. From a philosophical perspective, prosaics, It is a way of thinking, a way of viewing the essence of existence, the essence of the world and life, and a philosophy that is anti-ideologoical, emphasizing the importance of plain daily life.From the literary perspective: Russian literature has always had a systematic tradition of reflection, Tolstoy believed that "art only begins in the slightest." If poetry reflects moments of passion, prose often begins in a mundane and everyday way. In literary thought, it is related to poetics A relative term that includes novel，Putting it above the genre of poetry is Bakhtin's unique idea, as opposed to formalism poetic. For a long time, prose has been neglected by formalists, as well as strucruralism. Bakhtin did not simply replace poetics with prose studies, but completely changed the concept of literary genres. Bakhtin proposed new insights into literary form, which means that theories from Aristotle to Russian formalism need to be reassessed. and Bakhtin attempted to connect ethics with every moment of life, believing that all current perspectives on ethics are rigid, ignoring the most essential factors that deviate from the norm. The idea is precisely driven by the need for a correct understanding of the attributes of novels.

At the ethical level, both Bakhtin and Tolstoy have found unique ways to solve ethical problems. Bakhtin attempted to connect ethics with every moment of life, believing that all current perspectives on ethics are rigid, ignoring the most essential factors that deviate from the norm.

Lu Xun, one of the most influential figures in modern Chinese literature and intellectual history, made substantial contributions to the introduction of Western literature into China. As both a translator and editor, Lu Xun regarded translation not as a mere linguistic endeavor but as a profound instrument for expanding intellectual horizons and facilitating cultural transformation. He positioned literature as a medium through which to challenge entrenched traditions and provoke critical thought, particularly during a period of profound national crisis and social upheaval.

A Collection of Foreign Novels (Yuwai Xiaoshuo Ji), an important project edited and partially translated by Lu Xun in the early 20th century, serves as a notable example of his efforts to introduce Western literary works to Chinese audiences. The collection sought to reflect Lu Xun’s broader cultural and ideological aspirations by featuring translations of short stories and novellas from a diverse array of authors and languages.

Lu Xun’s approach to translation illustrates his conviction that literature should function as a tool for cultural critique and social transformation. His methodology combined fidelity to the original text with carefully considered adaptations that aligned with the linguistic and cultural sensibilities of Chinese readers.

In addition to the translated texts, the visual design of the collection—encompassing elements such as cover art and formatting—embodied a synthesis of Eastern and Western artistic traditions. This design approach symbolized the cross-cultural dialogue that Lu Xun sought to cultivate through his work.

As a whole, A Collection of Foreign Novels remains a paradigmatic example of Lu Xun’s contribution to modern Chinese literary and cultural history. It exemplifies his use of translation as a means to foster intellectual engagement and cultural renewal. This study investigates Lu Xun’s translation work within the collection, focusing on its historical context, source materials, and the strengths and limitations of his translation strategies, as well as the dynamic interactions between the translations and other paratextual elements of the collection. By doing so, it situates Lu Xun’s efforts within the broader cultural and intellectual transformations of early 20th-century China.

Karel Slavíček, S.J. (Yan Jiale, 1678-1735), born in the village of Imlamov in Moravia, joined the Society of Jesus in 1694. Skilled in music, mathematics, and astronomy, Slavíček's broad knowledge made him an ideal candidate for a mission to China. During his time there, he diligently learned Chinese and studied ancient Chinese texts, earning him the distinction of being the first Sinologist of the Czech Lands. In the 1930s, the Czech Jesuit Josef Vraštil compiled and translated Slavíček's letters into Czech from their original Latin. These letters were later edited and annotated by Czech Sinologist Josef Kolmaš, gathered and supplemented the correspondence between Slavíček and European astronomers. These letters are divided into two parts. The first consists of personal letters in which Slavíček shares his experiences as a missionary in China, including his initial impressions of the unfamiliar land, reflections on Chinese culture and morality, and the circumstances of his missionary work. As a missionary, Slavíček was a firsthand witness to the 18th-century debates on Chinese rituals, leaving invaluable documentation of this historical period.The second part comprises academic correspondence with European scholars. Slavíček made several significant cartographic and astronomical observations in China and sent his findings to Europe. His main correspondents were Teofil Sigfrid Bayer in St. Petersburg and Étienne Souciet in Paris. These letters, which cover a wide range of topics, delve into Chinese classical culture and hold substantial historical value for understanding European perspectives on Chinese advancements, particularly in mathematics and astronomy. This body of correspondence provides compelling evidence of Europe's profound interest in Chinese intellectual achievements during this period and stands as a significant record of the historical exchange of knowledge and culture between East and West. Moreover, it played a pivotal role in popularizing Oriental correspondence in 18th-century Europe, sparking widespread fascination with Chinese thought, customs, and scientific innovations.

This article explores Dostoevsky’s views on the “Eastern Question” as expressed in his journalistic and literary works, shedding light on how his perspective both mirrored and influenced Russian intellectual thought during the 19th century.

The “Eastern Question” which emerged in the early 18th century alongside the gradual decline of Ottoman power, evolved into a critical issue in international politics by the 19th century. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, European powers vied for control over political and economic interests in the Middle East, intensifying geopolitical competition.

In this context, the Russian Empire played a central role. Beginning with Peter the Great’s reign, Russia pursued the strategic goal of gaining access to the Black Sea. Over the course of nearly a century, this ambition became not only a defining feature of Russian foreign policy but also a key issue that resonated across all layers of Russian society, from the political elite to the common people, shaping both public discourse and national identity.

Dostoevsky viewed Russia’s actions as just, framing them as both a religious duty to protect Orthodox Christians and a historical mission to support Slavic peoples. In A Writer’s Diary, he depicted the “Eastern Question” not merely as a political challenge, but as a spiritual and cultural calling for Russia. He believed that resolving this issue could unite the Russian people in much the same way the Patriotic War of 1812 had, offering a solution to the social divisions that had deepened in the wake of Peter the Great’s reforms.

Dostoevsky’s perspective on the “Eastern Question” reflects broader currents in Russian nationalism and Pan-Slavism, positioning Russia as both the protector of Orthodox Christianity and a unifier of Slavic nations against European encroachment. His views underscore the complex interplay between geopolitics, religion, and national identity that defined Russia’s political landscape during this era.

Psychological Realism finds its expression in Eileen Chang’s works of fiction in the 1940s (“The Golden Cangue”, “Love in a Fallen City” and “The Jasmine Tea”), adding a touch of unique Modernist aesthetics to the literary texts. By analyzing and summarizing the rhetorical techniques as well as the stylistic characteristics of these texts, we could see that Eileen Chang consciously adopted stream of consciousness, free indirect speech and internal monologues to enrich the connotations of her works of fiction, which perfectly combine classical Chinese aesthetics with Western Modernism. The “discovery of the Interiority,” a defining feature of modern Japanese literature according to Kojin Karatani, was achieved by mild or stark contrast in Eileen Chang’s fiction in the 1940s.

Keywords: Eileen Chang; Interiority; stylistic characteristics; Western Modernity; Psychological Realism

A cigarette advertisement in 1933 featured the film star Hu Die in two different forms—sketch and photographic portrait—on the same page, creating a self-reflexive perspective of women’s situation when they were situated in business and arts by connecting the two portraits with a glance. This research starts with Hu Die’s cigarette advertisement, and analyzes how the visual spectacle created by the “double shooting technique” in the film “Kong Gu Lan” （《空谷兰》）replaces the reflection on women’s independence with the narration of family ethics. In Ding Ling’s novel “Meng Ke”（《梦珂》）, the protagonist projects a “second self” image in the mirror with the stimulation of cigarettes, which enables herself to accomplish the transformation from a student to a film star, and legitimizes the gaze relationship and desire structure with self-empathy, thus participating in the reproduction of the gaze mechanism. Ai Xia also created a fictional “second self” when she adapted the novel “A Modern Woman” （《现代一女性》） to a film script by rewriting the end of the story, which demonstrates the inner division and real dilemma of the modern girl and expresses the intrinsic sorrow which could have been articulated with the stimulation of cigarettes. By tracking the dual visual intoxication which crosses different genres, flowing among cigarette advertisements, early films, novels, and screenplays, the research probes the complex relationships among cigarettes, female, and subjectivity.

“Shengjiang Shengjing Tu” was published in 1884, in which the “Chinese Theater”featuring Yang Yuelou as the main character on stage. Its modern element, along with the previous report on the “Yang Yuelou Case” in Shen Bao Newspaper reflects the creator's sense of modernity. Through the “Yang Yuelou Case” in Shen Bao Newspaper and the “Chinese Theater” in “Shenjiang Shengjing Tu”, we can see the interconnection of modern identity among the famous characters, the media and the city, which reveals the emerging city culture in the late Qing Dynasty. The modern identity constructed by the famous characters, the media and the city leads to the fact that the masterminds and creators behind the scene, while constructing the image of Yang Yuelou and the symbol of Shanghai's modernity, also constructed their own identities; and through the famous characters and the media, they constructed the modernity of the city of Shanghai. In this way, the famous character Yang Yuelou, the “Yang Yuelou Case”, and the “Shenjiang Shengjing Tu” essentially refer to Shanghai's urban modernity and the modern significance of the newspaper publication industry of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty, and signify modern journalists’ understanding of Shanghainess based on the cultural dimension since the opening of the port of Shanghai.

As the inaugural tyrant of H.G. Wells' technocratic utopia, the figure of the Invisible Man, who possesses technological mastery but lacks moral compass, serves not only as an embodiment of technological threats but also as the presentation of the institutional and ethical vacuum that technological advancement inevitably brings. Since its initial cinematic adaptation in 1933, with Wells' personal involvement, the original work has become an enduring commercial film intellectual property. The Western world has subsequently produced nine representative films based on this story. The series entered China in the same year of its premiere, propelled by the intellectual community's admiration for Wells, and merged with the traditional Chinese imagination of the invisible man in Taoism, leading to the creation of a series of new works themed around the figure. The "invisible" as a modern imaginary of technological threats has initiated a diachronic contemplation across multiple contexts and national borders over a century of cinematic wandering, in the form of a thought experiment.

Within the pattern of diversity in unity of the Chinese civilization, the myths of Ba-Shu are harmoniously integrated yet distinct from those of the Central Plains,.Its regional mythological thinking, characterized by unique cultural features, can provide valuable enlightenment for contemporary people. From the perspective of quantum theory, this paper explores the characteristics of Ba-Shu mythological thinking from three aspects.First, empathetic thinking and inclusiveness. Quantum entanglement reveals a universal and subtle connection between living organisms, which shamans use to achieve spiritual communication. Sanxingdui has unearthed the most numerous and diversified shaman shapes in the country.As the birthplace of Wu culture, the Ba-Shu region demonstrates a strong mythological thinking characterized by its regional features. The animal composite figures unearthed at Sanxingdui, which often integrate features from multiple animals, reflect a cultural mentality of harmony and inclusiveness.Second, the fusion of time and space. The quantum tunneling effect transcends the limitations of classical physics on space-time, enabling individuals to achieve the transcendence of three-dimensional space-time in a special state of consciousness. The early development of astronomical and astrological culture in the Ba-Shu region reflects the ancestors' need to explore parallel universes and communicate with deities of the heavens and earth. The shapes, ranging from the "Tianmen" series to those representing different time-space dimensions, demonstrate the Ba-Shu ancestors' imagination of time-space travel.Third, image-thinking holographic narratives. The quantum field and the holographic principle reveal the wholeness of the universe, where the material world and the world of consciousness are interdependent, manifesting and concealing each other. The ancestors of Ba-Shu were good at figurative thinking and reproduced sacred matters through holographic narratives. These narratives primarily took the form of flat images that conveyed a sense of space, three-dimensional modeling of artifacts, and scene-based narrative of sacred matters.

如果说佛学提倡的是传统宗教思想上的生命升华，那么AI是呈现的则是科学思想上的生命追求。二者在生命认知上虽有各自的理论依据和表述逻辑，但作为宗教的佛学和作为科学技术的AI在生命叙述上都以“意识”为主体。笔者将从佛学和AI对生命“意识”的不同叙述差异出发，探讨佛学对当前AI研究方面的一些启示。

In the mythical narratives of the emperors of the Chinese dynasties, the myth of "Yu’s reward of black jade" was directly related to the mandate of heaven, the virtues of saints, the achievements of emperors, and the change of the royal power. These can be called the most core narrative element of the founding of a state and the divine right of kings. However, was the "black jade" appearing first in the myth of Yu related to the creation myth? What was the relevance? This paper uses the quadruple evidence method to explore the hidden facts and mainly focuses on the elements of the creation. It will highlight a clear clue about the narrative of the creation myth and the ritual performance "from the first separation of the earth and heaven by an axe to Yu’s reward of the black jade and then to the offering of sacrifices with black jade and the worship of the Orient with green jade in the elusive mythical narratives. The tools for the creation of the earth and heaven in China's narrative of the creation myth were an axe and a chisel, and the core tools in the myth of “Grand Yu Controls the Waters” were a mountain-cutting axe, black jade and a jade slip. All these tools were born directly or indirectly out of the axe and battle-axe. The “offering of sacrifices with black jade” and the “Oriental God of Xi” in the inscriptions on shells and animal bones in the Yin Dynasty, and the royal ceremony of "worshiping the Orient with green jade" in ancient books were undoubtedly the ceremonial illustration and inheritance of the creation myth.

In Three-Body, Liu Cixin employed the “Wallfacer Project” as a pivotal narrative device to re-define the theatrical display of human political power as a survival gambit on an interstellar scale, thereby deconstructing the epistemological and ethical frameworks of traditional political performance. Within this interstellar theater, the Wallfacers weaponize political performance into an informational warfare tool for civilizational survival through the absolute informational monopoly of “cognitive barricades” and the deceptive tactics of “strategic subterfuge”. The genuineness of performance is entirely suspended, plunging the audience — including the Three-body civilization, human society, and potential cosmic observers — into a deadly loop of the “chain of suspicion”. In this schema, the roles of performer and spectator dissolve into instrumentalized proxies for survivalist gamesmanship, while the traditional “performer-audience” relationship collapses into a zero-sum contest governed by the Dark Forest Law.

When performance becomes inextricably bound to species survival, Three-Body exposes the violent displacement of morality by technological rationality: Luo Ji’s deterrence ritual as the “Swordholder” reveals itself as a “civilizational trick”, where performative violence sustains the illusion of peace. By magnifying political performance on an interstellar stage, the novel not only lays bare the fictive nature of power narratives but also furnishes a dehumanized critique for posthuman performance through the ruthless logic of “cosmic sociology” — ultimately asserting that all performance is survivalist enactment of power in the existential crucible of civilizational continuity.

The Canonization of Gesar's Epic" for consideration for inclusion in the conference program. Gesar's Epic, characterized as a historical poem, is a long heroic epic formed by the accumulation of various cultural elements from Tibetan myths, historical narratives, cultural memories, customs, beliefs, and expressive discourse throughout different periods. In different eras, among different ethnic groups, and within varied historical contexts, continuously creating new versions of the epic. Moreover, through the recording, organizing, research, commentary, and further creative contributions by generations of eminent monks, wise sages, and scholar-literati, the process of its canonization has been persistently advanced. Gesar's Epic is a living classic. From its orally transmitted form to the written texts that have been recorded and organized, through literary historiography, diverse interpretations among different ethnicities, and its translation and dissemination both domestically and internationally, it has gradually established its status as a classic.

In traditional studies of violence, as a coercive means for the strong against the weak, violence reflects the strong will of the strong. Whether it is an innate biological instinct or the result of social upbringing, human beings need to confront to their own violence. René Girard, a famous contemporary French literary critic, anthropologist and religious scientist, has been thinking about violence all his life, and explores the roots of violence with mimetic anthropological theories. Mimetic anthropology mainly consists of three parts: mimetic desire, scapegoat mechanism and Biblical revelation. Mimetic desire is presented as a triangle with the desire subject, the mediator and the object as the apex, and Girard thus denies the linear structure of human desire from subject to object. The desire subject learns the object from the mediator and desires the same object with the mediator, which leads to interpersonal conflict and violence. In primitive society, when mimetic desire pervades, the differences between human beings are lost, the distinctions that are the basis of social order are dissolved, the members of the community confront each other and a sacrifice crisis breaks out. In the extreme chaos, mimesis draws the primitive people to activate scapegoat mechanism, and transform the chaotic violence of all against all into the unanimous violence of all against one. The Community executes the victim, social harmony is restored, and social order is reestablished. By running scapegoat mechanism, the community attributes its own violence to external violence, and in this way, obscures the truth of collective violence and prevents the demise of ancient societies and cultures. Therefore, Violence is the heart and soul of the sacred. Myth narrates the sacred, but also covers the sacred. Although the Bible is similar in structure and motif to myth and is also filled with narratives of violence, its narrative perspective is not that of the persecutor who perpetrates violence, but that of the victim who suffers it. Girard thus argues that Biblical revelation offers humanity the possibility of salvation from the mechanism of violence by replacing violence with love and forgiveness, renouncing all forms of violence. Mimetic anthropology combines the dual perspectives of persecutor and victim, taking into account the destructive force and the constructive force of violence, but its theoretical construction is only based on the meta-dynamic of mimesis. Girard left behind the historical and cultural context and social reality to talk about violence. The path of religious forgiveness and absolution as a solution to the reality of violence is doomed to a utopian bubble. Nowadays, the forms of violence are ever-changing, and the connotation and extension of violence have greatly expanded. Girard is unable to face the derivation of violence, and his path to solving violence is not practical or feasible.

Fan studies has been an interdisciplinary, or even anti-disciplinary, field of research. Scholars have drawn on methodologies from both literary studies and anthropology to analyze contemporary fan communities and their productions. However, some key terms and theories from anthropology have been applied arbitrarily and indiscriminately in fan studies, most notably the theory of the gift economy.

Digital fandom is often seen as an epitome of the gift economy in the digital age, within a world dominated by the capitalist market economy. This paper aims to examine the application of the term “gift economy” in fan studies and analyze the misunderstandings and idealizations associated with the concept. Two images or scenarios of the gift economy are frequently used as examples in fan studies: the first being the pre-modern potlatch referenced in Marcel Mauss’s seminal discussion of gift economies, and the second being the familial and acquaintance networks in the modern, atomized urban world, maintained by women’s affective labor and gifts.

While scholars in fan studies have correctly identified the similarities and parallels between fan culture and the gift economy, they often overlook the nuances in the dynamic interactions between the gift economy and the market economy, typically idealizing fan culture and positioning it as an alternative to the market economy. On the other hand, the application of the gift economy theory to fan cultural studies also opens up new perspectives. As fan culture becomes increasingly hybrid, it may be more productive to understand it through people's identification with and understanding of fan products, rather than through the binary between gift and merchandise.

An examination of the origin of the name "hollyhock" and its cultural connotations reveals that it is a native flower of Shu, southwest China. Its morphological characteristics, growth habits, and variety of colors are well documented in classical Chinese literature. As hollyhocks are planted overseas, their cultural status flows and elevates, embodying the idea of 'blooming inside the wall, more fragrant outside the wall.' The variation in the connotations of hollyhock across different civilizations exemplifies the dynamic flow of mutual appreciation among multiple cultures. This study revisits Euro-Asian encounters through the lens of hollyhock as a cultural clue, highlighting the themes of equal communication and cultural intermingling.

Rooted in protest against caste-based discrimination, overt and subtle, historical and mutating forms –Dalit literature from India provides a valuable archive of voices of lived-experience. An archive that represents over more than 160 millions of downtrodden population that is spread across the Indian subcontinent. Emanating from at the bottom of the social hierarchy, these voices preserve these cries and protests comparable to that of Slave narratives in the USA.

The first generation of Dalit writers from Maharashtra, (the home state of B.R. Ambedkar, the torch bearer of Dalit rights during Colonial India, and after independence) founded Dalit Panther Movement in 1972. Inspired by Black Panthers movement and their intellectual struggle, the founding members of Dalit Panthers would go on to provide a strong foundation for Dalit literature, as it is known today. Often rejected by the aesthetic tools rooted in upper caste poetics, Dalit literature attains its life from protest– against the very foundation of Classic Indian aesthetics of Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram (the true, the holy, the beautiful) as Sharankumar Limbale postulates.

However, I argue that it is not just an archive of Dalit protest, but “the Protest” that intersects with the voices of protests around the world. This juncture provides a fertile ground for examining Black-Dalit comparative and shared poetic discourse against the “Hegemonic” aesthetics. The presentation also argues in relevance of this converged spatio-temporal literary examination.

The proposed paper is comparative and synthesizing in nature. Presented considerations will be based on research on the literature after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and contemporary nonviolent resistance strategies. In my presentation, I would like to focus on novels that explore (centrally or otherwise) various forms of passive resistance and inconspicuous protests in the workplace. Since they are rarely concentrated on putting pressure on an employer, it may lead us to question their nature. Nowadays, it seems that this field should be expanded to include slightly different issues – reaching essentially to questions about the condition of the subject in general, changing attitudes to work (Great Resignation, quiet quitting, the FIRE, lazy girl job, tang ping, etc.) and the possibilities, effectiveness, and significance of protest in the contemporary world. I propose an analysis that frames Bartleby, The Scrivener (1853) by Herman Melville as a general point of reference for further interpretations of selected novels. I suggest understanding the protagonist’s quiet and pertinacious protest primarily as a disturbance against a workplace in general, deconstructing force in an established, rational, and productive world. Although inconspicuous and perplexing in its meaning, Bartleby’s protest is open and evident. It forces us to question the limits of resistance. The proposed presentation is based on well-known literature on nonviolent protest (among others: Gene Sharp, Helen Fox, James C. Scott, Kurt Schock, Stellan Vinthagen). Additionally, my presentations will use resources exploring the problem of exhaustion, burnout, and subjective passivity in contemporary culture. For instance, I will provide references to Gilles Deleuze’s The Exhausted, various works by Wolfgang Streeck, The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han as well as generation-oriented studies such Can’t Even. How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen. My presentation will focus on contemporary European, American, and Asian novels focused on young, female protagonists. In the selected novels we might recognize a recurring pattern of avoidance in the workplace or even against the workplace. The variety of strategies used in the novels will allow for showing the complexity of the titular dilemma and its cross-cultural differences. In the analysis, I propose to preliminary include such novels as The New Me by Halle Butler, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. I would propose to understand these novels with direct reference to various strategies of resistance, questioning the uses they make of the work-to-rule and passive resistance. I will ultimately ask what transformations of the subject can we recognize in the inconspicuous protest, avoidance and passivity that occurs in the workplace.

Zhao Chuan is a Chinese "social theatre" advocate and director. In his theatrical evolution from The World Factory(2014) to Homeland(2024), significant societal shifts, such as the 2018 Shenzhen Jasic Incident and the Blank Paper Movement during the pandemic, underscore the limitations and potential of collective action in contemporary China.

The World Factory (2014) uses a documentary theater approach to expose labor exploitation in the context of China’s capitalist expansion, invoking intellectual debates and embodying the spirit of a “social theater.” Yet, subsequent events, such as the Jasic Incident, in which factory workers and students advocating for union rights faced suppression, reveal the real challenges of mobilizing public resistance within China's tightening political sphere.

Homeland (2024) moves inward, emphasizing personal migration stories and everyday life challenges rather than overt social critique. During the COVID-19 pandemic, collective frustration and grief intensified under strict lockdown policies, sparking the Blank Paper Movement. Citizens gathered, holding blank sheets of paper as a silent protest against censorship and pandemic restrictions. This symbolic gesture illustrates the shift in public expression from direct demands to more subdued yet resonant forms of dissent—a shift mirrored in Zhao’s own artistic transition.

Through Homeland, Zhao explores how individual life stories and shared emotional experiences can foster a new kind of public engagement, suggesting that while traditional avenues for collective action may be restricted, the potential for social cohesion remains. The essay ultimately argues that while Zhao’s theater reflects a decline in visible social critique, it gestures toward a resilient, empathy-driven civil sphere that resonates powerfully in a society where collective action is increasingly complex.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter der Reproduzierbarkeit, explored the link between technical reproducibility and the demise of authenticity and tradition. The concept of an original, central to traditional translation theories based on fidelity, also erodes. Benjamin wrote:

"The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. [...] The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction."

"One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition."

Cinema, as the apex of reproductive technology for Benjamin, entails “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” How, then, can we rethink translation in a post-tradition world, where the distinction between original and copy has lost meaning?

Vilém Flusser suggests we have shifted from the era of technical reproduction to synthetic images and life. If so, we are also in a post-reproduction and post-translation culture. Translation once relied on historical culture and an individual detached from the public sphere. Now, in the era of synthetic images, new self-images of humanity emerge, surpassing not just historical perspectives but also modern translation. Thus, translation has, over the 20th century, become a literary genre.

To post-tradition, we must add post-translation. This is clear when a screen touch produces instant text versions in nearly any language, or when films on streaming platforms launch in dozens of languages at once. Often, we cannot identify the “original language” of these works.

Yet, as languages circulate synthetically, merging in a boundless process of multi-circulation that fosters cultural porosity, the opposite occurs with human bodies. Borders increasingly exclude, turning into quasi-concentration camps. Dead bodies drift in the Mediterranean, stereotyped as unacceptable and undesirable.

This paper links these two phenomena: the absolute hospitality of post-translational synthetic versions, enabled by new technologies, and the hostile bordering of the world, fostering racism and deadly zones of untranslatability.

This paper aims to examine the links between memoir-writing, imagination and translation, particularly when the latter is understood as an experience of exile. Building on past work on the intersection between the concepts and narrative experiences of ‘translation’ and ‘exile’, (Lopes 2016, 2020, 2021), the reflection now proposed will continue the enquiry focusing, this time, on Out of Place. A Memoir (2000), by Edward Said. The memoir will be read against the author’s considerations about exile.

The paper will discuss the ways in which memoir and exile (re)create a diverse geography of experience, enhanced by the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of existence that are impulses – sometimes metaphorical (values, habits, rituals, ways of life), sometimes literal (languages) – for a form of translation that brings together memory and imagination.

Said’s work, significantly entitled Out of Place, summons up the concepts (and experience) of ‘displacement’, ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘banishment’, to translate the idea (and experience) of loss: ‘Out of Place is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world’, as the author states in its preface (2000: xiii). To this extent, Said's memoir, written during a period marked by other vulnerabilities, evokes a world that only exists in memory (and/or imagination) and in its verbalisation – processes that I read as acts of translation, which (re)imagine, in different circumstances and languages, an otherwise unrecoverable past.

Particularly relevant to this (attempt at) recovery is the search for a home that has been lost as a sign of identity and stability, because ‘[e]xile is [...] the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (Said 2002: 174). Salman Rushdie calls this sadness a double feeling of unbelonging – homelessness results from a literal translation in space, exposing the displaced person to a daily life inhabited by (potential) untranslatability and, paradoxically, the need for constant processes of linguistic, cultural and experiential translation, as well as constant reimagination of the self.

Spatial displacement causes an emotional slippage condemning exiles to an ‘elsewhereness’ of experience - a kind of deictic wandering, for they never fully belong ‘here’ nor ‘there’, a state of perpetual translation between ‘here’ and ‘there’ –, making them at once vulnerable and a sign of late modernity. By attempting to recover a lost world, Said is arguably reinventing it, ‘creat[ing] fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1991: 10) – as such, re-membering is arguably always in itself an act of translated, imaginative, and provisional reassemblage.

The scholarly tradition that links notions of translation and hospitality has frequently focused on the linguistic and philosophical connections between hospes and hostis, the host and the enemy. The negative connotations of this approach and its imagery become all the more powerful – indeed, dramatic – as technology comes to play an increasingly powerful role both in managing practices of translation and in mediating processes of hospitality. A possible alternative route seeks to avoid or at least mitigate such binary, confrontational models by pointing instead towards (imperfect, unfinished) forms of translation as copresence and collaboration. Following suggestions that emerge from philosophical approaches to linguistic hospitality (especially Ricouer, Sur la traduction, 2004) as well as experiential accounts of translation practices (such as Mireille Gansel’s Traduire comme transhumer, 2012), this paper will reflect on the ‘hopeful’ reading of translation as a form of (ongoing, incomplete) hospitality based on the acknowledgement that ‘otherness’ is always already here, always already present.

Nietzsche has reportedly stated that “[o]ur writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts” (qtd in Carr, The Shallows, 2010: 19). If this is so, it affects a writer’s performance and perception of both the text and the surrounding world.

Drawing on Thomas O. Beebee’s transmesis – a term which refers to “literary authors’ use of fiction to depict acts of translation” (2012: 3) – this paper explores literary fictions of translators as sites of human imagination that engage with public perceptions, expectations, and collective images of translation and translators, and how we deal with “the foreign and the domestic”, “understand ourselves and others” (Kaindl, “The Remaking of the Translator’s Reality”, 2018). Interest in these fictions has been growing in the field of translation and translator studies, especially over the last decade. Scant attention has, however, been paid to translators’ writing tools and how they may shape notions of translation, translators' working habits and methods, and translators’ affective response to their work, otherness, and the world around them. Whether semi-organic (pen) or technology-mediated (computer), writing tools allow translators to express a double voice and subjectivity, theirs and that of the author they are translating, and to perform their own creativity. In this sense, translators’ writing tools can make translation a site of hospitality or, by contrast, of hostility.

This exploratory study conceptualises translators’ writing instruments as a plot device by comparing through a close reading approach three literary representations of translators into, from, and somehow related to the Japanese language: Hotel Iris (Y. Ogawa, 1996); The Translator (N. Schuyler, 2013); and The Extinction of Irena Rey (J. Croft, 2024). The first narrative portrays the translator’s pen as a haptic experience that eventually symbolises destruction, that is, the translator’s ability to inflict harm on others and his translation through his hands. Schuyler’s novel openly questions translation as “a mechanical process” (23) and explores the power of chalk on a blackboard as the metaphorical enactment of the translator’s “black box”, one which challenges the authorial auctoritas. Croft’s novel has no Japanese translators, but Japanese hovers as a fetish language of international consecration into which the author “most earnestly” desired (16) to be translated. The author, who goes missing, and her eight translators all use computers in contrast to the natural environment of the forest where they are translating. Despite the presence of the digital, suspicion arises as to its reliability.

In a nutshell, the aim is to assess how fictional translators’ different writing tools shape conceptualisations of translation and ways of feeling, perceiving, and hosting otherness – i.e., the foreign language, the source text, and translation itself.

This paper explores pseudotranslation as a mode of composing texts, proposing it as a specific way of positioning the writing self as fluid in terms of culture, language, geography, and identity. This proposal builds on B. Rath’s (2014) suggestion to conceptualize pseudotranslation within Comparative Literature as a mode of reading. Departing from Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Rath urges World Literature scholars to explore pseudotranslation in relation to imagination and hospitality.

I wish to extend Rath’s proposal so as to explore how pseudotranslation may also serve as a mode of composing a text and, consequently, a way of conceiving authorship. The analysis will focus on Montesquieu’s text and two of Voltaire’s Oriental fables (1746 and 1747), examining the image and positioning of the textual author. These three narratives share a common setting in imagined Oriental spaces — namely, (an invented) Persia, Persepolis, and ancient Babylonia. Voltaire wrote The World as It Goes and Zadig or the Fate during a period of Oriental vogue at the French court, epitomized by the 1745 event where the entire court dressed à la turque for the wedding of the heir apparent (Pomeau, 1996: 93). Notably, the concept of masquerade has recently been linked to pseudotranslation (Lopes, 2016; Moniz, 2024).

Thus analysis is grounded in historical data on 18th-century French literary pseudotranslations and contemporary reflections on the embodied nature of translation. Allthree pseudotranslations under discussion were published anonymously, and both Montesquieu and Voltaire never officially claimed authorship, as convincingly demonstrated by Michael Cardy (2021). This reluctance to own the texts, even after their names appeared in paratextual frames (issued by the publishers), may be interpreted as evidence that their writing was shaped more by a translational imagination than by reliance on domestic repertoire. This approach inherently entails an experience of disguise and otherness.

Cardy, M. 2021. Le monde comme il va: critical edition by Michaer Cardy. In: Voltaire 3B Oeuvres de 1746-1748 (II). Voltaire Foundation.

Lahiri, J. 2022. Translating Myself and Others. Princeton University Press.

Lopes, A. 2016. “Invisible man: sketches for a portrait of Mário Domingues, intellectual and (pseudo)translator”. In Authorizing Translation, ed. Michelle Woods, 61-79. Routledge.

Moniz, M. L. 2024. “Pseudotraduções em Portugal (1930-1989)”. In Tradução e tradutores em Portugal: um contributo para a sua história (séculos XVIII-XIX), org. Teresa Seruya, 347-393. Tinta da China.

Pomeau, R. 1996. “Note sur Le Monde comme il va”. In Voltaire. Romans et Contes, 93-94. GF Flammarion.

Rath, B. 2014. "Pseudotranslation." In ACLA. State of the Discipline Report.

David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly is a subversive rewriting of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera Madama Butterfly. Focusing on the film’s capacity to shift between characters’ subjective shots, the essay argues that as multiple internal focalizors coexist in M. Butterfly, their respective takes and shots combine to form a kind of “synergy” to constantly configure and reconfigure the power hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, etc. in the storyworld. In this way, the film deconstructs the rigid male/female, West/East oppositions delivered by the original opera through, among other factors, the highly fixed focalization typical of stage performance. A more universal claim based on the case study thus emerges: the dynamic nature of cinematic focalization could be visual cues inviting the audience to enter various ideological perspectives and unwittingly engage with their mutual dialogues.

This paper attempts a comparative analysis between Korean Sijo Poetry and ‘Indian traditions of haiku’ – particularly in sijo poems composed by Korean poet Yi Un-Sang and translated by Jaihiun Kim; and Indian author Rabindranath Tagore’s haiku poems in his book Stray Birds (1916). In the poetic world of short ‘verse libre’ where imagist poems of Western modernism may have held central attention for decades, an Asian turn has foregrounded Japanese ‘haiku’ and Korean sijo poetry in a new way. Yi became an influential figure in the history of today’s sijo and contributed largely to the nation’s literature. However, in Indian subcontinent, Rabindranath Tagore explored ‘haiku-like’ epigrammatic verses in his Stray Birds (1916) – a work that was translated by Tagore himself from his poetry collections Kanika (1899) and Lekhan (1926). Within their form and structure, both sijo and haiku evoke one single image/ concern in each poem; but the difference lies in their literary traditions as well as cultural variations. Both haiku and sijo poetry explore deep observations on natural phenomenon or regular life activities and offer perspectives of literary wellbeing in this process. From recent studies of positive cross-cultural psychology (PCCP), wellbeing scholar Tim Lomas proposes a model of “universal relativism” that includes “a universalising stance that looks for commonalities between people of different cultures, and a relativistic perspective focused on particularity, pluralism and difference.” (Lomas 69). The present paper offers a cross-cultural reading of both Yi Un-Sang and Tagore’s works to examine if readers can find textual tools for mindfulness practice. It also invites further exposure towards holistic wellbeing through shared human nature despite diverse cultural values.

This panel comprises 04 (four) essays, each reading select Bangladeshi and (South) Korean literary and cultural texts with a view to exploring the network of genetic and typological inter-animation. It is an initial phase of a longer project that intends to explore the known and the chiefly unknown connections between (South) Korea and Bangladesh that many literary and cultural texts in Korean and Bangla languages testify to. The idea of this panel was triggered by two recent events: first, once Han Kang won her Nobel in 2024, the iconic status of Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Laureate, in Korea resurfaced, and, second, a recent revaluation of Birangona (women raped during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War) brought to the fore the Korean translation (by Seung Hee Jeon) of shaheen Akhtar’s novel, Talaash.

Culling insights from Dionýz Ďurišin’s concepts of interliterariness, this panel defines ‘genetic contact’ as the elements of similarities/ connections due to factual contact and ‘typological affinity’ as the elements of similarities in spite of no evidenced factual contact.

The panel broaches four dimensions in order to render its study range interdisciplinary and accommodative:

1. Korean and Bangladeshi aesthetics: Aynun Zaria’s paper takes resource from Byung Chul-Han’s Saving Beauty (2017) with a view to underscoring the ways Bangladeshi consumers received and postprocess the concepts and notions of ‘plastic beauty’ generated chiefly through K-drama that has a huge fan-following in Bangladesh.

2. Korean and Bangladeshi poetics: Jarin Tasneem Shoilee’s paper explores how Korean sijo poetry has impacted the generation and updating of haiku- and sijo-styled poetry in Bangla. Situating the poems in the transcultural planetary nexus of ideas and praxis, the paper locates ways in which literatures offer mental wellbeing across cultures.

3. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma 1 – sexual violence: Mashrur Shahid Hossain’s paper offers a long awaited comparative reading of narratives about and by women who were sexually abused in times of conflict – Korean ‘Comfort Women’ during the rule of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces and Bangladeshi ‘Birangona’ during the 1971 Liberation War. The essay concentrates on women’s management of rage, resistance, and resilience in response to sexual abuse.

4. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma management 2 – diaspora: Redwan Ahmed’s essay compares novels by two diaspora writers to explore commonalities that migration-induced trauma generates across time and space. The essay contends that both Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko testify to the common means through which migrant people manage their identities and lives in the hostlands.

The panel wishes to initiate an affirmative critical-affective dialogue on the potential of increasing trans-cultural and inter-lingual exchange between South Korea and Bangladesh.

The paper utilizes three award-winning biofictions in English, French, and Chinese, namely Blonde by Joyce Carols Oates from the US, La Septième Fonction du Language by Laurent Binet from France, and the Yanxia Alley by Wei Wei from PRC, to discuss how these novels do in narration from a comparative approach. In regard to narration, it is found that three biofictions do the narration in a chronically timed sequence, in which the novels begin with the start of the hero’s life at a certain stage or heroines’ life. Regarding the narration techniques, flashbacks as well as the plain prose is utilized in telling the story about the hero or heroines. The plots and characters bildung are considered worthy of researching into these three biofictions in which major events or interesting episodes have illustrated and expanded different lives of hero and heroines in the works. It is concluded that biofiction as a genre of novels is differentiated from biography, autobiography or autobiographical novel in that biofiction is a fiction genre based on the essence of the hero or heroine with fiction as the major elements.

This paper analyzes the experimental expressions that intentionally reveal the objectifying capability of film in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971) to argue that the formal practices of defamiliarization in both films elicit a sense of uncanniness and disorientation as well as present an aesthetic of non-humanness. These formal practices involve manipulations of elements such as time, visibility, and human bodies, thereby showcasing mechanical performativity and multiple layers of visual objectification. The aesthetics of objectification or alienation transform filmic images into a potential platform for dialogues between Marxist materialism and New materialism.

The two films will be discussed in the contexts of post-war avant-garde art, Japanese New Wave cinema, and sociocultural movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. Both Double Suicide and Demons were funded by Art Theatre Guild and adapted from theatrical plays; they exhibit an intended incomplete fusion of theatrical and filmic conventions, presenting themselves as attempts at anti-naturalism cinema and the exploration of artistic expressions. The repetitions of similar or entirely distinct shots within a single scene in Demons disrupt the linear narrative, illustrating the distortion of time and the inversion of life and death achieved through film editing. The exposure of the artificiality and plasticity of the images also serves as a critique of historicism in relation to the grand narrative. Double Suicide uncovers the hidden labor of puppeteers, who are deliberately ignored in Bunraku puppet performances and can be interpreted as representatives of the working class. These puppeteers are invisible to the diegetic world as they guide the human characters toward the conclusion of suicide, thereby implying the spectral nature of the unseen agents. On the one hand, the objectifying depictions of human beings in these two films are reminiscent of the Marxist critique of alienation, which aligns with the sociopolitical resistance movements of that time. On the other hand, by reducing human images to graphical elements, such as lines and color blocks, these cinematic portrayals render humans as manipulable and inorganic as non-human entities and inanimate objects. This simultaneously uncanny and visually pleasing aesthetic reflects the central idea of Object-Oriented Ontology, which considers all beings as objects.

In addition, the uncanny performativity exhibited by both films is closely tied to film as a medium. The perceivable cinematic apparatus functions as an interventional supernatural force, introducing a surreal dimension to the images. This paper further explores the connections between critical thoughts on the film medium’s potential and the aforementioned aesthetic expressions.

Kleist’s queer marionettes (1810), Haraway’s anti-identitarian cyborgs (1985), and Murakami’s wind-up bird (1994) offer us instances of post-human glitches that resist normalizations despite their embodied precarities. Hardt and Negri’s “new post-human bodies (Empire 2013) and Latour’s confrontation of “the time of the Anthropocene” (2014) demand a remapping of the human as conventionally traced, in order to recognize it as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). The Comparative Gender Studies Research Committee invites presentations on both earlier and contemporary materials related to the congress theme “Technology and Comparative Literature.” We particularly encourage submissions from scholars, writers, and activists that investigate how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and/or mental health conditions when considered in relation to gender and sexuality. We seek papers reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities We will attend to technology in both our potentially posthuman virtuality as well as earlier moments of simulacra through interrogating all 6 terms: precarious, mediation, queer, body, virtual, and space. Mindful that a session on precarity offered in the privileged context of an international congress needs to adopt a position of allyship and avow its positionality, this session will recognize those who for various reasons are unable to be present. Papers might consider precarious labor, contrareproductivity, queer temporality, homonationalism, queer counterpublics, queering technological affordances, cooptation and fragility, queering conventional technologies, transmediation, queer play and gaming, fanfiction and queer networks, affect and ambivalence, technologies of identity, queer(ing) AI.

As the war in Ukraine moves into its third year, interrogations of its effects on the lives of those directly involved with the conflict offer outside observers poignant, often painful, glimpses into how human process and emerge from the trauma of war. This paper examines two Ukrainian cultural projects that offer two distinct approaches and perspectives on responding to the aftermaths of war: the film «Східний фронт» [Eastern Front] (2023), Manskij and Titarenko, dirs., and current performances of “Cultural Forces,” a musical ensemble of active-duty Ukrainian soldiers. Each of these provocative texts offers a distinctive approach to how its Ukrainian actors have been affected by the war during its first two years. Eastern Front uses the documentary film genre to portray the human cost of the war through depictions of the treatment to animal “victims” caught in the conflict. The group “Cultural Forces” uses a narrative concert format for its soldier/musicians to perform their trauma in front of its audiences. Questioning anthropocentric methodology (Callicott 2002) as hegemonic in favor instead of critical pluralism, or a “studying up” perspective (Plumwood 2002), which encourages self-reflection and contemplation of the human condition, the paper considers how each of these texts succeeds in relating the posthuman in its own vernacular. It considers the place of the human and nonhuman animals in conveying and processing the trauma of war and how disparate posthuman approaches to trauma can succeed in creating spaces for critical pluralism in their performances.

In this paper I trace the queer negotiations of love, loneliness, queerness, and disability in two speculative fiction novels: Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 science fiction novel Klara and the Sun and Ottessa Moshfegh's 2022 dark fantasy novel Lapvona. Specifically, I argue that both novels deploy their respective SF generic conventions to queer and render ambivalent the desire for interpersonal intimacy and love through a process whereby an object otherwise understood as interior-such as selfhood or love-is offloaded onto a setting, plot, or set of narrative circumstances that are other than the logics of the so-called real world. Both Klara and Lapvona, I argue, have a unique investment in speculatively externalizing love through an unrequited love for an Other of cosmic scale: Klara, the robot narrator of Ishiguro's novel, loves the Sun and Marek, the deformed boy at the center of Lapvona, desperately seeks the love of God. In both novels, I read love as being arrived at through a counterintuitive, complete elimination of the self, and such elimination of the self in turn being mediated by the speculative contexts for each novel's narrative. Klara's nature as a robot renders her outside the central love story she has been programmed to support as an "artificial friend" and the sociopolitical structure of Marek's medieval fiefdom corrodes the possibility of connection between people. However, I finally present such externalization as intimately intertwined with a queer and disabled mode of being and suggest that speculative externalization has much to contribute to queer theory and disability studies, with Klara and Marek experiencing disability and impairment as well as engaging in queer attachments to other characters, to their cosmic Others, and to themselves. Of special interest to this end are Ahmed's queer critique of happiness, Halberstam's queer failure, and Kafer's and Muñoz's respective figurations of futurity, both crip and queer. It is through the disruption of normative emotional and physical movement through the world-from Klara's malfunctioning and her distant interpretation of, but fierce investment in, human affect, to Marek's belief that physical pain and cruelty are themselves signifiers of loving connection—that Ishiguro and Moshfegh present modes of intimacy, loving, and connection that are uniquely speculative, queer, and crip.

The finite dimensions of the relationship between man and woman have been prescribed by man and not by woman. Modern woman prefers to exercise- her choice and break away from her traumatic experiences. Women are now portrayed as more assertive, more liberated in their view and more articulate in their expression than the women of the past. Instead of suffering at the hands of her husbands or other males, she has started asserting her identity. Whether it is Devi of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, Sarita of Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors, Lucy of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chantal of Milan Kundera's Identity, the women have established a coherent class structure- one of assertion of identity and defiance of male supremacy and protest at being subordinated by man.

Devi, the protagonist of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, is unable to stand her husband's non-recognition of her abilities. She is married to a Regional Manager of a multinational company and she is to him just a woman – a woman to be tried down to house hold chores, a woman who has no right to aspire to become anybody other than a full time housewife. Devi leaves Mahesh, unable to cope up with his attitudes; she runs away from home to Gopal, her neighbour's brother. But here, too she finds herself suffocated. And ultimately she defies and leaves him too to live in her own home by the sea.

Margaret Atwood is one of the pioneer of contemporary Canadian women fiction in English. Her The Edible Woman became the epoch making voice owing to her abiding commitment for women's identity, the layers and levels of consciousness in a male – chauvinistic society and the myriad meanings of men-women encounter. It is considered to be a manifesto of postcolonial women sensibility and sensitivity where states of marginality and 'otherness' are seen as sources of energies for potential change and progress. Atwood explores the themes like victimization and survival, the question of female identity, the politics of gender alienation of women in a male dominated society, the narrow delimiting definition of a woman and her function in society and man's attempt to destroy the self-hood of women. It is through the character of Marian, the writer has exhibited that a woman will be consumed if she projects herself as an 'edible' object.

The paper intends to present a comparative stance of the two novels – Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night and Atwood's The Edible Woman. On the one hand Hariharan depicts the male domination, the male unwillingness to identify Devi's individuality, while on the other Atwood has talked about the emergences of 'new woman', not as a consumer product but as a woman transforming the marginal experiences into a creative force. The paper will also analyse comparatively the perspectives of both the writers - Githa Hariharan and Margaret Atwood, the one from the Indian viewpoint and the other from the Canadian angle.

The article begins by examining the passages related to Cao Xueqin to provide a sketch of his character in the Hong Kong novel The Drunkard by Liu Yichang. Subsequently, Cao Xueqin’s character in The Drunkard is compared with his image established by Hu Shi’s ‘The Dream of the Red Chamber: Search for Evidence’, a pioneering article in Chinese New Redology. This comparative examination aims to unveil the parallels and disparities between the two representations of Cao Xueqin. The relationship between the ‘two Cao Xueqins’ is then examined with reference to the concept of ‘old tales retold’, signifying the recontextualization of classical Chinese narratives in contemporary frameworks, thus endowing them with renewed significance. To provide a detailed elucidation of the ‘old tales retold’ concept, one of Liu Yichang’s Cao Xueqin-related short stories, ‘Chinese New Year’s Eve’, will be used as an illustrative example. The article then turns to clarifying the significance of the 'old tales retold' in the study of the comparative history of East Asian literature.

Chinese translators Wu Tao, Zhou Zuoren, and Shi Zhecun translated the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz's short story "The Lighthouse Keeper" in 1907, 1909, and 1935, respectively. Notably, none of them translated from the original Polish text. This article explores the reasons behind these translators' choices to translate "The Lighthouse Keeper," their distinct translation characteristics, and how these translations reflect the early 20th-century Chinese literary community's acceptance and adaptation of foreign literature. This is significant in the context of empathy towards and solidarity with literature from small and weak nations, showcasing the complexity of cultural exchange among Asian literatures. Wu Tao's translation was derived from a Japanese version, specifically selected from the magazine Taiyō (The Sun). During the late Meiji period, the literary community responded to the government's calls for nationalism and praised national writers like Sienkiewicz. Therefore, it is not surprising that Wu Tao encountered Sienkiewicz's works in Taiyō. Simultaneously, Zhou Zuoren was studying in Japan, where he followed Japanese and western publications. Like other late Qing intellectuals, he was concerned with new ideas, particularly feeling empathy and solidarity with "small and weak nations." In 1909, Zhou and his brother Lu Xun published The Collected Works of Foreign Fiction, which included Zhou's translation of "The Lighthouse Keeper." His translation was based on Jeremiah Curtin's English version. Given Zhou's extensive reading, it is likely he encountered the Japanese translation in Taiyō, but he opted for the English version, disregarding the Japanese text. By the time Shi Zhecun translated "The Lighthouse Keeper," it was already the 1930s. The concern for small and weak nations had become a consensus among the educated class. At this point, Shi Zhecun translated a book called The Polish Short Story Collection, including "The Lighthouse Keeper." Wu Tao's translation was significantly influenced by the Japanese version, exhibiting traces of Sino-Japanese Daoist culture in its wording and sentence structure. Zhou's translation primarily employed a literal approach but adopted classical language. In contrast, Shi Zhecun responded to the call of the times by using accessible vernacular. Shi Zhecun's translation of Sienkiewicz's works began with "The Lighthouse Keeper," after which he continued to translate other works by the Polish author. Wu Tao's focus on Taiyō allowed him, without having studied in Japan, to be among the first to translate works that would later receive sustained attention in the Chinese literary translation community. As familiarity with small and weak nation literature grew, translators gradually obtained translated texts beyond the Japanese versions, slowly breaking free from Japan's influence. By the 1930s and 1940s, sustained attention to specific authors led to a rich output that had a more direct social impact.

This essay offers a timely exploration of abjection, hatred, and the transformative potential of forgiveness, using the gripping narratives of Han Kang’s Human Acts and Julia Kristeva’s philosophical work Hatred and Forgiveness. In an era marked by political division, collective trauma, and a heightened awareness of social injustices, the concepts of hate and forgiveness take on renewed significance. This essay will not only bridge literature and psychoanalytic theory but will also invite critical reflection on how these themes resonate with contemporary efforts for healing and reconciliation.

The presentation begins with Kristeva’s theoretical framework of abjection—a state where boundaries between self and other are blurred, leading to feelings of revulsion and alienation. Central to this is her analysis of the maternal body and the pre-Oedipal phase, where the “abject” first emerges. In the modern context, these insights reveal how trauma disrupts identity, sparking visceral responses that often defy rationality.

Building on this foundation, the essay then analyses Human Acts, where abjection vividly manifests amid the violence and dehumanisation of the Gwangju Uprising. Through poignant examples, including graphic portrayals of bodies and characters’ intense, physical reactions to trauma, we will examine how Han Kang employs abjection to depict trauma as an embodied experience—a reality faced by many in today’s turbulent world. In Kang’s text, blood, bodily fluids, and corpses become symbols of suppressed memories that haunt individuals and collective identities alike, illustrating Kristeva’s notion of the “abject” as a visceral confrontation with the limits of human endurance.

From this place of abjection, the essay traces an evolution to hatred, drawing on Kristeva’s theory and Han Kang’s literary insights. Trauma in Human Acts breeds rage and resentment, spurring characters towards revenge and despair. We will draw comparisons between the unnamed prisoner in Human Acts and Pierre, a patient in Kristeva’s Hatred and Forgiveness, exploring how each grapples with hatred born of traumatic violations. These stories reveal how abjection can fester into hatred, and in turn, how unchecked hatred may fracture communities and hinder personal healing—a compelling message for today’s world.

Finally, the essay will examine Kristeva’s notion of forgiveness. Beyond a simple ethical imperative, Kristeva envisions forgiveness as a challenging, transformative path, demanding deep self-reflection and confronting the complexities of shared humanity. We will explore whether Kang’s characters, shaped by violence and grief, can embark on such a journey. By analysing the roles of art, language, and memory in Human Acts, the essay highlights ways trauma might be confronted and re-integrated, both individually and collectively. Ultimately it aims to provoke a discussion on trauma and healing, moving beyond binaries of victim and perpetrator.

The emerging field of Sino-Japanese studies has, in recent decades, shed light on literary exchanges between China and Japan, long shaped by the tradition of “brushtalk”. However, at the turn of the 20th century, intra-Asian intellectual exchanges intensified in multiple directions, fostering greater mobility for women. This paper follows the trajectory of Sino-Japanese studies by examining the writings of Chinese women who traveled to Japan and Japanese women who visited China between 1900 and 1940, as their diverse works reveal a renewal of the poetic travel tradition between the two countries.

In the early 20th century, many Chinese women traveled to Japan for education before returning home to disseminate Japanese feminist ideas, engaging in poetic and feminist journals. This collective feminine experience of travel to Japan is notably reflected in the works of Qiu Jin, whose shi, ci, and tanci, such as "Jingwei shi", urge Chinese women to cross the Eastern Sea. Conversely, numerous Japanese women traveled to China, renewing the Chinese tradition of guji poetic itinerary while discovering Chinese women’s lives. Akiko Yosano’s work thus evolves from a poetic writing of her first crossing of China, in "Natsu yori aki e" (1914), to a blend of prose and poetry in both Chinese and Japanese in "Manmō yūki" (1928), which depicts her travel in Manchuria. This prose-poetry alternation is also found in Hayashi Fumiko’s travelogues from the 1930s, such as "Furansu iki" (1933) and "Hokugan butai" (1939). While Yosano and Hayashi’s writings reflect the growing influence of nationalism on Japanese women writers—mirroring the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment in China—this paper will also consider dissenting voices offering counter-narratives. Alongside her diary-like account of her life in Japan, "Guimao lüxing ji" (1903), Shan Shili translated Japanese educational manuals advocating the Meiji-era ideal of “good wives and wise mothers”, which contrasted with contemporary feminist circles. Similarly, amid rising anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1930s, Lu Yin’s "Dongjing Xiaopin" (1930–1931) offers a strikingly different perspective during her stay in Tokyo, portraying Japanese women’s kindness and generosity. She also contrasts Japanese feminism with the country’s rigid social structure, which remains an obstacle to women’s emancipation.

This paper aims to provide a nuanced overview of the collective and individual voices of women navigating between China and Japan during a period of both intensified exchanges and escalating conflicts. What roles do women play in shaping representations of China and Japan, and how do they contribute to the circulation of texts and ideas between the Chinese and Japanese shores? Finally, how does crossing the Eastern Sea, allowing Chinese and Japanese women to observe a feminine Other, influence their writing?

This is a holding request for a multi-person panel, the ICLA Theory Research Committee

"Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" is an aesthetic treatise by Schiller, revised from his earlier "Correspondence" with the Duke of Augustenburg, in which the adoption of the epistolary style is particularly worthy of deep consideration. In both the "Correspondence" and the "Letters," Schiller elevates the epistolary form as the highest ideal of a "beautiful style," and through this form conveys a practical path that diverges from rationalist and systematic philosophical writing. Even so, compared to the "Correspondence," the use of the epistolary form in the "Letters" is somewhat weakened. The subtle revisions from the "Correspondence" to the "Letters" suggest differences in their intended audience and political intentions. For Schiller, form is not merely a vehicle and intermediary of expression but is also an intrinsic constitutive element of thought. The isomorphic relationship among beautiful style, complete humanity, and a free polity reveals the potential of stylistic form in shaping ideal humanity, ultimately pointing toward his practical approach to aesthetic education.

This study examines the often overlooked impact of Mao Tse-tung on Raymond Williams’ theoretical framework. Utilizing Raymond Williams’ seminal work, Marxism and Literature, in conjunction with Mao Tse-tung’s On Literature and Art, the study delves into their mutual influence on the function, definition, and implementation of committed writing. The analysis focuses on how Williams, drawing inspiration from Mao Zedong’s literary thought, scrutinized the intricate interplay between literature and society, as well as aesthetics and politics. Furthermore, the paper investigates how Williams incorporated Mao’s concept of “integration” into his construction of the path for writers committed to championing the cause of the working class and the underprivileged. Ultimately, the study probes into the myriad factors that influenced Williams’ reception and adaptation of Mao’s ideas, ranging from his familial background and the historical and political zeitgeist of his era to his persistent research interests.

Scholarly digital editions have become an important resource in literary studies. They make openly available and contextualise a broad range of document types, including literary manuscripts, correspondence, or photographs, which shed new light on authors’ lives and works, their composition practices as well as their social and professional networks. They thus allow scholars to explore aesthetic, philological, and material aspects, as well as historical and biographical information within their social, cultural, and political contexts.

The specific affordances of the digital medium and its capacities to highlight (transnational) movements, connections, and relationships merit some reflections on digital editions as life-writing projects that seem to take up new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice. Capturing the dynamism, non-linearity, fragmentariness, and relationality of human lives through, for instance, network graphs, interactive maps, and non-hierarchical entry points, digital editions tie in with the objectives of relational biography or metabiography. Digital editions of pre-existing collections of ego-documents do not offer a coherent cradle-to-grave narrative but a glimpse into a fragmented life and decentred subject, with previously hidden lives coming into view. Moreover, they highlight the centrality of ‘persona’ as a concept in life-writing scholarship that does justice to the ways in which different versions of selfhood are strategically produced, staged, and disseminated through life narratives in a wide range of media and genres. Taking the scholarly digital editions Auden Musulin Papers (https://amp.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/) and Auden in Austria Digital (work in progress), two projects based at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Austrian Academy of Sciences), as a starting point, I will explore the fruitful intersections of life narrative research and digital platforms, tools, and methodologies.

To understand the notions of classification, identification, domiciliation, and consignation in terms of private law and state law with reference to the upsurge in Open AI, Chat GPT, Block-Chain, Gen AI market to temper with the copyright norms, Intellectual Property Rights of the restored, revived and resurged archived manuscripts, records and literature for the conservation of cultural memory and history. Jacques Derrida writes in his book "The Archive Fever - A Freudian Impression" about the same in these words - “the exergue has at once an institutive and a conservative function: the violence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law, as the Benjamin of Zur Kritik der Gewalt would say. What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence.” (Derrida, 1996)

But the contemporary digitization of the archival repository has navigated unlimited, fastest possibilities for marketing expectations. Content Creation by way of computing automation neural network through Artificial Intelligence has changed the course of discourse of pragmatics concerning the continuation and perpetuation of ideas, concepts and concerns regarding the understanding, circulation and continuity of art and literature down the generations. Investment by stakeholders regarding this emerging entrepreneurship is now very much liable to understand the employees' AI empowered utility to leverage the archival heritage and culture through apt usage of AI productive tools to market as well as to conserve the ethnic interest of the respective memory variables of indigeneity.

The wandering aborigines’ pseudo-historical images, lifestyle, and reflections once used to be a matter of dreamtime indigenous oral traditions and the same for the globalized world seem to be incredibly unbelievable or awesome. But since the computer-based knowhow has been a medium to be a source of repository of archives, the knowledge about the traditional societies, their ethnographic art, folk culture have been measured as parameters in computational virtual vision context, while the progressive generative images technology has opened an avenue for patrons and researchers to explore indigeneity and traditions not only as the metaphors of ethnic identity and ethical mode of going back to sustainable eco-system, but more it has emphatically relived the indigenous intangible indicators as neural perceptions to load in the memory of neural networks datasets that not only help to translate, but also enables to encode and decode relationship in cross-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic contexts, henceforth contribute significantly in building multi-dimensional learning models from the perspectives of neurological analyses (acoustic features, visual images, myths, motifs, signs, symbols as signifiers of their existential features and sustenance in their respective climatic time-zones), besides exploring time-binding factors concerning their ecological, biological context and environmental existence.

After studying some samples as case studies of natural language processing and neural network programming especially of the ethnography of folk culture from Australia and India, it appeared that virtual orientation is in fact and in principle a purpose of building pedagogues of virtual orientalism, besides being the resourceful neurons to calculate perceptron (a mathematical model of a biological neuron used in AI NNs or a simple algorithm to classify data) for multi-layer neural computational automated vision. Indeed, the wandering aborigines’ culture is now a wondering computational pool to build national interest for traditions and indigeneity, and to prevent their extinction, besides mitigating binaries of nature and culture.

The paper aims to present an overview of the involved Repository learning models’ performance initiated to preserve and restore the process of loss, the function, and the training. Secondly the paper will also attempt to present the pro-active steps taken by the governing agencies in cross-cultural context to conserve intangible assets for generating text and content for the further academic proposed scholarships.

Within the ideological context of transhumanism, speculative fiction deals with ‘What if?’ by pushing current global trends and developments into realms defying empirical materialism. Ai Jiang’s transhuman postapocalyptic novelette I am AI explores the consequences of technological human augmentation through the protagonist ghostwriter Ai who, for the sake of increased productivity, slowly replaces her body parts, including her heart, with artificial technology. She falls into a philosophical conundrum in which she questions her identity and personhood as Ai or as A.I. Focussing on an analogue perspective, the Queer steampunk horror A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock looks at eco-transhumanism within a mycological cultural turn, as seen in popular cultural production. Medlock’s novel is about taxidermist Simon and botanist Gregor who live together in solitude on the edge of Victorian London society. They possess a strange fungus showing signs of intellect, and Gregor works to create true intelligent life from plant matter out of which the result is a half fungal-human female called Chloe.

These literary texts offer a type of protagonist echoing Harraway’s Chthulucene that heralds human and nonhuman as being linked in tentacular practices. A comparative analysis of I am AI and A Botanical Daughter show their exploration of the entanglement of “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-ashumus” (Haraway, 101). These literary texts challenge auto-poiesis or the self-human-making machine of history (Haraway, 118) by instead proposing sym-poiesis, namely the making-with or “becoming-with” Haraway, 119). Stories of making-with or becoming-with are exemplified through the marginalised protagonists in I am AI and A Botanical Daughter. These texts first explore how human existence is measured regarding exclusivity or inclusivity which is reminiscent of Agemben’s discussion of the homo sacre as either sacred or accursed. However, being on the edge of existence forces invention and creation in which new forms of knowledge and social relations are envisioned. As briefly summarised so far, these literary texts offer controversial perspectives to current ecological, political, and ethnic standards in our contemporary times to ensure that we do not end up living the forms of apocalypse projected in speculative fiction.

Works Cited.

Agemben, Giogio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998.

Haraway, Donna, J. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press, 2016.

Jiang, Ai. I am Ai. Shortwave Publishing, 2023.

Medlock, Noah. A Botanical Daughter. Titan Books, 2024.

Occultism is the study of supernatural powers, dealing with supernatural situations that cannot be explained with modern science. They are depicted as supernatural beings beyond reality in many movies and dramas and melted in plays in various ways. They represent the expression of fear for the dark side inside the human mind that has not surfaced yet. The Soul Guardians and Supernatural has further developed from the old ghost and features the ghosts of the East and West based on goblins and people with a focus on the Korean sentiment and the others. The main characters are a bunch of characters accompanied by a special thing with a new ghost with Han(grudge) appearing for an each book. The ghosts cause problems with their supernatural powers, but the problems express how they were treated unfairly. Their hearts are revealed through "Han(coldness)" that is frozen cold. Realizing how to solve their problems, the main characters apply "Hwan(flames)" to their coldness and melt it out instead of punishing their evil. Whether they live in the East or West, human being can face a difficulty. Sometimes they can solve their difficulties, and other times they suffer for unfair reasons. In the latter case, they resort to a supernatural being capable of solving their situations. This paper highlights that human beings create supernatural issues and also have solutions to them. The investigator tried to examine philanthropic thinking made possible through adjustment and understanding in human life whose balance cannot be even.

This study delves into the universe of sijo, classical Korean chant poetry, through a formal and thematic analysis of the anthological work “Sijô: Poesiacanto Coreana Clássica”, the only sijo compendium translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Yun Jung In and Alberto Marsicano in 1994. The research explores the origin of sijo, its recurring themes and examines its musical aspect and graphic layout. Based on the compilation by Yun Jung Im and Alberto Marsicano, the work seeks to uncover the most important characteristics of this poetic genre, revealing its beauty and cultural richness. In this case, the translation of the work in question plays a crucial role as a tool of intertextuality. By introducing sijo to the Brazilian public, the translation opens doors to cultural dialogue and to the formation of cultural identities of chant poetry in Brazil. Therefore, this work also seeks to examine, through an intertextual-cultural analysis, how the translation of sijo can inspire new translators to venture into this poetic genre. The theoretical basis will be Kristeva (1974) on intertextuality and translation as an intertextual process; Bakhtin (2003) on translation as dialogue; Bassnett (2002) on the role of translation in fostering intercultural dialogue involving peripheral cultures; and Venuti (1998) on the formation of cultural identities. At the end of the research, we hope to be able to affirm that, by having access to concrete, high-quality examples, Brazilian translators can be inspired by the forms and techniques of sijo, expanding the range of poetic possibilities in our language and that the translation of sijo contributes to expanding knowledge about Korean culture, stimulating intercultural dialog and opening the way to new poetic creations.

The application of children’s literature as therapy to facilitate healing from trauma is a concept that has gained increased attention in recent years. As Capshaw (2005:n.p.) observes, there is power in the “special position of childhood in relation to trauma writing”. The child is framed as either the “ultimate victim”, or the “ultimate survivor” whose innocence and resilience can offer a model for adult survivors of trauma. This is particularly true of the manner in which children’s literature and trauma writing feature in the Korean Netflix series, “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay”. Of particular interest to this research is how the benefits of children’s literature trauma therapy can reach a wider audience than was previously possible through traditional paper-based media. While this drama is set against the backdrop of a psychiatric hospital, and thus offers the exploration of several mental disorders, the main characters, Ko Mun Yeong, Moon Sang Tae and Moon Gang Tae present with symptoms of anti-social personality disorder, autism and melancholia, respectively. Each of these conditions is exacerbated by severe trauma experienced in childhood. Central to the narrative, however, is the use of children’s books and, most particularly, fairy tales, to negotiate psychic wounds and progress towards maturation and psychological healing. In this, there is a strong return to the traditions of early fairy tales such as those by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm in that they teach the reader about narcissistic obsession and early childhood abuse (Vermeesch 2023:n.p.)

Literary fashion holds a unique place in fashion discourse. Unlike the written fashion of magazines, which, as Roland Barthes (1967) explains, preserves the “purity” of garments by avoiding personal expression, literary fashion reflects individuality. It embodies what Ferdinand de Saussure calls "parole", combining visual and verbal elements to shape character identity and evoke imagery. Clothing descriptions in literature help readers visualize characters, turning abstract figures into vivid representations. These descriptions often dramatize meaning through materials, textures, and emotional effects, creating poetic, romantic, or even parodic narratives that deepen the significance of events.

Umberto Eco (1972) asserts that clothing and accessories result from “an ideological choice” and convey a message. While Eco specifically refers to a tie as the bearer of this message, he demonstrates that “clothing is communication” within the framework of social life. Similarly, Algirdas Greimas and Jacques Fontanille argue that clothing reflects a “form of life,” linking personal style to emotions and social contexts. Following Isabella Pezzini (2002), this study proposes a semiotic typology of clothing in literature, applicable across novels:

1. Sign of transformation;

2. Moral and social type;

3. Emotional and sensitive marker;

4. Spatial and temporal marker;

5. Relational function;

6. Cultural sign.

Using this typology, the study examines clothing in Korean and Japanese literature, from the Samguk yusa and Genji Monogatari to works by contemporary authors such as Han Kang, Young-ha Kim, Haruki Murakami, and Banana Yoshimoto. Outfits that define characters and events in these novels will be analyzed through the typology with semiotics tools to illustrate and support the theoretical claims. By analyzing fashion in these works, the study demonstrates how clothing reflects cultural identity and social change in East Asia, highlighting the enduring role of fashion in literature as a means of narrative enrichment and cultural expression.

E. P. Thompson’s William Morris: From Romantic to Revolutionary underwent several revisions since its first publication in 1955, with the most significant being the under-examined 1977 edition, particularly evident in its “Postscript”. Thompson no longer emphasized Morris’s identity as a Marxist, but instead more actively defended the Romantic tradition, arguing that Romanticism was not only the foundation of Marxism but also the sustaining force behind Morris’s lifelong creative work and practice. Therefore, the “Postscript” not only demonstrates Thompson’s inheritance and innovative interpretation of Morris’s thought but also reflects his academic endeavor to reconcile diverse intellectual traditions. It is through this profound exploration that Thompson achieved a more comprehensive understanding and interpretation of the British Romantic tradition and Marxism.

Anonymity in Pacific Island mythology and history has often been exploited by Western historians and mythographers, who have inserted themselves into the narratives of these cultures. The absence of specific authors in oral traditions has been widely and frequently abused, allowing Western interpreters to project their perspectives onto these stories, often without proper acknowledgment of the original sources. This practice has led to the distortion of indigenous narratives, as Western authors have reinterpreted myths and histories through their own cultural lenses, sometimes misrepresenting or oversimplifying complex cultural contexts. For example, the portrayal of Pacific cultures in Western media has often been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes and inaccuracies. This appropriation not only undermines the authenticity of Pacific Islander voices but also contributes to the erasure of indigenous authorship and authority over their own cultural narratives. Recognizing and addressing this issue is crucial for preserving the integrity of Pacific Island mythology and history, and for ensuring that indigenous perspectives are accurately represented and respected. Through a critical approach to the Hawaiian myths collected by W. D. Westervelt and comparison to the contemporary approach taken in Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, this paper will confront some of the problems facing the study of mythology within the geo-political context of the Pacific.

'They're Made Out of Meat' is a short story by Terry Bison that encapsulates the conversation of two extraterrestrial beings. Filled with rhetorical exchanges, this story describes how human beings are seen as mere creatures of meat by these extraterrestrial creatures who seem to be a lot more technically advanced or "intelligent" as compared to human beings. Despite this advancement, these extraterrestrial beings still reckon with emotions of isolation and togetherness, proving how the advancement of technology is not mutually exclusive to the existence of isolation. Using this story as a premise along with Delhi by Vandana Singh and Nine Lives by Ursula K. Le Guin, I'm going to explore how technology can never combat the essentially gregarious nature of human beings. The need for company will always persist, and while technology can temporarily fill the void, it is afeeble resemblance of the same and eventually fizzles away.

This paper examines how queerness in broad terms can be conceived as a radical biopoliticized project – one that fosters estranging yet empowering transnational solidarities between those who are othered on the basis of identity by social, technical and affective means. I seek to investigate digital media texts and practices from both a scholarly and artistic perspectives that mobilize the inherently fluidity of queerness to cultivate an intimacy and relationality with those pushed toward the margins. My paper reflects on the holistic conditions they are creating in order begin to identify new and potentially transformative feelings to build upon. It not only recognizes the difficulty and precarity of being queer in the Asian diaspora, but also considers what it would mean to think about LGBTQ life as the starting point for imagining radically new futures for queer Asian diasporans and the broader communities and environments in which they live.

Specifically, my paper explores the ways visual records of queer experience and belongingness within the Asian diasporic communities are inscribed within the materiality, affectivity, and performativity of digital media texts and practices. Focusing on queer diasporic Chinese artist LuYang’s multimedia work titled DOKU: The Binary World (2023), I use digital ethnography and visual anthropology to inquire about how different transmedia practices of imagining and embodying queerness are mediated within virtual spaces. The networked, live motion-captured performance of DOKU: The Binary World is a real-time collaboration between motion-captured dancers – embodying the avatar forms of LuYang's genderless digital bodies – in two different geographical locations interacting in the same virtual environment. My paper wishes to illuminate how racialized queer bodies and desires with queer relations are relegated to liminal spatio-temporalities in cyberspaces. In so doing, I hope to elicit a shared future that is reciprocal and liberatory. A future that sees the power of digital media practices and makes the virtual part of the conversation around queer diasporic freedom and pleasure.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new dimensions to literary creation, analysis, and interpretation. This paper examines the intersection of AI and literature, focusing on how AI-generated narratives challenge traditional storytelling methods and redefine authorship in contemporary literature. Through a comparative analysis of classical literary forms and AI-generated texts, this study explores the philosophical and ethical implications of machine-generated narratives.

By drawing on key examples from AI-authored novels, interactive fiction, and machine-assisted literary criticism, the research investigates the evolving role of human creativity in the digital age. Additionally, the paper considers the ways AI influences comparative literature studies by offering new tools for text analysis, translation, and literary interpretation. This study aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about the relationship between technology and literature, providing a critical perspective on the potential and limitations of AI in the field of comparative literature.

Keywords: Comparative Literature, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Humanities, Narrative Evolution, Computational Creativity

In some critical writings on the premodern Chinese novel, one can come across annotations proposing to define in numerical terms the relationship between what is true or false in a piece of writing. These numerical proposals, a form of rhetorical reassurance in the face of the challenges posed by fiction and authenticity, reveal the need for a safety threshold in navigating the discomfort associated with the fictional. This aspect is particularly salient in yanyi (演義) narratives, a form of narrative writing that was very popular in premodern times and variously related to the narration of historical events and characters. This contribution proposes an analysis of this specific category, starting from the prefatory writings accompanying yanyi works, especially from the 16th and 17th centuries.

In her seminal essay “In Praise of Gossip” (1982), Patricia Meyers Spacks reminded her readers that the characteristics traditionally associated with gossip have also been used to describe the novel, though the latter is not seen in such a negative light. Be that as it may, fiction has often been frowned upon and taken as a frivolous, at times “feminine”, enterprise. Novels borrowed their form from narrative historiography, which modern historians dismiss as, at best, lacking in rigour and, at worst, apocryphal. Historical fiction is oftentimes seen as a perpetrator of unfounded rumour and therefore an enemy of “Science”. It does not bode well on the literary side of the aisle, either, where its plot constraints are taken as a hindrance to originality.

In this paper, I would like to start by examining the critical reception of mid-20th century novels about the Roman Empire, especially the example of Robert Graves’s Claudius novels (1934, 1935) which were not taken seriously neither by the literary establishment nor by the classical historians. What makes historical fiction, even if by a renowned author, such a tough pill to swallow? According to Dudley Fitts’s NYT review of Gore Vidal’s Julian (1964), it’s because it is often “self-indulgent and irresponsible”. While conceding it is a well-written book, the reviewer argues that is in spite of the genre. He even suggests Vidal might have learned a thing or two from Graves. Yet the pitfalls of genre fiction ultimately weighed on the reception of both novels.

I wish to ask why and in which ways the genre causes such unease in both critics and historians. On the one hand, one notes an inherent suspicion of genre conventions (which have to do with plot rather than form) ; on the other an exaggerated focus on inaccuracy and anachronism. While it is true that the positivist ethos had positioned itself against narrative histories, and 20th century historical fiction was the ultimate betrayal to 19th century scienticism, one must not ignore the potential of historical fiction as a vehicle for propaganda and revisionism. In an era of “fake news”, what can a reader-focused model teach us about narrative histories and the onus taken on by historical fiction? Barthes (1967) himself did ask what the difference between the discourses of history and fiction could be, arriving at the conclusion that there are no discursive differences. Yet it would be absurd to suggest that all fiction is therefore irresponsible. The paper will then conclude by recommending some reading strategies which might help to ontologically reframe these ethical issues, much in the same way proposed by historical fiction.

Le parti pris de Claude Lanzmann envers la fiction est bien connu : les critiques virulentes qu’il n’a cessé d’adresser à l’égard des œuvres de fiction qui vont de la série télévisée Holocauste (1978) au roman de Yannick Haenel, Jan Karski (2009), en passant par le film de Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List (1993), montrent clairement son hostilité, sinon la peur, envers la fiction. Que reproche-t-il à la fiction ? Celle-ci est d’abord considérée sous l’angle de la falsification. Le roman de Haenel est à cet égard qualifié de « faux roman » en raison de sa partie fictionnelle où le héros, un personnage historique, s’exprime à la première personne. Le droit à l’invention que revendique le romancier ne procède, selon lui, que de l’ignorance et d’un manque de respect pour les faits. Lanzmann critique également les valeurs cognitives et émotionnelles de la fiction, notamment lorsqu’il fustige Holocauste : il se montre particulièrement sévère à l’égard des « identifications consolantes » avec les personnages-martyres que la série américaine aurait permis aux téléspectateurs. C’est donc la catharsis liée à l’immersion fictionnelle qui est ici mise en cause. Or, le cinéaste ne condamne pas seulement la fiction, mais il s’en réclame également – et paradoxalement – pour son film documentaire. Ainsi, dans Shoah, les témoins ont été invités à se transformer en acteurs qui jouent leur propre histoire afin d’« irréaliser » celle-ci. Cette mise en scène qu’il appelle « fiction du réel » a pour objectif d’abolir la distance temporelle entre le passé et le présent et de montrer le « réel », qui n’est pour lui que « la configuration vraie de l’impossible ».

C’est sur cette conception lanzmanienne de la fiction que nous souhaiterions revenir dans cette communication. Elle a donné lieu à une esthétique qui, insistant sur l’irreprésentable et l’« unique singularité » de Holocauste, confère à l’œuvre d’art le statut d’une singularité absolue (on peut penser par exemple aux travaux de Shoshana Felman). En revanche, les études récentes sur la littérature des camps ou les images d’archives (Catherine Coquio, Georges Didi-Huberman, etc.) proposent de considérer le rapport entre l’art et le témoignage dans une perspective moins spéculative qu’anthropologique. En nous référant à ces travaux, nous essaierons d’éclaircir les enjeux à la fois esthétiques et politiques du rapport entre la fiction et le témoignage.

Ma Boyong, one of China's hottest fiction authors, combines thrilling plots with historical detail to craft stories that are both compelling and plausible. Since beginning his writing career online in the late 20th century, Ma has explored a wide array of genres, including historical fiction, martial arts, science fiction, supernatural tales, detective stories, and anime. His early involvement in the development and professionalization of Chinese Internet literature paved the way for his eventual recognition by both mainstream literary awards and popular markets as a distinguished author of historical fiction.

Ma's fictions, often referred to as "historical possibility novels," delve into historical possibilities through fictional narratives and characters while maintaining fidelity to the broader historical context. He does research and finds inspiration by reading professional dissertations relative to his novels, talking to experts, and visiting museums and historical sites. However, before solidifying his unique approach to historical fiction, Ma's work occasionally sparked controversy for its historical inaccuracies. One notable example is his 2005 short story "The Xiaozhuan (the small seal script) War," published online, which reimagines Qin Shi Huang's chancellor, Li Si, simplifying and standardizing the non-alphabetic written script across the six kingdoms during the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC). In 2016, scholarly critiques pointed out several historical inconsistencies in the story, igniting widespread debates among Chinese netizens about Ma's grasp of history and the historical literacy of the general readership. In response, Ma defended that his original intention was to follow the Chinese literary tradition of retelling old tales with absurd nuances and plots through his fictionalization.

This paper examines the discussions and critiques surrounding "The Xiaozhuan War," highlighting the tension between historical accuracy and artistic reproduction. It argues that the determination of frontiers between fact and fiction cannot be left to individual judgment, and the boundaries of fiction are dynamically shaped by discursive environments and historical developments. The decade-long gap between the story's creation and the controversy itself underscores the contextual differences in interpretation.

Furthermore, this paper reveals how the controversy over "The Xiaozhuan War" prompted Ma Boyong to reconsider the formal boundaries between fact and fiction in his subsequent works. His "historical possibility novels" employ more self-reflexive narrative strategies and symbolic distinctions. Additionally, Ma's cross-media interactions with experts, scholars, and online readers demonstrate the contemporary need for more interactions and democratic negotiation in the writing of historical fiction.

Sans famille (1878), one of the most well-known French children’s books written by Hector Malot, has been popular in Japan since it was first translated. More than 180 translations, including five manga versions, were published, and two animated television series were produced and broadcast in 1977 and 1996. The first two translations in Japan were published in the form of a serialized novel, in 1902 and 1911, both in sequential installments in major daily newspapers. This presentation will focus on these first two translations published in the Meiji era, “Mada minu oya” (1902–1903) translated by Sosen Gorai and “Ie naki ko” (1911–1912), by Yuho Kikuchi, and consider the source of their popularity in Japan.

Both Gorai and Kikuchi categorized the original as a “Katei shosetsu (home novel)”. Gorai observed moralities concerning parent-child relationships in the original and carefully translated the parent-child scenes. The depiction of the affection between the parent and child and the education aimed at building the child’s character in the original work were highly appreciated, while the translation also added the idea of gratitude of the child for the parent, which Gorai regarded as the basis of Japanese family morality. Similarly, Kikuchi, a best-selling author of “home novels” for female readers, appreciated that most of the female characters in the original sacrificed themselves and cared for their children, husbands, and parents. Kikuchi's translation emphasizes the virtues of the female characters’ devotion to their families. Therefore, both Gorai and Kikuchi adapted their translations to include moral values that were appropriate and acceptable to the Japanese ideal of “home” of the time.

This presentation will focus on “Kitaro,” the hero of Shigeru Mizuki's manga “Gegege no Kitaro” (1967-), known worldwide for its manga and animation. With “Kitaro” as the central character, this presentation traces how a character inspired by folklore became established as a hero for children in Japan and abroad, from picture story shows in the 1930s, to manga, to animation.

Kitaro, the character from the now widely known animation Gegege no Kitaro, is a young boy born from a graveyard, who, in cooperation with his fellow yokai (monsters), including his father, Father with the Eyeball, Cat Girl, Rat Man, and Nurikabe, acts as a hero who helps the weak. The character was inspired by a folklore in various parts of Japan called “Kosodate Ghost” (Child-rearing Ghost Folklore), in which a ghost woman who had given birth to a child in a tomb after her death bought candy to feed the orphaned child. Eventually, Shigeru Mizuki, who earned his living as a picture-story show illustrator after the war, wrote the original, picture-story show “Graveyard Kitaro” with the permission of the original author, and later became a rental book cartoonist and wrote the manga “Graveyard Kitaro” and “Kitaro Night Story”, adding such major characters as the eyeball father, mouse man, and cat girl. Mizuki's works were serialized in shōnen manga in the 1960s, stabilizing their popularity, and were made into an animated TV series in 1968. Around the same time, a book-length manga of Shigeru Mizuki's Gegege no Kitaro was also published in 1967. Meanwhile, in conjunction with the animated series, a series of reading materials for younger audiences was also published, and the image of Kitaro as a hero of justice became firmly established in the series. The animated series will be in its sixth season by 2020, and there are 11 animated films and two live-action films in theaters. The series has been developed in a variety of media, from radio dramas, novels, and stage productions to pachinko games.

In fact, the 100-year history of “Kitaro” is a model case in which a pre-modern voice story was reorganized into a modern written and optical story while the story was passed on. The story of the “ghost raising a child,” which had been handed down in various regions in the pre-modern age through the medium of voice, was reorganized with the addition of modern written, graphic (printed), and optical media, and spread to various regions through picture-story shows and rental manga. Over the course of 100 years, the same characters and their stories have been reorganized in different media, and the methods of transmission and reception have been transformed as the stories have been passed down through the generations. It also becomes clear that behind this model is a network of people connected by “inevitable coincidences,” as in the case of Shigeru Mizuki.

MIYAZAKI Hayao's “Spirited Away,” released in 2001, is an internationally acclaimed animated film that won the 75th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film in 2003. A Japanese fantasy novel was influential in the process of creating this animation: KASHIWABA Sachiko's debut novel, The Marvelous Village Veiled in Mist published in 1975. In 1998, the possibility of adapting Kashiwaba's work into a film was discussed, but ultimately abandoned. However, the framework of Kashiwaba's story about “a girl who ends up working in a mysterious world” was incorporated into the production process of “Spirited Away”. Kashiwaba's work is a full-length fantasy in which the main character, a young girl named Rina, arrives in a mysterious town veiled in mist in the mountains during her summer vacation, and undergoes an inner transformation through working at stores in the town during her stay there. In this presentation, I will explore how Kashiwaba portrays the main character who transforms through her work experiences in the alternate world. Additionally, I will examine the potential of the children's literature genre in the written form by highlighting the differences with “Spirited Away”.

In the final chapter of his recent study on literary realism (The Real Thing, 2024), Terry Eagleton gives a brief overview of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis before commenting on Auerbach's "impatience with abstract and general forms of cognition". Indeed, Auerbach seems to have a penchant for the concrete and humble, but probably such "post-Romantic" aspect of his work should always be considered against his clear and grand vision of historical progress. After all, as Eagleton points out, the entire volume of Mimesis as the story of an ever more richer, more intricate realism was effectively written as a response to fascism.

It would be more helpful, then, to point to the tension between the concrete and the abstract in Auerbach's philology, and examine the nature of "synthesis" in his readings (or his "syntactic conquest", as Fredric Jameson describes Auerbach's attempt). Can philological approach properly interpret the concrete detail without imposing abstract truth? If Auerbach was the champion of the multiple, fluid and divers as Eagleton suggests, why was he not favorable on the overtly fluid experimental writing of modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce? (A useful comparison may be made with Adorno's dialectical approach which is equally alert to the clash between particularity and abstract reasoning, but allowing far more favorable evaluation on high modernism.)

This paper shows that Auerbach's engagement with the mingling between the sublime and the vulgar is especially relevant in the current culturalist context in which Theories tend to underestimate diachronic change in the universal history of human emancipation. In the context of comparative literature, Auerbach's idea of Weltliteratur opens up a possibility to rediscover non-European literature, not simply as "the other" of the West, but as a part of common human progress on the same "earth". His insight particularly invites us to re-evaluate those humanistic literary traditions outside Europe which encourage universal values in ways specific to their local contexts.

A case in point is Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe's literary achievement. Ōe is a master of realism that portrays the suffering of main characters as a product of society still incapable of justice yet illuminated by the hope of salvation. Ōe's imagination thus resonates with Auerbach's responsiveness to comprehensive historical vision realized in individual rendering. Given that Ōe is profoundly influenced by prominent European literary figures such as Dante, Rabelais, Wiliam Blake, and W. B. Yeats, one could even argue that the complex themes and style of Ōe's novels is a "synthesis" of European and non-European realist tradition. From such perspective I explore the ways in which Ōe's literary endeavor is meaningfully related to Auerbach's legacy.

As Edward Said points out in his preface for Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Goethe’s utopian notion “Weltliteratur” (“world literature”), as a transnational and humanistic synthesis of all national literatures in the world, serves as a conceptual foundation for the later discipline of comparative literature. While later in “Philology and Weltliteratur” (1951), Auerbach delineates the challenges “Weltliteratur” faces in the postwar globalized world: the standardization of culture and way of life under the hegemony of Euro-American influence, along with the specialization and professionalization of the education institution, lead to the increasing difficulty in the synthesis of a transnational worldly philology — that is, a historiography of human religion, poetics, literature, politics, and culture.

My paper investigates how Auerbach’s notions on philology and “Weltliteratur” as a humanistic synthesis get reconfigured in storytelling narratives in contemporary global media. Engaging with David Damrosch’s analysis of Auerbach and “Weltliteratur”, Frederic Jameson’s theories on postmodernism and visual media, as well as Jacques Ranciere’s discussion of aesthetics and politics, I present a “global Auerbach” and his ideas on philology and “Weltliteratur” in the postmodern regimes of art.

The materiality of aesthetic historicism can mediate the "aesthetic" and "historical" elements of literary theory, taking into account aesthetic ethics while maintaining historical truth. Yang Yibo distinguishes between Classical Historicism, aesthetic historicism and Aesthetic Historicism. Classical Historicism is dedicated to making the discipline of history a "new science"; "aesthetic historicism" is a literary theory from the perspective of the relationship between literature and history; while Aesthetic Historicism is a kind of thought infused with historical consciousness in the development of classical German philosophy. Compared with the former two, Aesthetic Historicism is not satisfied with the refinement of its own theoretical system, but intends to construct the historical consciousness and national spirit of the German nation. (See Yang Yibo, German Classical Aesthetic Historicism, China Social Science Press, 2017, pp. 37-58.)The meanings of "aesthetic historicism" and "Aesthetic Historicism" both refer to aesthetics and history, but the few recorded uses of the term also lowercase the initial letter instead of capitalizing it. The former is the result of several scholars' explicit definitions, while the latter is the result of a single scholar's theoretical construction. Therefore, although the actual discussion inevitably involves the trend of "capitalized" German aesthetic historicism and its practical influence, the "aesthetic historicism" in this paper is mainly the lowercase "aesthetic historicism" centered on Vico, Auerbach, and Hayden White. Aesthetic historism can be traced back to the Vico's discourse on "poetic wisdom" and the concept of history, which is summarized in the article "Vico and Aesthetic Historism" published by the literary critic Erich Auerbach in 1949. In 1959, the American historian Hayden White published Italian historian Carlo Antoni's From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking, and in the translator's introduction, he systematically elaborated the concept of aesthetic historicism. The materiality of aesthetic historicism is embodied in three aspects: firstly, the productive activities of poetic wisdom and its image are material; the poetic production of literary creation, theory and criticism activities depends on the material basis, and the poetic image (or linguistic symbols) is also characterized by its productive nature. Secondly, each element of literary activity participates in the historical process of overdetermination as social energy in a specific socio-historical context. Finally, writing events and textual events are processual and embodied, and embodied metaphors are able to evoke bodily sensations and respond to the existential and ethical problems of today's world through the "distribution of sensibility". The "deenchantment" of the materiality of aesthetic historicism can inject new vitality into contemporary realism and lead to an "aesthetic-historical materialism".

In his text The Philology of World Literature Erich Auerbach attempts to implement an idea of world literature that is resolutely anti-global, and, in this sense, it seems entirely at odds with an approach to world literature that has gained currency as world’s most valuable literatures, even if primarily in (English) translation. On the other hand, Auerbach’s approach to the study of world literature is utterly global in the sense that it encompasses all possible literatures and all possible languages, and not only that, but also all the historical and philosophical, or we might say, theoretical developments and reflections that may have led to the literary forms and contents. Moreover, Auerbach apparently does not regard world literature in this manner for its own sake, or out of mere aesthetic or scholarly curiosity. Rather, there is a twofold movement in his considerations. On the one hand, Auerbach speaks of the richness (Reichtum) of ‘earth cultures’ (Erdkulturen) that he wants to preserve in this way. On the other hand, world literature for him seems to represent a general human code and mode of thinking that can be utilized for deciphering the contemporary as well as the arrivant, the possibilities of the future. But it is not meta-theorizations that he seeks, rather Auerbach emphasizes the singular and ‘intuitive’ for an appreciation of literature. Methodologically, he endorses and advises a form of critical engagement with the literary text that aims at identifying what might be called epistemological and theoretical ‘radiation’ (Strahlung). In doing so, he approaches historicity as a condition for coming to terms with a more or less valid understanding of the literatures of the world.

In this sense, world literature becomes a mapping for apprehension, a theoretical field of textuality that is important for the intelligibility of the world. For Auerbach, then, the concept of world literature is almost a counter-conception to the logocentrism of the ‘sciences’; It is a deep reading of how the world has been constituted historically and how it may possibly continue to evolve from a humanistic and ethical point of view. Taking these lines as a starting point, in this paper, I wish to dwell on the historical, epistemological, and affective economy of Auerbach’s text that drives his theoretical pursuit of an engagement with world literature in order to navigate his approach of an ethical quest in his understanding of world literature for what he calls ‘earth cultures’ (Erdkulturen) as a critical, anti-globalization endeavor that seeks a democratic, anti-dominant humanism built on the richness and singularity of the earth’s literary imagination.

Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) is one of the few Japanese writers to focus on modern dance, yet his dance-related novels remain relatively underappreciated. In the 1930s, he published several works that featured dancers as central characters. Novels such as ‘Kinju’ (Of Birds and Beasts, 1933), ‘Maihime no Koyomi’ (Days of Dancers, 1935), and ‘Hana no Waltz’ (Waltz of Flowers, 1936), intertwine the lives of real and fictional dancers in Japan and abroad. These works reflect a range of social contexts prevalent during that period. This raises an important question: How did Kawabata conceptualize an “Oriental” modern dance while portraying Japanese modern dancers grappling with multiple identities? His works not only depict the tensions that emerge when individuals strive to express their ethnic identity within the globalized framework of Western dance techniques, but they also underscore the dancer’s “Oriental” perception of the fluidity between the mind and body.

The term Nanyō refers to the Southeast Asian region, including the island nations of the South Pacific. It began to be commonly used in Japanese society from the late 1880s. From this period onward, Japanese writers depicted the Nanyō region through various representations, most of which involved internalizing a uniquely Japanese perspective on the Nanyō based on Western knowledge of the region. Furthermore, the Nanyō images produced in Japan influenced neighboring countries such as Korea and China, where they were utilized in the creation of their own distinctive perceptions of the region. Therefore, a comparative literary approach is essential in examining the literary representations of Nanyō by Asian writers.

Based on this discussion, this study conducts a comparative analysis of the representation of Puputan by Takami Jun, Korean writer Ham Se-deok, and Indonesian writer Haril D. Widjaja. How do Japanese, Korean, and Indonesian writers reproduce and reinterpret Puputan, a historical event in Indonesia, in their literary works? By examining their translation methods of Puputan, this study explores how each writer conceptualized Nanyō and responded literarily to "Asian history." (446 characters)

Khu Eng-Han (1924–2012) is a Japanese-language writer from Taiwan and the first foreign writer to win the Naoki Sanjugo Prize, an important award in the field of Japanese popular literature. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, while still a high school student, he published prose poems depicting Taiwan’s local landscapes and customs in literary magazines in Taiwan. In 1942, he went to Japan for university, returned to Taiwan in 1946, and fled to Hong Kong in 1948 as a political refugee. In 1954, he moved back to Japan and began writing stories about Taiwan. In this presentation, I focus on one of his key works, Koen (1955), examining how this short story relates to the works of Nishikawa Mitsuru published in the 1930s, as well as to Shōji Sōichi's novel Chin-fujin, published in the early 1940s. Additionally, I explore how he integrated his own experiences, including his political activities in Taiwan and observations in Hong Kong-to ultimately craft a unique narrative about Taiwan.

Beethoven's Third Symphony, also known as Eroica, represents a profound departure from the composer's earlier classical style. It introduces experimental and dramatic forms of expression that lay the groundwork for the emergence of Romanticism in music. Two 20th-century authors, British writer Anthony Burgess and Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, each wrote a novel inspired by the structure and musical elements, such as polyphony, variations, and counterpoint, prevalent in Beethoven's symphony. The intimate relationship between music and literature has been explored and categorized by such scholars as Wolf (1999), Rajewski (2005), and Petermann (2018), who have contributed greatly to the understanding and development of the "musical novel." These works use specific literary techniques to imitate the musical medium, including methods associated with stream-of-consciousness, which focus on revealing the inner workings of consciousness, often to uncover the psychological depth of characters (Humphrey, 1954). In these novels, the manipulation of musical tempo and narrative time converge, creating a unique interplay between music and narrative. Carpentier's El acoso and Burgess' Napoleon Symphony each adapt the structure of Beethoven's symphony to their respective settings: Napoleon's France and Batista's Cuba, mirroring the symphony's roughly 45-minute duration. This paper explores how both authors employ stream-of-consciousness techniques to manipulate narrative time and explore the ways in which these techniques interact with recurring themes, motifs, and, in a Bakhtinian sense, the contradictory and dialogical ideologies present in their works.

A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit is an important modernist novel by Chinese writer Lin Huiyin. In the tension between realist content and modernist form, it shows all walks of life through the juxtaposition of spatial narrative in 1930s’ Beijing, while the description of the public modern medical and newspaper movie spaces reflects the penetration of Western conceptual thought. However, in the early 20th century, influenced by Western colonialism, Chinese society continued to undergo profound modern transformation, and the change in time perception was one of the important manifestations. From the traditional circulation theory to the linear progress theory, the change of Chinese people's view of time reflects their acceptance of a modern ideological device.Although modern novels are still a linear arrangement of words in time, and the reading experience of readers is the same, some modern writers such as Lin Huiyin attempt to create a maximum synchronic narrative effect, and her A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit is an important case.

A person's perception of time and space is always limited, however, literature can provide a panoramic perspective that transcends the boundaries of self perception of others. A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit spatializes time and unfolds the external activities and inner situations of characters from various social classes in Beijing on a limited day. Interestingly, this narrative style echoes the montage technique in modern films. Although watching movies also requires following the temporal rules frame by frame, the use of montage techniques may provide viewers with a more intuitive and synchronic cognitive perspective. In fact, during the enthusiasm of translating and studying Soviet film montage theory in the 1930s, the novel is very likely to mixe montage with scattered perspective from traditional Chinese painting, creating a realistic three-dimensional sense of space and time on the paper, mapping the fluidity of transformative Beijing's old and new, the foreign and the vernacular, and constructing a spatial and temporal model that can be described as subtle, dynamic, and visualized. This not only reflects Lin Huiyin's unique literary construction as an architect, but also probes the relationship between literature and space-time, and the threshold that words can reach.

ABSTRACT: This study examines the journey of William Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet in Mongolia from its first performance in the debut of the Soviet Union in 1979 to its modern performance on the Mongolian stage, as well as the Mongolian translations of Hamlet. The study's objective elucidates the interrelationship of world literature and its adaptation to local culture that is eligible for its target audience. This study explores the Mongolian version of Hamlet, focusing on cultural and linguistic adaptations that reflect the unique socio-historical context of Mongolia. An in-depth analysis of Mergen Khasbaatar’s 2013 translation of Hamlet emphasizes how elements of traditional Mongolian culture, such as nomadic life, Buddhist philosophy, and the language of honor, are incorporated into the original text, preserving the originality of the play and making it accessible to local readers. This study places the translation within a broader theoretical framework, such as Schleiermacher’s externalization and localization, which uses the cultural sensitivity required to express climate, family ties, and social hierarchy. The findings contribute to the field of translation studies by highlighting the role of the cultural context in literary adaptation and offering insights into the transformative potential of translated works also this research will contribute to future research on a profound understanding of the adaptation of Western literature works to Eastern cultures.

Key Words: Hamlet, culture, translation, Mongolia, adaptation

The rise of the digital society has led to the emergence of a new generation—digital natives—who grow up immersed in digital technologies. These individuals engage with analog culture through various digitalized materials, accessing and interacting with archival cultural content via platforms like Google, YouTube, and ChatGPT. Further enriching this experience is virtual reality technology, which enables the immersive recreation of past analog cultures. In this context, retro culture—cultural artifacts from older generations—has found new life in the digital age. Ernest Cline foretells of this phenomenon in his duology, Ready Player One (2011) and Ready Player Two (2018). In the novels, OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) serves as a digital version of Foucault’s heterotopia: it is a virtual public space which facilitates communication and socialization between digital natives. Essentially, the virtual reality of OASIS, in conjunction with our omnipresent Internet, promotes the rapid dissemination of retro culture. Ready Player One’s protagonist and allies become masters of 1980s culture, eventually attaining their fame as winners of the novel’s Easter egg hunt. During the process, they experience and learn a respectful sensitivity for the importance of retro culture. Ultimately, the novel illustrates that retro culture can be a bridge to bond two disparate cultures – the analog and digital generations. In essence, retro culture’s popularity in the digital generation can be a form of cultural translation, aiding the development of digital technology. These phenomena provide a positive effect for reducing generational gaps by promoting cultural sharing and empathy.

This study examines how contemporary Korean diasporic literature uses sound and rhythm to reflect cultural identity and navigate hybrid linguistic spaces, viewed through Guy Deutscher’s linguistic relativity framework. Analyzing Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny (2021) and Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face (2020), I argue that their innovative use of auditory elements not only mirrors the authors’ international experiences but also shapes readers’ cognitive engagement with the texts.

Chung’s tales blend Korean onomatopoeia with surreal imagery, creating a soundscape that transcends linguistic barriers. In “The Head,” visceral auditory descriptions evoke horror while demonstrating how language influences sensory perception. Conversely, Cha’s collection of short stories integrates Korean terms within English text, crafting a multilingual rhythm that reflects complex cultural identities. Her use of “oppa” and “unni” reconstructs social hierarchies that resist direct translation, illustrating how language shapes social cognition.

This analysis reveals that these authors construct new linguistic landscapes challenging monolingual paradigms. By manipulating sound and rhythm, they create a “third space” of cultural expression that defies traditional categorizations of Korean or Western literature. This research extends Deutscher’s work by showing how multilingual texts can create unique cognitive effects, offering new perspectives on the relationship between language, thought process, and cultural identity in an increasingly globalized literary landscape.

Speaking anxiety remains a prominent barrier for Uzbek EFL students where the pressure to perform often outweighs the opportunity to learn. Many students experience fear of judgment, fear of making mistakes, and the discomfort of speaking in an unfamiliar language, which negatively impacts their fluency and confidence. Traditional classroom approaches, which often prioritize grammar and rote memorization over communication, can exacerbate these anxieties.

This presentation explores the integration of popular culture as an innovative and effective strategy to address speaking anxiety among Uzbek EFL students. Popular culture, with its universally appealing mediums such as music, movies, TV shows, and digital media trends, provides engaging and familiar content that can make speaking activities less intimidating. Incorporating role-plays inspired by popular films, analyzing song lyrics for discussion, and encouraging students to present on trending topics can foster a relaxed and motivating classroom atmosphere.

By bridging the gap between students’ personal interests and the curriculum, I believe, teachers can create a supportive environment where learners feel empowered to express themselves. This presentation will offer a practical framework for incorporating popular culture into EFL lessons, backed by recent studies and classroom applications. Additionally, this approach leverages the emotional connection students have with popular culture to make language learning more relatable and meaningful. Ultimately, this approach not only alleviates anxiety but also enriches the language learning experience, preparing students for real-world communication challenges.

This paper examines the portrayal of Southeast Asia in the Korean drama imaginary, identifying trends, concerns, as well as critiquing the purported relationship between South Korea as the centre of production of popular culture, and Southeast Asia as its passive market. Recent studies have highlighted the controversial portrayals of Southeast Asia in Korean dramas, particularly noting the prevalent stereotyping of the foreign. While arguably only issues necessitating improved cultural sensitivity, these problematic portrayals have led to criticisms from both scholarly and mainstream audiences. This can in turn jeopardise the reception of Korean popular culture in Southeast Asia, considering Southeast Asia’s position as one of its primary market. This paper thus proposes a review of the portrayals of Southeast Asia in the Korean drama imaginary, by looking at Korean dramas such as Princess Hours (2006), Racket Boys (2021) and Little Women (2022). By using the framework of geographic imaginaries, this paper identifies trends in Korean dramas such as filming in foreign locations with the aim of accuracy in representation, using foreign locations as substitutes for locations inaccessible due to issues with production or political reasons, and imagining foreign locations through filming locally or through the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI). These findings will be used as a starting point in critiquing the linkage between Southeast Asia and Korean popular culture, examining the position of Southeast Asia as purportedly passive consumers, the imbalance of leisure mobility between South Korea and the Southeast Asian region, as well as the complex issue of the discriminated Southeast Asia, by looking at prejudice against migration marriages, mixed-race marriages, and Southeast Asian foreign workers in South Korea. Ultimately, this paper contributes to further considerations of the Korean Wave phenomenon in Southeast Asia, particularly considering Southeast Asia’s importance in enabling the contemporary revitalisation of the concept of Asian Cool.

The literary genre biofiction is becoming more intriguing through its potential: Authors can use the story of famous people to create a new story that is not entirely based on a biographical truth. Readers can broaden their imagination through interesting stories about well-known personalities standing between fiction and reality.

Therese Fowler describes Zelda's life in the biographical novel Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013). Even though people initially perceived her as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz. She was a passionate woman who tried to be a painter and a writer.

The friendship and literary rivalry between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway made them famous ‘frenemies’. Paula McLain wrote The Paris Wife (2011), a historical fiction focused on the marriage and divorce of Hemingway and his first wife. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and describes how the relationship between Hemingway and Richardson fades.

The aim of this comparative analysis between those two biographical novels, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and The Paris Wife, is to expose if there are gender-specific characteristics: Are Fowler and McLain, both women, focused more on emphasizing forgotten women’s life stories or are they rather neutral in the storytelling process? Is it a way of ‘female writing’ in the stories of unique but somehow invisible women by their husbands’ side? And how different or similar are the stories of people who lived in the same era in both novels?

Jean Echenoz’s biofiction Ravel (2006) profoundly illustrates the deep interplay between literature and music. The novel focuses on the final decade of Maurice Ravel’s life, with the creation and first performance of Boléro at its core. By employing the musical qualities of repetition and difference, Echenoz constructs a unique narrative rhythm and multi-dimensional portrayal of Ravel’s character.

The fiction’s depiction of the musical structure of Boléro is both meticulous and insightful. This composition centers on a single rhythmic pattern and two alternating melodic themes, brought to life through an ever-evolving orchestration that defines its innovative musical language. Echenoz seamlessly integrates these structural characteristics into the novel, creating a text that harmonizes rhythm and narrative complexity.

The repetition and difference of rhythm in the fiction are reflected in the dynamic interaction between historical events and fictional imagination. Ravel’s creative process, his American tour, and the gradual decline of his health serve as the rhythmic foundation of the narrative, with their repetition emphasizing historical authenticity. However, Echenoz enhances these historical events with imaginative details, imbuing each retelling with novelty and exceeding the boundaries of traditional biography.

Similarly, the repetition and difference of melody are expressed through two alternating portrayals of Ravel. In Boléro, the alternation of bright and dark melodic themes injects emotional tension into the music. In the fiction, Ravel’s brilliance and struggles alternate to construct a conflicted and multi-faceted character. On one hand, he is a celebrated composer of immense talent and public acclaim; on the other, he endures insomnia, neurological decline, and profound solitude. Each iteration of these character traits is deepened emotionally: the tension between his success on tour and discomfort with public exposure, the burst of creative inspiration contrasted with the uncertainty of the creative process, and the intensifying suffering of his final years as he grapples with the inevitability of death. These evolving emotional layers mirror the “repetition and difference” of the novel’s melodic structure, adding richness and complexity to Ravel’s characterization.

By merging the rhythmic, melodic, and orchestral techniques of Boléro with the interplay of historical and fictional elements, Echenoz endows Ravel with an innovative narrative aesthetic. The fiction is not only a literary reimagining of Ravel’s life but also an experimental exploration of the possibilities between literature and music, reality and imagination.

The threads of abandonment, hopelessness, and haunting connect the desiring characters in Old Movies by Ian Casocot (Philippines) and The King of Caldecott Hill by Amanda Lee Koe (Singapore). The television screen acts as a space for these lost characters to project their fantasies and form desires for companionship against an indifferent and globalized society. These fantasies staged by the screen, while an escape from the world and their afflictions to abandonment, also reveal a deeper connection with the work of dreams produced in their respective nations. To explore these connections, I echo Neferti Tadiar’s fantasy-production to analyze whether ‘the global order of dreamwork’ pervades in fiction and affects the ways of dreaming held by literary characters. I contend that the dreams of fictional characters, specifically, the way their fantasies are constructed, are symptomatic of the kinds of imagination (re)produced to construct the Philippines and Singapore as nations. At the same time, these stories confront readers with the ways of living administered by these national imaginations.

This paper explores the fantasy-productions of Filipino diasporic novels for young readers, namely the Filipino American novels "Hello, Universe" by Erin Entrada Kelly and "Patron Saints of Nothing" by Randy Ribay. The transnational concept of fantasy-productions is based on the theories of Neferti Tadiar and will be complemented by theories regarding mythographies and the imaginary by Arjun Appadurai.This paper will highlight how Filipino American novels decolonize American fantasy-productions, as seen in the children’s novel, "Hello, Universe", which won the most prestigious children’s literature award in the USA, the John Newbery Medal, in 2018. The mythographies in the novel help recuperate Filipino tribal representations, which were demonized by American fantasy-productions. On the other hand, the new mestizo consciousness, as found in "Patron Saints of Nothing", nominated for the US National Book Award for young adult literature and also won the Freeman’s Award in Asia in 2019, engages with the fantasy-productions of the Philippine government regarding Rodrigo Duterte’s Drug War, as well as confront American fantasy-productions regarding Filipino American invisibility and indifference. The mythographies found in the novel forwards Filipino American

solidarity in the values of "pakikisama" and "pakikiramay". These two novels show that Filipino American narratives are significant, because they are part of Philippine national discourse and converse with other fantasy-productions from the Philippines.

This study explores the confluence of masculinity and nationhood in the music videos of the P-pop boy group, Alamat. Alamat has distinguished themselves from other P-pop groups in recent years through their use of various Philippine languages in their songs and stylized depictions of traditional Filipino textiles, narratives, and imagery in their music videos. These demonstrate a distinctly “Filipino” approach to the K-pop boy-group formula that both reflects and responds to the socio-cultural sensibilities of Philippine audiences, vis-a-vis our colonial past and globalized present.

In this paper, I argue that Alamat’s musical and aesthetic demonstration of a Filipino identity relies on gendered, masculinized strategies. Scholars agree that the nation must be considered as a fundamentally masculine enterprise (Andersen and Wendt, 2015)-- one that is territorially and culturally maintained through the physical and discursive integrity of its male population, akin to Connell’s conception of a hegemonic masculinity (2005). Alamat, in my view, plays with traditional, hegemonic Filipino masculinity, characterized by strength, religiosity, and economic responsibility (Chan, 2017), through their music videos’ navigation of sexual bodies, desire, and national feeling. The visual, moving motif of “kaldag,” a gyrating dance move that directs the audience’s gaze onto the members’ bare torsos, centers male erotic desire in shoring up collective identifications not only with romantic pursuits but also with anti-colonial resistance. However, while these moves signal cultural and sexual potency, they also fulfill unique affective functions as they mark moments of emotional vulnerability. The music videos narrate various levels of alienation experienced by the country’s youth as an outcome of extensive labor migration, neo-colonial beauty standards, and poverty (Arnaldo, 2020). It is through this layered approach to intimacy and the national condition that Alamat manifests a hybrid masculinity, one that challenges entrenched narratives of domination and foregrounds desire and feeling as national/cultural agency.

‘Emergence’ — a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia performance by Arvin Noguerras, Itos Ledesma, and the Daloy Dance Company — features multiple forms of engagement with Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers (1972). Staged in Manila in 2024, the performance involved variations on Nolledo’s novel; themes of which were re-articulated through movement, sound, and a dramatic reading of an essay reframing and responding to quotations from the novel. The text was considered as a point of convergence and departure, and each component of the performance varied on themes explored in the novel, including confinement, freedom, and transformation.

This presentation seeks to reflect upon the process of transposing elements of Nolledo’s writing through different media, examining resonances among the sonic, choreographic, and the textual. The discussion centres on parallel strategies actualised through each medium, focusing on how techniques and approaches from each process respond to, reinforce, and modulate the aesthetic and political dimensions of the text.

This article compares Mikhail Sholokhov’s One Man’s Destiny with Yu Hua’s To Live, exploring the similarities and differences in their portrayals of personal suffering. Both novels share elements such as life experiences, the roots of suffering, the protagonists’ resilient spirits, and the use of a dual narrative structure. However, the distinctions between the two novels are crucial. Firstly, the construction of time differs significantly. In One Man’s Destiny, Sokolov follows chronological markers, creating a linear progression of life where the deceased rarely “return.” In contrast, To Live captures significant events through a personal and subjective lens, where the end of life signifies the “duration” of time. Secondly, the experience of suffering is portrayed differently. Sokolov, burdened by the trauma of war, fights against fate like a heroic warrior, seeking survival while feeling isolated and aware of the world’s indifference. Conversely, Fugui, despite numerous life changes and the loss of loved ones, finds warmth amid sorrow, enriched by kinship, friendship, and love. Thirdly, the relationship between narrators varies. In One Man’s Destiny, the narrator "I" functions as a witness and listener, supplementing details about Sokolov and his adopted son, and conveying the trauma of war. The narration centers on Sokolov, with minimal focus on the narrator "I". In To Live, the story is narrated by a folklorist who intertwines perspectives over a decade, linking past and present through Fugui’s memories. This interaction enriches the story and fosters the growth of characters . Through a comparative study of these two works, we gain insights into the distinct expressions of suffering by Chinese and Russian writers. Despite their differences, both authors convey a universal message: while suffering is inevitable, a resilient spirit enables us to transcend adversity and embrace a renewed life.

As the founding figure of 20th-century Russian Sinology, Vasily Mikhaylovich Alekseyev developed a unique approach to Confucian interpretation through both fieldwork and textual translation. Based on Alekseyev’s travelogue and works on Confucianism, this paper explores his views on literature (Wen) and Dao, and examines their significance in Sinology. Alekseyev’s interpretation reveals a dualistic character: literature is classified into two categories—Confucian classics and aesthetic literature, and Dao is associated with metaphysical truth and ethical moral practice. Moreover, Alekseyev emphasized the material and authoritative characteristics of literature as a medium for conveying the intangible Dao. He further interpreted the phrase “Literature is the carrier of Dao” as an elitist mechanism for civilizational education. In this cross-cultural interpretative study, Alekseyev’s understanding of the relationship between literature and Dao also influenced his construction of Chinese literary history and his translation strategies, while engaging in dialogue with the Russian literary tradition from which he originated.

As one of the important categories of Chinese philosophy, “virtue” is an important foundation for the development of Chinese philosophy. Artem Igorevich Kobzev, a famous contemporary Russian sinologist, firstly traces the definition of “virtue” in the Shang-Yin era. A.I. Kobzev is not only good at grasping important categories in ancient Chinese philosophical classics from the perspective of comparative philosophy, but also discusses the corresponding translations of “virtue” in different cultural contexts, such as Russia and the West, for example. In particular, from the perspective of comparative philosophy, the similarities and differences between “virtue” and “goodness” in ancient Greek philosophy are compared. The relationship between “virtue” and the related concepts of “goodness” and “Tao” in Chinese philosophy is also discussed.

The multiple meanings of “virtue” are fully reflected in the thought of the Hundred Schools of Thought during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. A.I. Kobzev analyzes the presentation of “virtue” and its multiple meanings in the Confucian classics. In addition to analyzing its meaning in the Confucian classics, A.I. Kobzev also explores the meaning of “virtue” in the classics of the Hundred Schools of Thought, such as Taoism, Mohism, the School of War, and the School of Law. Adopting a historical-philosophical approach and within the framework of the development of Chinese philosophical history, A.I. Kobzev continues to explore the interpretation of “virtue” in the context of the metaphysicians of the Wei and Jin dynasties, as well as the Song and Ming philosophers. For example, He Yan, Wang Bi, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming, and advances the evolution of the meaning of “virtue” to the views of Qing and modern scholars such as Wang Chuanshan, Dai Zhen, Zhang Xuecheng, Tan Sitong, and Mou Zongsan. In this way, A.I. Kobzev has generally explored the multiple meanings of “virtue” in ancient Chinese philosophy and its evolution.

In order to take a more comprehensive view of the meaning of “virtue”, we will not only analyze the focus of Russian sinologists' interpretations of “virtue”, but will also use comparative philosophical methods to explore the interpretations of “virtue” by modern Chinese scholars as well as by Western scholars. The method of comparative philosophy will also be used to explore the interpretation of “virtue” by modern Chinese scholars and Western scholars. In this way, we will compare the similarities and differences in the interpretations of “virtue” by Russian, Chinese and Western scholars, and further explore the deeper ideological and cultural roots of such similarities and differences, with a view to exploring whether there is any fairness or cultural misinterpretation in the understanding of Chinese culture in Russia, China and the West, and to achieve the purpose of a kind of civilizational exchanges and mutual understanding.

The Scholars is the pinnacle of satirical novels by Chinese literati of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and has been handed down in many languages in the international Sinological community, making it one of the masterpieces of world literature. The full translation of The Scholars, translated and published by the Russian sinologist Voskresensky in 1959, presents the spirit of the original in a complete and exhaustive manner, while supplementing it with a wealth of paratextual information. Starting from the perspective of Imagologie, we explain the transmission and image shaping of Chinese cultural elements in the Russian translation of the paratext of The Scholars, reveal the Chinese cultural image constructed in the main text based on corpus translation, and explore the internal mechanism and literary significance of its formation. The exotic image constructed by the translators provides Russian readers with a unique vision of Chinese society, which is of great research significance and cultural value in promoting self-knowledge, enhancing cultural exchanges between China and Russia, and improving the image of the country.

Dating back to the beginning of the 18th century, the Russian academic circle had already begun to introduce Confucianism，and there has been an uninterrupted stream of people translating and introducing Confucianism until the 21 st century. At the turn of the 20th and 21 st centuries，the Russian Sinology community published the six-volume Encyclopedia of Chinese spiritual Culture，which was edited by Academician Mikhail Leontevich Titarenko，the fifth chairman of the International Confucian Association，and received high attention from the leaders of both China and Russia. It offered an objective and “outsider” interpretation of the value of Confucianism from the perspectives of Confucian figures，schools，concepts and so on. For the same Confucian concept，The Encyclopedia of Chinese spiritual Culture provided cross-interpretations with the help of different disciplines, also, it had cross-interpretations with other Sinology works of the same period. When the value of Confucianism is studied，it should be noted that the Western Sinology community conspired with the intellectual community to indulge in the delusion that capitalism was the end of history. They once put forward the views that Confucianism was not adaptable to modernization and that Confucianism had become a “museum exhibit”. The Encyclopedia of Chinese Spiritual Culture broke through such delusions and demonstrated the vitality of the modern transformation of Confucianism.

This essay examines the creation of Yingxi fiction and the role of elegant gatherings at the Great World Entertainment Center during early Republican China. Yingxi fiction, crafted by the traditional scholar Lu Dan’an, emerged after he viewed imported silent films. Lu Dan’an meticulously recorded the films' content and adapted them into fictional texts, aiming to introduce these stories to those who could not afford to watch the films. The process of creating Yingxi fiction not only unveils the hierarchical dynamics within these sophisticated gatherings but also illustrates how traditional Chinese novelists assimilated Western culture and cinema. By employing theoretical frameworks such as Cultural Field, Vernacular Modernism, Aura, and Mechanical Reproduction, this essay interprets the Chinese literati's struggle against the forces of modernism.

In the first half of the 20th century, the Sino-French Institute of Lyon (Institut franco-chinois de Lyon, IFCL, 1920–1946) fostered the growth and rise of a group of intellectuals from Republican China. Their experiences in Lyon and France not only provided a source of exotic inspiration for their literary creation, but also compelled this generation, born and raised up in radical social revolutions, to delve more deeply into questions of individual and national choices. Focusing on Su Xuelin苏雪林’s Thorny Heart棘心(1929) and Xu Zhongnian徐仲年’s My Beauty Faraway彼美人兮(1946), this study analyzes how sentimental writing in these two autobiographical novels serves as a medium to explore how Republican-era “overseas students literature” and its authors sought to challenge traditional sentimental norms through distinct paths, i.e., by embodying sacred religious love and by exploring sensual, transnational romance. Much like the divergent paths Su Xuelin and Xu Zhongnian took in the 1950s and beyond—in Taipei and Shanghai, respectively—their differing interpretations of the progressivist thought during the May Fourth Movement has been already foreshadowed in their novels. For instance, Su Xuelin’s Thorny Heart (1929) tells the story of Xingqiu’s encounter with Catholicism during her time at the Sino-French Institute. Xingqiu perceives religion and universal love as a striking contrast to the selfish character traits she associates with the Chinese people, viewing it as a potential remedy for the “mal du siècle” afflicting modern individuals. Su Xuelin’s depictions of natural landscapes and her highly reserved comments on urban life reveal her ambivalence toward the May Fourth rationalism and its underlying “modernity”, suggesting thus a certain rebellion against these ideals. In contrast, Xu Zhongnian’s My Beauty Faraway (1946) recounts his romance with a French woman, Louise, their marriage, and his eventual return with her to China. Xu Zhongnian dedicates extensive passages to the flourishing scenes of Shanghai during the treaty-port era, even illustrating the narrator’s contributions to the “localized cosmopolitanism”. In sum, on the basis of emotion, body and faith, these two novels illustrate the representative ways in which late Republican-era students studying abroad imagined the “France” and the “world”. Su Xuelin and Xu Zhongnian’s reflections on national fate also highlight this generation’s efforts to act as “mediators”, particularly in terms of how to “internalize” foreign influences and “recreate” a new subject of self.

This study examines how gender boundaries are constructed through the travel writings of women exploring China’s Northwest frontier，1903 -1936. Women's participation occupies a special position in the modern movement of China’s Northwest. Their writings and practices not only reflect new ways of thinking and planning about nationalism and femininity but are also filled with tension due to the delineation and crossing of national boundaries.

On the one hand, beginning with the first wave of female liberation in the late Qing, diverse voices have emerged, leading to ongoing reflections about the ideal image of new women. On the other hand, the different development processes between countries and regions reflect various clues of modernization—one of the most significant topics in the twentieth century. The Northwest frontier, characterized by the intertwining of different authorities, thus came into public view. Consequently, the call for women to venture into the Northwest frontier represents not only an experiment in women's liberation and national transformation but also serves as material to the interactions that cross national boundaries.

Focusing on three cases—the exploration of a female aviator (Lin Pengxia’s Northwest Journey 西北行), an emissary (Liu Manqing’s A Mission to Tibet 康藏軺征, and a spy (Ichinomiya Misako’s Mōko Miyage 蒙古土産)—this study shows the blended picture of travel writing. Although these women came from varied educational and personal backgrounds, their journeys were influenced by Confucian gender frameworks and nationalist discourse, which guided their entry into pivotal historical moments.

The Northwest, as an unevenly governed frontier, provided these female travelers with opportunities to challenge gender norms, transgress identity boundaries, and rewrite female destinies. However, they repeatedly drew back into prevailing gender structures, co-opted by national narratives.

What narrative patterns emerge that continually reintegrate these women into traditional gender frameworks? How do female travelers construct the heterogeneous “otherness” of the frontier? In what ways do their observations about frontier women reflect the intersection of historical and contemporary challenges faced by women? How were their images constructed—by themselves and the media—and subsequently absorbed into the discourse of nation-building?

Through addressing these questions, this study seeks to illuminate the complex interactions among gender, travel, and nationhood. By using the doubly “marginal” perspective of women in the Northwest, it further aims to reconsider the “centered” discussion of modernity.

During the transformative period from late Qing to Republican China, children—regarded as symbols of the nation’s future and core strength—began to attract significant public attention. As a result, discussions about children’s school education and daily lives persisted throughout the Republican era. The “discovery of the child” took on entirely new meanings in the 1920s and 1930s. While extensive research has examined textbooks across various disciplines, less attention has been paid to pedagogical resources, such as supplementary learning materials. This study addresses that gap by focusing on several extracurricular geography learning materials published during the Republican period: Grand Domestic Travel (1926) and The Travels of Zhen’er (1934) and Little Travel Notes (1939). It explores how first-person, child-centered narratives functioned within the framework of educational commercialization, specifically investigating how these narratives mobilized children’s emotions, fostered national consciousness, and disciplined bodily behaviors. This study argues that geography learning materials offered school-age readers diverse perspectives for understanding China by traversing various boundaries: urban and rural, national and local, Han and other ethnic groups, self and other, and child and adult. At the same time, these materials pioneered innovative methods for cultivating modern children.

Asserting the primacy of the sonic as an interconnected but independent entity in the field of textual studies, this paper engages with Work Songs as technology in order to establish an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between work and music in the contemporary times. Through a close study of representative examples of Work Song scholarship and archival documentation from the United States of America, India, and the United Kingdom the paper first locates the existent tension between competitive styles of categorization where the analytical foci alternates between ‘labour’, ‘occupation’, ‘work’, and ‘work process’. Within the rich field of debates on categorization that arise from such archival documentation and scholarship, the paper then locates at least and by and large, two dominant strands of seeing, hearing, and thinking about Work Songs. The first strand of thought focuses on the issue of origins. In that, Work Songs are linked to certain populations in terms of their race, community, or class becoming a part of a select few – namely, the “primitive” and “natural” people of the world in their everyday labouring lives. The second strand of thought focusses on the notion of musical value in relation to the work process. In that, the ideas of labour and work gains primacy where Work Songs are seen to work as a facilitator for aiding the process of work in terms of maximizing its productivity. In both strands of thought, content and structural analyses of songs become the primary modes of engagement with an assumption of homogenous language culture or class realities. In both cases the field of textual studies become limited in the absence of an engagement with the politics of sound and audibility. It is by questioning the two abovementioned dominant strands of thinking about Work Songs that this paper arrives at reasserting ‘sound’ as that interconnected and independent entity – one that not only expands the field of textual studies but also leads us towards an alternative perspective on understanding the crucial relationship between work and music in today’s times.

Classical Indian music is deeply rooted in tradition, with its origins tracing back to the Vedic period, according to many sources. Ragas are more than just musical compositions; they evoke specific emotions and are associated with different times of the day and seasons. Traditionally, each raga is linked to a particular time of day, season, and rasa (aesthetic emotion). Raga Bhairava holds a position of primacy, traditionally considered the first raga in the Ragamala classification. Associated with early morning devotion, the Ragamala paintings of the Bhairava raga have motifs of reverence and religiosity.

Various schools, from the Rajput to the Mughal to the Pahari traditions, have rendered Raga Bhairava differently, showcasing a range of emotional intensities and aesthetic interpretations. The Raga is also linked to Lord Shiva, in his fearsome form, but most Ragamala paintings of the Bhairava Raga focus on austerity, asceticism, and devotion. Scholars suggest that ragas may have evolved over time, undergoing changes in their notes and rendition. This could explain the near absence of fear as a theme in surviving Ragmala paintings. However, depictions of the fearsome Bhairava Raga do exist, particularly in Pahari and Nepalese traditions. Most representations, however, use dark tones and early morning hues to emphasize the introspective quality of the raga, focusing more on devotion and spirituality rather than fear.

At a fundamental level, my paper will try to understand the various ways in which elements like fear, introspection or devotion are transplanted from music to poetry and painting. Likewise, the various kinds of binding verse or bandish used in renditions of the raga will also be analysed for the theme of fear and gravity. Mapping available Raga Bhairava paintings on a temporal and spatial axes will allow for a deeper understanding of artistic evolution and regional stylistic differences. Such a study of these paintings can reveal shifts in patronage, artistic conventions, and cultural influences over time. This will further offer insights into how the visual representation of Raga Bhairava evolved, reflecting broader changes in artistic taste and philosophical perspectives.

A ceremony was scheduled at Frankfurt Book Fair to honor Adania Shibli with the 2023 LiBeraturpreis award for her novel, Minor Detail. However, the award was cancelled soon after the Hamas attack on Israel. This revocation only reaffirms the need to explore the nuanced writing of writers like Shibli on the irrefutable ways through which violent and genocidal histories exert their power on the present. After all, the violence that is portrayed in her book speaks of the horrors of any genocidal machinery, whether Hamas or IDF, that violates the freedom and rights of any citizen across the world. My paper presentation is an essential argument on how genocidal narratives can’t be exclusionary. One cannot condemn the Hamas attack and then renounce award for a book like Minor Detail that denounces another genocidal narrative. This paper presentation explores the complexities of historical trauma, individual accountability and the enduring impact of violence on both victims and perpetrators.

Furthermore, this paper will emphasise on broadening the general meaning of the term “censorship”. In “Censorship and the Female Writer”, Luisa Valenzuela calls censorship as “a hydra with its many heads”. For Valenzuela, censorship could also suggest “a very strong Freudian negation—[for a reader] to avoid the pain of confronting a reality [beyond what one is conditioned to think]”. In essence, censorship then signifies the act of suppressing or stifling perspectives different from one’s own. Renouncing Shibli’s award is an attempt to suppress the Palestinian literary voices that materialise the pain and suffering of Palestinian people on global platforms and therefore a case of selectively censoring the genocidal narratives in general. It is significant to challenge this kind of censorship since it poses extreme dangers to build space for democratic and diverse discursive practices where no one genocidal narrative is bigger than the other and there is equitable space for all these narratives to coexist as a cautionary note that “Never Again for Anyone”.

This talk explores the legacy of protest and dissent in Belarus, highlighting how memories of these events are documented and preserved as forms of resistance. The talk presents the work on the recent publication Belarus—Faces of Resistance as an attempt to memorialize the experiences and stories of those who stood against authoritarianism in Belarus. In contrast to the narrative of collective memory shaped by state-sponsored interpretations, this work underscores the significance of personal and collective efforts to document dissent from below. The presentation demonstrates how these preserved memories contribute to a counter-history that both contests and complements official narratives, offering insights into the challenges of democratization in post-Soviet spaces. It also addresses the question how the methods of Comparative Literature can be applied in Public Humanities.

The long title is deemed necessary in trying to convey the multifaceted and extremely complex situation in Serbia, which began a few years ago with mostly localized protests against the mining giant Rio Tinto's plans to mine lithium in Serbia agricultural and fruit producing region. The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, and his government have mainly acted as PRs for Rio Tinto, as have the US Embassy to Belgrade, and top echelons of the EU, during their recent visit to Belgrade, organized specifically for this purpose.

On November 1, 2024, with the fall of the roof of the Novi Sad train station under reconstruction, which killed 15 and severely maimed 2 more people, the protests against government's incompetence, secret contracts selling public goods and lands, and general corruption, have reached their peak. As I write this, tens of thousands of Serbian people continue to protest in the streets daily, exposed to government bullies' physical attacks, regime media targeting, and illegal Secret Service interrogations and detentions of dozens of students, even minors.

The symbol of the protest became the "bloody hand," from the accusation that the Serbian government, in attempts to hide its own incompetence and corruption in the case of the fall of the train station roof, but also to protect Chinese investors involved in the restoration, has blood on its hands.

On January 13, 2025, Efraim Zuroff wrote a column for the Jerusalem Times, accusing Serbian Theater actors, who end their performances by raising red hands to the audience, of using the "Hamas symbolism."

The final element in this story is the Serbian government public response to the "bloody hands" protest symbol, by drawing the red middle finger on its own posters and pamphlets.

For the sake of protecting Western economic interests (Rio Tinto excavating lithium in Serbia, rather than in much richer lithium beds in Germany), the Serbian protests have been either misunderstood or downright misrepresented in the, especially Western media, linking them to Russian interference and misinformation campaigns (New York Times, Aug. 18, 2024). The Efraim Zuroff opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, on the other hand, has a slightly different history, and is linked to the Israeli advisors to the government of Aleksandar Vučić, in the business of discrediting the justifiable disatisfaction of the Serbian people.

By using documentary media evidence, video recordings, and media theories, this paper will explain the ramificiations of Serbian contemporary protests for European, and global politics.

Indigenous communities from the North East of India have been telling their stories to the world in the yarn of the region with endurance, resistance and resilience. Such traditions offer culture as a site of struggle and also account for the socio-cultural changes in the North East by locating trauma, the politics of tradition and continuity, the ecological space.

In his 2018 book, "Strangers No More", Sanjoy Hazarika writes of old and new struggles in the region: “The problems and alienation caused by the non-stop application of AFSPA and the Disturbed Areas Act along with other laws such as the Nagaland Security Regulations Act have created a huge gap of mistrust between individuals and communities in the states caught up in this trouble and the central government and its representatives.” (Hazarika 2018: 341) Situating the role of the protest within local, national, transnational contexts and temporalities in Karbi Anglong, this paper would focus on the turbulent history of conflict and fragmented selfhood in the Northeast of India with particular reference to the Karbi Youth Festival, an event organized by the indigenous communities of Karbi people from Karbi Anglong, Assam, India.

In 1974, Karbi Youth Festival (KYF) was first held in Karbi Club as a form of protest and resistant against the ongoing debates on language in the remote town of Diphu in January coinciding with New Year celebrations. It was a small affair lasting for three days and drew only a limited attendance. But it made a huge impact among the youth and students. Over the years, the KYF grew in strength and prestige as rural youth and students rallied solidly behind it in spite of state government’s apathy, refusing to give any financial assistance. The sustained impact of the festival initiated the possibility of moving beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization.

The Karbi Youth Festival provides newer opportunities to confront painful histories by ensuring that the festival ground transforms into a site of reclamation and resistance. In the cartographic imaginary, Karbi Anglong, as reiterated by the annual Karbi Youth Festival, has existed and survived over centuries through its myths, legends, songs, dances, artistic traditions as well as through its conflicting history and moribund politics. Most importantly, the Karbi Youth Festival takes cognizance of differentiation rather than assimilation, whereby language plays a mobilizing force in identity formation within the Indigenous Karbi community. The Festival is indicative of cognitive constructs that foster cohesive identity and a source of empowerment and agency. Through the vivid history of the Karbi Youth Festival, this paper would foreground conversations that must be heard, of art that must be seen, of photographs that must be envisioned, of dances that must be re-discovered and of stories that must be retold, again and again.

Since 2018, the artist Daniel Blaufuks is working on a visual-textual non-diary composed by landscape A4 sheets containing different archival materials and notes. The sheets are numbered, corresponding to one day each, and intersect private with public documents, (unreferenced) quotations with newly written fragments, different languages with (snapshot) photographs and old newspaper clippings. In this paper I will focus on the first larger exhibition of the project, The days are numbered (MAAT, Lisbon, 2024), and the corresponding photobook. Putting Blaufuks’ work in conversation with Walter Benjmain’s thought on memory, translation and (mechanical) reproduction, I will argue that The days are numbered is not only a sensible reflection about (human) decay and finitude, but also about a profound sense of contamination and affectedness of the self. Sidestepping the spatial and temporal coordinates that characterize many theorizations of hospitality, Blaufuks’ project rather invites to think through relationality and welcome in the context of historical responsibility and complex modes of implication (Rothberg 2019). Following this invitation, I propose to analyze Blaufuks’ project as a collection and archive of Benjaminian constellations of “Nowtime” (“Jetztzeit”) which by refusing the readability of the past seek to lay open the hidden “messianic” potentialities of remembrance (“eingedenken”). Exploring the role of materiality and the use of different media, I aim to show how The days are numbered seeks to think through the impact of technological change and the risk of the depolitization of art to ask how relationality might be imagined otherwise.

In Cécile Wajsbrot’s 2021 novel Nevermore, a translator struggling with grief and loss, translates the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, from English into French, sentence by sentence. The unnamed translator moves to a city, Dresden, that had once been destroyed and is surrounded by a language that she is neither translating into or from. This paper examines the reparative process of translation as an act of hospitality in the world of the inhospitable: Wajsbrot’s translator keeps returning to places decimated or abandoned by modern technology and humans: Dresden, Chernobyl, the High Line, Foula, as she contemplates translating the Ramsay’s house, emptied of humans. The representation, in the novel, of the embodied translator, reacting with affect to the text she is translating suggests that process of translation allows for the kind of human and ecological renewal seen in the decimated places she describes.

This paper also focuses on the how the process of translation is theorized as an embodied act within the novel, “in which theorising remains open to the twists and turns of its practice, an experiment in thinking with translation rather than a straightforward synthetisation of its craft” and in which “transient theories of doing and thinking translation surface and remain entangled in the first-person singular” (Grass, 9). Following Klaus Kaindl’s call for a rehumanized Translator Studies in which we are “translating human beings” (Kaindl, 2) with all their “illogicalities, fuzziness, subjectivity, ephemerality” (22), this paper posits that Nevermore’s fictional portrayal of the subjective choices of the translator at a moment of personal and planetary grief allows us a way into re-humanizing how we might theorize translation as a human and hospitable process. Finally, the paper analyzes Tess Lewis’s 2024 English-language translation of Wajsbrot’s novel, and her collaboration with Wajsbrot.

At a time when technological advances and the proliferation of AI-generated narratives seem to suggest the possibility of ever-present, perfect communication between speakers of all languages, reflecting on the intricacies of human translation emerges as a radical practice of linguistic hospitality and offers an opportunity to rethink how the inherent fragilities of human, embodied translators can be crucial towards achieving mutual understanding between cultures and creating more hospitable translational communities in which the labor of (literary) translators is also valued.

Recently published “translation memoirs” – a subgenre at the intersection of translation studies and life writing in which literary translators reflect on their creative practice (Grass & Robert Foley 2024) – attest to the interest in understanding translation as a human, relational gesture rather than a mere instrumental and technical procedure that serves to facilitate information across languages. Instead, translation memoirs by Kate Briggs, Jhumpa Lahiri or Doireann Ní Ghríofa, to name but a few, have opened up a space of hospitable dialogue about literary translation that reveal “many of the hidden avenues of translation that get passed over in silence or eclipsed in invisibility: the archive of hesitations, doubts, and errors, the personal and political negotiations that must happen in the record of translation subjects’ travels between languages” (Grass and Robert-Foley 2024, 2). In this paper, I aim to give center stage to the importance of such recent writing trends which emphasize the complexity of human translation as a form of relational and embodied translational hospitality: building on the aforementioned genre of the translation memoir, I want to expand the scope of translation life writing to include recent epistolary writings between writers and translators who have also engaged in meaningful conversation about translation. More specifically, I propose to close read the letter exchange between Kate Briggs and Lisa Robertson published in the online magazine Granta in January 2024, in dialogue with excerpts from Brigg’s 2017 translation memoir This Little Art. By thinking about translation as a friendly conversation with oneself (in a memoir) and with another (in letters) made up of joyful hesitations and doubts, healthy disagreements and shared stories, I hope to contribute to the ongoing revival of literary translation as a human, dialogical activity that fosters translational hospitality. As Mexican author Jazmina Barrera noted in a recent letter to her English translator Christina MacSweeney, “[she has] come to think about friendship as a very long conversation. One where distances and intensities are constantly changing, one that has a lot of stops [...]. Translation is also a form of conversation: an actual one, with the author; an implied one, with the text; a constant one, with yourself or with the person who translates next to you.”

This paper will explore Suzette Haden Elgin’s feminist science fiction classic Native Tongue (1984), the first of her trilogy of the same name, which imagines a dystopian, patriarchal future where women have been stripped of all rights and are viewed as property. Their existence is limited to serving men – the “master[s] of the household” (Derrida 2000, 4) – as wives, mothers and translators at a time when space exploration and colonization have led to frequent interplanetary communication and negotiations.

The paper proposes to analyze Elgin’s novel to reflect on the relationship between translation and hospitality from the women’s perspective and the power of language to alter their condition. With that goal in mind, it will look into two spaces where women find a sense of belonging and reclaim some agency: 1) the interpreting booth, and 2) the Barren House.

Regarding the first, despite all the technological advancements, translation remains a human activity, namely, a female task. Women from linguistic families, known as “lines”, are trained from birth in several human and alien languages to respond to the growing demand for translation. Ironically, their linguistic skills, intended to keep them overworked and under strict control, end up empowering them. As the sole proficient speakers of alien languages and experts on their customs, women become both essential and irreplaceable in all exchanges with the strange(r). Men depend on their knowledge to conduct business and avoid cultural conflicts and misunderstandings.

The second is a space for women who can no longer bear children and strengthen the numbers of the “lines”. While originally designed by men as a place to hold those deemed unwanted or useless, the Barren House gains a different meaning to women. It becomes their safe haven, a place they can call “home”, and the heart of their resistance movement. Left to their own devices, they slowly and secretly develop an exclusively female language, Láadan, to freely interact with each other and express their feelings, experiences, and perceptions. As a language by women and for women, thus essentially untranslatable to outsiders, it allows them to challenge their hostile and oppressive lived reality and conceive a new, more hospitable one.

This paper explores the intersection of translation, hospitality, and the mother figure through Elissa Marder's The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, alongside the works of queer Chilean authors Gabriela Mistral and Pedro Lemebel. Taking Walter Benjamin’s reflections on technical reproducibility as a point of departure, I argue that the maternal, as theorized by Marder and depicted in Chilean literature, serves as a site of both translation and hospitality—resisting mechanization while opening onto relationality and difference. If translation operates as imaginative interpretation, then the maternal is a translational condition par excellence: generating and unsettling meaning, resisting the reduction of the human to a standardized form.

The mother figure, as elaborated by Marder and reflected in Mistral's poetry and Lemebel's narratives, is not a static origin but a threshold where language, experience, and subjectivity emerge unpredictably. Like translation, the maternal is an act of hospitality—an opening to the foreign, the arrival of the other. Yet, contemporary capitalism and digital technologies threaten to reconfigure both translation and maternity into functions of efficiency and production rather than sites of radical openness. This paper interrogates how hospitality, as a function of translation, might resist the instrumentalization of both language and the maternal, affirming translation as an inherently fractured, relational, and ethical act.

By thinking the maternal alongside translation, as portrayed in the works of Mistral and Lemebel, I propose reconsidering the place of imagination in an age where technological mediation raises urgent questions about agency, embodiment, and ethics. If, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests, translation is ‘the language of languages,’ then the maternal might be reimagined as an archi-originary translation: a locus where meaning, identity, and relation are continually negotiated. In this sense, the mother, like the translator, becomes the figure through which hospitality is extended and redefined, offering a way to think translation beyond mechanization and as a practice of ethical encounter.

This theoretical framework finds resonance in Chilean literary works that engage with themes of hospitality, the maternal, and, unexpectedly, translation. The writings of Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral and author and performance artist Pedro Lemebel provide concrete literary explorations of these ideas, demonstrating how hospitality and maternity evoke the dynamics of translation. Their framing of maternity and hospitality offers a perspective through which translation can be reconsidered as a site of political resistance, queer and polymorphic creativity, and ethical relation within specific historical and cultural contexts.

본 연구는 전근대에 편찬된 경주 지리서 『동경잡기』가 20세기 초에 활자화 및 일본어 번역된 양상에 주목하여, 한국과 일본의 경주 지리서 재편 양상과 간행 배경을 살피는 데에 목적을 두었다. 1910년 한일합병을 전후로 조선으로 이주한 일본인 지식인들은 조선 고서를 수집 및 번역하는 데에 열의를 쏟았다. 일본인들은 조선고서간행회, 조선연구회 등의 연구단체를 설립하여『사씨남정기』, 『평양속지』를 비롯한 다양한 장르의 조선 고서들을 활자화하거나 일본어로 번역하였다. 한편, 이에 대해 최남선(崔南善)은 조선광문회(朝鮮光文會)를 설립하여 조선 고서를 주체적으로 활자화하기 시작했다. 요컨대 1910년을 전후로 조선인과 일본인이 각자 조선 고서를 재편하는 데에 힘썼던 셈이다.

이들의 간행본에 대한 연구자들의 관심은 비교적 이른 시기부터 이어져 왔으나, 그들의 고서 간행은 1920년대에 기획된 조선 고서 시리즈 「통속조선문고」가 다소 개작이 이루어진 것과 달리, 직역 혹은 활자화 자체에 초점을 두었기 때문에 텍스트를 중심으로 한 연구가 적은 실정이다. 그러나 1910년대에 그들이 일정한 목적을 지니고 해당 작품들을 간행한 정황을 살펴보는 일은 일제강점기 초기 양국의 시각 차이를 확인한다는 측면에서 중요한 일이다.

본고는 당대의 고서 재편 양상을 확인하는 작업의 일환으로, 경주 지리서 『동경잡기』의 재편 양상을 확인하고자 하였다. 이에 일본인이 주체로 활동한 조선고서간행회, 조선연구회의 간행본과 조선인이 주체로 활동한 조선광문회의 간행본을 비교 대상으로 삼았다. 세 단체에 의해 공통적으로 간행이 이루어진 조선 고서는 『동경잡기』가 거의 유일하다는 점에서 본 연구는 또한 주목할 만하다.

이에 따라 본고는 세 판본이 원문으로 삼은 『동경잡기』를 추정하고, 이를 재편한 양상을 확인하기로 한다. 예시로, 조선연구회는 서문에서 『동경잡기』의 판본을 두 개 이상 확인하였으며, 조선광문회는 간오(刊誤)를 추가하여 원문의 잘못을 바로잡고자 하였다. 이러한 시도를 텍스트를 중심으로 확인하는 일은 단순히 활자화가 제대로 이루어졌는지를 확인하는 것 이상으로, 고도(古都) 경주를 둘러싼 당대 양국의 시각 차이를 확인할 수 있다는 점에서 의의를 지닌다.

이 연구는 한국의 고대 무속 행위에서부터 죽음을 제재로 한 중세의 한시와 제문, 2010년대 이후 창작된 세월호 문학까지를 경유하여 한국 문학에서 ‘죽음 이후’를 형상화하는 방식을 살핀 후, 올바른 공동체적 애도는 어떠한 모습이어야 하는지를 고민해보는 것을 목표로 한다.

인간은 죽음에 있어서 늘 당사자이며 주변인이다. 죽음은 당사자에게는 일생에서의 마지막 관문을 통과함으로써 삶을 마무리하는 과정이며, 타자의 죽음을 맞닥뜨린 주변인에게는 죽은 이의 부재를 인정한 후 일상을 재건해야 하는 과제를 남긴다. 다시 말해, 인간에게 있어 죽음은 필연적이며 불가피한 것으로서 죽은 자는 죽음의 의례를 무사히 통과하여 존재 변화를 이뤄내야 하고, 산 자는 망자의 죽음을 받아들여야 한다. 이에 각 문화권에서는 죽음을 수용하고 받아들이는 '애도'의 방식이 다양하게 나타나며 사회에 따라 상이한 죽음관을 형성하였다.

그러나 애도는 죽음을 맞이한 당사자와 죽은 자를 마주한 산 자 개인의 차원에서만 이루어지지는 않는다. 특히 전쟁이나 재해, 역병 등으로 인해 다수의 사상자가 발생한 이후, 애도는 공동체의 과업으로 남게 되며 망자를 향한 충분한 예우와 애도 기간을 갖추지 못할 경우 죽음은 사회 구성원들에게 큰 트라우마로 남게 된다. 사회에는 크고 작은 죽음이 매일 자리하며, 따라서 애도를 수행하는 공동체의 방식을 사유하는 일은 인간에게 있어 죽음을 대비하는 일만큼이나 위급하며 중요한 위상을 지닌다고 볼 수 있을 것이다. 이에 이 연구는 한국 사회가 고대부터 현대에 이르기까지 죽은 자를 애도하고 산 자를 위로해 온 방식을 문학의 측면에서 살핌으로써 올바른 공동체적 애도에 대해 고민해보고자 한다.

한국 사회가 망자를 애도하는 가장 오래된 방식은 망자천도굿으로부터 발견할 수 있다. 의례의 형식을 빌려 이뤄지는 굿거리에서 애도는 개인을 넘어 특정 죽음과 의례에 연루된 여러 존재들이 참여하게 된다. 이는 죽음과 애도가 신과 인간, 먼저 죽어 제장에 불려온 여러 망자를 아우르는 '굿 참여자'라는 공동체의 차원에서 이뤄짐을 말하는 것이기도 하다. 사령굿의 전 과정이 이런 모습을 보여주지만, 특히 서울 새남굿의 도령돌기, 함경도 망뭇굿의 타승풀이는 죽음이 망자만의 것이 아니며, 다른 존재들의 도움과 참여로 이뤄짐을 직접적으로 보여준다.

근대의 제문과 한시를 통해서는 공동체가 죽음을 기억하는 방식을 살필 수 있다. 한글 제문은 가족의 죽음을 애도하는 현장에서 읽히는, 현장성 있는 문자 문학이다. 제문에 사용된 서술 전략과 감정 노출의 방식, 애도의 형상은 다수의 선행 연구에서 다루어 온 바 있다. 그러나 이러한 연구는 주로 여성이 작성한 한글 제문에 초점을 맞추어 왔으며, 조선 이후 창작된 제문에는 큰 관심을 가지지 않았다는 점에서 한계를 지닌다. 따라서 이 글에서는 『이승과 저승을 소통하는 한글 제문』에 실린 부모님에 대한 제문을 전체적으로 조망함으로써 기존 제문과의 차이를 살핀 후 남녀 간 애도 방식의 차이 등을 확인하고자 한다. 한편, 한시에서 개인적 죽음을 애도하는 시편들이 어떻게 공동체적 위로의 장으로 확장될 수 있는지를 탐색하고자 한다. 애도시는 특정 개인의 죽음을 계기로 창작되어 시인의 사적 감정이나 개인적 추념에 머무르는 것으로 이해되기 쉽다. 그러나 이러한 시편들은 종종 망자에 대한 단순한 기억을 넘어, 유족과 지인, 나아가 애도를 공유하는 공동체 전체를 염두에 두고 창작된다. 그 과정에서 한시는 상실감을 치유하고 망자에 대한 기억을 환기하며, 위로의 기능을 수행할 수 있다. 이러한 맥락에서 애도시는 단순히 비탄이나 칭양(稱揚)의 정서를 표현하는 데 그치지 않는다. 따라서 애도시를 살피는 일은 애도 수행의 주체가 죽음을 수용하는 방식과 전통적 애도 관습을 따름으로써 죽음에 대한 보편적 공감대가 형성되는 과정을 이해하는 일과 다르지 않을 것이다.

마지막으로, 2010년대 중반부터 현재에 이르기까지 창작된 세월호 문학을 통해 현대 한국 사회에서 유효한 공동체적 애도의 방식을 고민해보고자 한다. 2014년에 있었던 세월호 참사는 304명의 사상자를 발생시키며 현대 한국 사회에 큰 충격을 가져왔다. 특히 세월호 참사는 ‘막을 수 있었던’, 국가에 의한 인재라는 점에서 국민들로 하여금 국가 권력을 불신하도록 했으며, 창작자들에게는 정치적 올바름에 대한 부단한 반성을 수행하도록 했다. 즉 세월호 참사는 한국 사회가 공유하는 하나의 트라우마이자 한국 문학의 한 분기점으로서 개인과 공동체적 삶을 긴밀하게 연결하는 하나의 계기로 작용했으며, 2010년대 중반 이후 세월호를 기억하려는 문학이 꾸준하게 창작되며 애도, 나아가 연대의 장으로 개인을 호명하고 있다. 이 연구에서는 세월호 참사 이후 매달 마지막 주 토요일에 진행되는 ‘304 낭독회’와 34명의 시인이 참여한 ‘생일시’ 프로젝트를 대상으로 세월호 이후의 문학을 톺으며 공동체적 애도의 방식을 고민한 후, 이러한 애도가 망자를 넘어 산 사람을 위로할 수 있는 가능성에 대해 고찰해보고자 한다.

죽음의 필연성과 그에 대한 애도의 필요는 시대를 초월하는 보편 감각이다. 그러나, 동시에 하나의 죽음이 발생한 사회적 · 역사적 맥락에 따라 각 죽음을 수용하고 망자를 배웅하는 애도의 방식은 다양하게 나타날 수 있다. 따라서 이 연구에서는 문학의 장 안에서 텍스트 고유의 특질과 텍스트 외적 맥락에 따라 애도를 수행하는 방식을 살핀 후, 이러한 애도의 관습을 한국 사회 전반으로 확대시켜 공동체적 애도와 윤리에 대해 고민하는 결론으로 나아가고자 한다. 이러한 시도는 '죽음과 그 이후'라는 존재론적 숙명에 대해 시대별 맥락이 함의하는 특수성과, 애도의 다양한 문학적 방식이 시대를 불문하고 재호명될 수 있는 이유를 고찰하는 계기를 마련할 수 있을 것으로 기대한다.

It is hardly controversial to state that we are living in a post-European world, given the pressures on Eurocentric perspectives to become more inclusive, especially toward the Global South. What is equally true—and provides the impetus behind my paper—is that the division between center and periphery within Europe has become more porous. However, the intra-European dialogue between Western and Eastern literary/publishing establishments observed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, exciting though it is, continues to be hampered by assumptions and stereotypes. On the one hand, there is lots to cheer on, including new book prizes, chief among The European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, and the Grand Continent Prize, which aims to make the winning title widely available in translation (the title must be written in either French, Spanish, German, Polish, or Italian, which are also the languages the title is then translated into). On the other hand, it seems that Western European readers continue to expect a certain type of narrative to come out of East Central Europe, mainly, and not unlike during the Cold War, a book written by a dissident or depicting the trials and tribulations of living under an oppressive government. Ironically, today’s East Central European writers have themselves to blame, at least in part, as many of them embraced what Andrew Wachtel has called “new internationalism,” which is about getting translated as well as obtaining legitimacy. For his part, David Williams uses the term trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature” or “literature of the ruins”) to designate writers who continue to feed the West a cocktail of political tribulations or historical narrativizing (Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk, for example, became immensely popular in Germany for his travelogues depicting East European backwaters). Is there a way forward out of this? Absolutely. To foster a truly pluralistic literary ecosystem, Europe must both engage with global literary developments under the banner of “world literature” and support avant-garde and migrant voices within its borders. This includes redefining paradigms for translation—such as reconsidering the notion of “native” translators—and reviving policies like the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. By embracing linguistic and cultural diversity, Europe can not only counterbalance the dominance of English-language literature but also model a sustainable approach to literary inclusivity that values both global and regional voices.

We have been used to discuss technology in the sense of new communication technoogies, often linked to the digital medium. This is the discussion today with comparative literary studies, when we address its relation to technology. This field is mostly discussed in the relations between new communication and creation technology and research, gathering the uses of the digital, the possiblities of artificial intelligence, and the new distribution media or social networks. This is a very relevant take on technology, especially because it is still very uncertain. These techological phenomena are directly linked to discourse and languages, and, therefore, to the production and circulation of literature. However, technology is a much wider theme, and so are the relations between literature and technology. In particular, I will pay attention to a particular relation between the history of European languages, fishing tehcnologies, and literature.

While the prominence of some literary languages over the others has changed in the history of European literatures, their various uses continue to both producing the idea of Europe itself as well as resistances to it. This paper looks at narratives of fishing that contrast the Eurpoean fishing policy frameworks with the specific local experiences of the changing fishing practices in the margins of Europe. In particular, the paper delves into the narrative essay Laberinto de mar: un viaje por la vida y la historia de nuestras costas by Noemí Sabugal’s, which employs multilingualism in its tracing of the technological changes that have transformed and eroded the fishing sector in Spain. The book continuously uses minorized languages of the Iberian Peninsula to account for a resistance to the homogeneization that European policy frameworks have encompassed as the sector progressively evolved technologically towards a more industrial, international-scale fishing. Through the uses of Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan, the book invites us to interrogate the changing ideas of Europe and the tensions between a Post-European cultural and literary panorama and the enclosing European governance policies. In sum, Laberinto mar invites us to interrogate other forms of cultural discourse that, while not necessarily centered in literary production and circulation, nonetheless involve the linguistic uses of technology in the creation of and resistances to European ideologies and imaginaries.

Few researchers are interested in Bruno Latour’s reflections on literature, probably due to his apparent devaluation of language, which he often considers as a veil preventing access to beings. Consequently, this presentation explores the possibility of approaching literature through Latour’s ontology, focusing on the (x-)morphism he values for analyzing protagonists in fictional works. First, we will show how Latour reassesses the conventional opposition between “fact” and “fiction”, giving privileged status to “beings of fiction.” We will then analyze how these beings exist, paying particular attention to female protagonists such as Thérèse Raquin in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Marie-Ève in Henri Lopes’ Sur l’autre rive. Indeed, Latour discusses a series of multiple “morphic” transformations experienced by Adie, the protagonist of Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark, at the moment when she recites a poem by Yeats, with her words coexisting and interacting with other human and non-human entities. We argue that this way of writing and reading novels allows female protagonists to exist in a different way than before.

Peu de chercheur·euse·s s’intéressent à la réflexion de Bruno Latour sur la littérature, probablement en raison de sa dévalorisation apparente de la langue, souvent considérée par lui comme une voile empêchant l’accès aux êtres. Dès lors, notre communication explore la possibilité d’aborder la littérature à travers l’ontologie de Latour, notamment en focalisant sur le (x)-morphisme qu’il valorise pour analyser les protagonistes dans des œuvres de fiction. Nous montrerons d’abord comment Latour réévalue la relation opposée entre le « fait » et la « fiction », en accordant plutôt un privilège aux « êtres de fiction ». Nous analyserons ensuite la manière dont ces derniers existent, en portant une attention particulière aux protagonistes féminines telles que Thérèse Raquin d’Émile Zola (Thérèse Raquin) et Marie-Ève de Henri Lopes (Sur l’autre rive). En effet Latour évoque une série de multiples transformations ‘morphiques’ que connaît la protagoniste Adie de Richard Powers (Plowing the dark) au moment où les mots d’un poème de Yeats qu’elle récite sont prononcés, coexistant et interagissant avec d’autres entités humaines et non humaines. Nous pensons que cette façon d’écrire et lire les romans fera exister les protagonistes féminines romanesques autrement qu’auparavant.

This paper examines an ecofeminist comparative analysis of Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, investigating how both novels delve into the intertwined oppression and resistance of women and nature under patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial systems. By applying an intersectional ecofeminist framework, the study reveals how solitude—manifested as isolation, estrangement, or transcendence—functions both as a mechanism of control and as a space for resistance and regeneration in these narratives. While both novels depict women and nature as marginalized and commodified, their critiques differ in scale and narrative style. Whale focuses on local industrial capitalism in Korea, illustrating how domestic systems of economic development exploit natural resources and female labor, culminating in nature’s material reclamation of industrial ruins. In contrast, One Hundred Years of Solitude critiques global colonial capitalism in Latin America, using magical realism to depict nature’s cyclical resistance to foreign corporate exploitation and historical erasure, particularly through the allegorical destruction and renewal of Macondo. The paper also investigates how female characters—Chunhui’s physical endurance and Remedios the Beauty’s mystical transcendence—embody divergent forms of ecofeminist resistance, ranging from embodied defiance to ethereal withdrawal. This analysis extends beyond gendered oppression, integrating critiques of class, colonialism, and environmental degradation to offer a multifaceted exploration of power and resistance. Ultimately, the paper argues that both novels, while culturally and narratively distinct, converge in their portrayal of women and nature as resilient agents capable of challenging and subverting systems of domination, providing valuable insights into contemporary ecofeminist discourse.

The classic science fiction film series Alien envisions reproduction as a violent collaboration between technology and biology, breaking traditional paradigms of gender, corporeality, and species boundaries. The Xenomorph’s reproductive mechanism operates through an automated biological drive. It parasitizes human hosts regardless of gender, thereby reducing the host body to a mere container and reproductive machine. This non-normative reproduction reveals a state of genderlessness or post-gender, constructing a queer maternal-fetal structure. Focusing on the fourth film in the series: Alien: Resurrection, this paper explores, on the one hand, how technology reshapes and alters the perception and behavior of bodily existence, and how the mechanism of the body, reconstructed through technological and reproductive violence, challenges the phenomenology of embodiment. On the other hand, the paper examines the peremptory reshaping of Ripley’s body through cloning technologies and the mutation of the Xenomorph Queen’s reproductive mechanism, ultimately resulting in a hybrid, fluid existence—a posthuman assemblage, which is capable of reconfiguring itself in response to environmental or internal tensions. Nevertheless, the paper emphasizes how this reproductive mechanism and Ripley’s multifaceted identities destabilize the normative binary structures of gender and reproduction, pointing to a queered marginality and vulnerability. This not only blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, the human and the alien, and gender and subjectivity but also redefines the materiality and expressivity of the body. Drawing on queer gender theory, media analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage,” this paper situates the Alien series within broader discourses on the ethics of technology. It reinterprets how sci-fi narratives transcend the boundaries of biology and technology, gender and body, creating multidimensional and fluid posthuman imaginaries.

In September 1935, Lin Yutang published an English article titled "Feminist Thought in Ancient China" in T’ien Hsia Monthly, where he introduced three men, he considered ancient Chinese feminists: Yu Zhengxie, Yuan Mei, and Li Ruzhen. Among them, Lin highlighted well-known scholar Yuan Mei, portraying him as a social pioneer advocating for women's rights. Writing for Western-educated Chinese intellectuals and English speakers in China, Lin’s works and translations mediated China and the West, facilitating traditional Chinese knowledge flow worldwide and shaping perceptions of China. Lin’s feminist view notably influenced Sinologist Robert van Gulik. In the postscript of The Chinese Gold Murders, van Gulik discussed how he incorporated Lin’s article in his conceptualization of Judge Dee’s progressive stance on women’s voices in Chapter Fifteen. Many scholars have similarly regarded Lin as a cultural bridge between China and the West and accepted his characterization of Yuan Mei as a feminist. However, Goyama Kiwamu’s research concluded that Yuan Mei’s literary thought stemmed from his haose (lust for man and woman), in which Yuan objectified both men and women as subjects of sexual desire. Yuan Mei used to say that reading a good poetry sentence is like watching a beautiful lady. According to Kiwamu’s research and Yuan Mei’s works, Yuan's opposition to foot-binding, advocacy for women’s rights, and critique of Confucianism do not stem from feminist ideals but due to Yuan’s sexual desire, thus leading to his patronage of women. This raises critical questions: why did Lin portray Yuan Mei as a feminist? What motivated him to interpret Yuan’s thoughts in a feminist fashion? Despite the distance between Yuan’s writings as well as actions and feminist ideals, why did Lin Yutang cast a feminist light on Yuan Mei and introduce Yuan Mei as a pioneering Chinese “feminist” to English readers in the 1930s?

This research investigates a Chinese television drama adapted from a novel by Yi Shu, a distinguished Hong Kong novelist, titled The Story of Roses (玫瑰的故事). The study aims to elucidate the inherent tensions and challenges associated with postfeminism in China. It analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of this drama online to demonstrate that shifting intimate relationships, evolving political, economic, and technological conditions within the media industry, and broader social transformations have fostered postfeminist subjectivity in Chinese television. Specifically, in line with neoliberal transitions, women confined to domestic and private spheres are increasingly portrayed as responsible for their own circumstances. This research seeks to examine the construction of the postfeminist subjectivity of the female protagonist Huang Yimei through her romantic relationships. It also investigates how The Story of Roses has embedded and perpetuated the entrenched hierarchical division between productive and reproductive labor, thereby constructing the myth of postfeminism in post-socialist China workplace. Furthermore, this study outlines a framework of feeling for contemporary Chinese women who aspire to achieve autonomy, independence, and social status within Chinese society.

In societies where human and non-human collide to remap the experience of being, queer literature has been particularly active by reappropriation simulacra as a resistance power to the “polishing” of spaces. Queer literature embraces ambivalence and affect, for they disrupt linearity. While virtuality is usually understood as a non-affective technology enabled through specific devices, I propose to read queer novels as “virtual spaces” in that virtuality itself is the remapping of spaces beyond the human to tackle binarity through the complex entanglement of affect, environment, and precarity. Two novels approach queer precarity through non-human fragmentation: Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022), which narrates the story of a non-binary person overcoming family trauma and boundaries through an osmosis with trees to allow another identity, and Camille Cornu’s Photosynthèses (2024), which tells of a non-binary person dissolving boundaries of humanity through an transformation with plants to fragment identity. Drawing on theoretical thinking by Preciado (Dysphoria Mundi), Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), and Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology), I will analyze the ambiguity of fragmentation: its precarity in front of a constantly absorbing normativity, its virtuality for a remapping of identity, its environmental multiplicity through queer temporality. As a way of opening for discussion, I will argue that the meditative resistance of these texts further highlights the necessity of remapping Comparative Literature beyond binary studies and for an unstable—precarious—method of reading virtual spaces.

Buddhist texts and scriptures, as part of the grand corpus of Buddhist literatures, were circulated ab initio in India through oral means, which later influenced the translation and dissemination of Buddhist literatures in China as well. Group recitation of Buddhist texts in ancient India was an essential part of textual transmission by the bhāṇakas [lit., “speakers” (McGovern 2019: 450); professional reciters] (Allon 2021: 1), who were responsible for maintaining and circulating the canons, which were edited and redacted (Skilling 2017: 276–277) by the saṃgītikāras [editors/compilers] (Galasek 2016: 204). Unlike the modern author-reader relationship, where the author and the reader are usually not present simultaneously in the same spatial or temporal context, the Indian reciter and the audience encountered each other vis-à-vis within a circulation field, which was more of an “intra-textual realm” (Galasek, ibid.: 56) that substituted for an “actual oral performance” (Anālayo 2020: 2720).

This method of oral performance later influenced the circulation of Buddhist texts in China in every aspect—from the initial stages of translating and interpreting Buddhist literatures, where reciters first needed to orally convey the content [Chi. 口出; 口傳], to the sinicization of Buddhist canons by appealing to indigenous audiences through the oral expounding of scriptures [講經] and adapting Buddhist literatures into forms of oral performance, such as chanting stories [唱導] and transforming texts [變文] into stage dramas, like the story of how Maudgalyāyana saved his mother. This oral tradition was not confined to China but also impacted other East Asian countries, such as Japan, where many Buddhist stories were propagated and preserved in setsuwa [説話] compilations, such as the Anthology of Tales Old and New [今昔物語集].

This study attempts to focus on the trans-regional and trans-spatial function of oral presenters across Asia and to examine how Buddhist literatures were transmitted and disseminated diachronically and synchronically through oral expounding.

Bibliography

1. Allon, Mark W. (2021). The Composition and Transmission of Early Buddhist Texts with Specific Reference to Sutras. Bochum: projektverlag.

2. Anālayo [Bhikkhu] (2020). “Early Buddhist Oral Transmission and the Problem of Accurate Source Monitoring”, Mindfulness, 11(12), pp. 2715–2724.

3. Galasek, Bruno (2016). On Presenting Characters and the Representation of Persons A Narratological Study of Characters in Narrative Suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya. Dissertation. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

4. Mcgovern, Nathan (2019). “Protestant Presuppositions and the Study of the Early Buddhist Oral Tradition”, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 42, pp. 449-491.

5. Skilling, Peter (2017). “The Many Lives of Texts: the Pañcatraya and the Māyājāla Sūtras”, in Dhammadinnā (ed.) Research on the Madhyama-āgama. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation, pp. 269–326.

“sar-zamīn-e-hind par aqvām-e-ālam ke 'firāq' / qāfile baste gaye hindustāñ bantā gayā”

—Firaq Gorakhpuri

In this paper, I attempt to undertake a comparative reading of the lyric poetry written as part of the “Romantic” and “Progressive” literary movements in two modern Indian languages (MILs), Odia and Hindi, during the 1920s-1950s. It will be a historiographic study of the Chhayavaad-Sabuja Kavita and Pragativaad movements within the conceptual framework of plurality by tracing the formation and use of certain repertoires of signification through reception, interliterariness and intertextuality in the creation of the texts. Taking cue from Amiya Dev’s idea that Indian literature is not “a fixed or determinate entity but as an ongoing and interliterary process” and Ipshita Chanda’s assertion MIL literatures are “individual entities formed from a plural base and part of a plural system”, I attempt to write a history of these literary movements to understand how plurality informs the poetics of the entity called Indian literature.

Using Sisir Kumar Das’s tools of prophane/early assimilation and metaphane/later assimilation, one can see literary movements with similar sensibilities across MILs during the 20th century. I propose the category of ‘supra-linguistic assemblages’ to read these movements (modifying Claudio Guillen’s “supranational assemblages”) which are informed not only by Indian poetic systems derived from Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali and Prakrit but also from European ones like the German and English literary traditions and West-Asian poetic systems especially the Perso-Arabic poetic systems which have come here through reception and contact. For this case study, I will be looking at the works of two poets each from both of the languages—Sumitranandan Pant, Nagarjun, Mayadhar Mansingh and Rabi Singh—with a focus on the period of transition between the two movements to historically locate and understand how the processes of intra-systemic and inter-systemic contacts manifested in the literary creation in these languages. The broader aim of this paper is to make a case for how a plural literary history accommodating many languages can and should be written for literatures produced in multi-lingual/cultural societies like India.

Hideo Levy’s literature offers a compelling lens to reexamine comparative literature from an East Asian perspective. Born in the United States and partly raised in Taiwan, Levy writes in Japanese yet continually engages with multiple locales—Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China—revealing the fluid nature of identity in modern societies. His narratives challenge the long-standing assumption that language, people, and nation naturally cohere, proposing instead that any notion of “home” is shaped by dynamic, overlapping histories.

This research focuses on Levy’s I-novel form, which combines personal experiences with broader regional realities. In many of his works, protagonists navigate the complexities of mainland China’s rapid modernization, grappling with the disparities between official languages (like Mandarin) and local dialects. Through encounters in underdeveloped regions like villages in Henan Province, Levy foregrounds those excluded from dominant national narratives—echoing his childhood memories in Taiwan, where American diplomats, mainland Chinese communities, and local Taiwanese cultures coexist uneasily. By portraying these diverse, often marginalized voices, Levy underscores how political and economic paradigms can silently marginalize people who do not “fit” prevailing notions of progress.

The study explores how Levy’s border-crossing narratives introduce new possibilities for comparative literary discourse, particularly from the standpoint of East Asia’s intricate colonial and postcolonial histories. By situating Levy alongside writers like Abe Kobo and Oe Kenzaburo, we see how Japan’s trajectory of modernity—shaped by war, empire, and the formation of a national literature—can be re-envisioned through interlinked yet distinct cultural identities in East Asia. Levy’s updates to the I-novel question the idea of a singular, unified “Japanese literature” and illuminate how personal subjectivity connects with the histories of people in Taiwan, mainland China, and beyond.

Ultimately, Levy’s works invite us to think about comparative literature in a way that embraces movement, translation, and partial belonging. His approach—inherited from and yet expanding upon the creative legacies of Abe and Oe—troubles the boundary between self and Other, pushing us to reconsider modern literary formations through the lens of shared yet variegated East Asian experiences. In doing so, Levy’s fiction points to alternative routes for comparative literature that foreground regional multiplicities, personal histories, and new forms of collective imagination.

Chinese script word 世界 as the world are commonly used in east Asian languages（it is pronounced 'shìjiè' in Chinese, 'sekai' in Japanese and 'se:ge' in Korean）. This is originally a Chinese translation of Buddhist term loka-dhātu, a key word of Buddhist worldview, in which our human world is localized as one India-centered continent on the sea outside Mt Sumeru as the axis of one of a billion universes.

My presentation will trace a brief history of this borrowed word (世界 sekai) in early and premodern Japanese literary texts.

The oldest extant historiographies of the early eighth century Japan described the emergence and completion of the world reigned by the grandson of the sun goddess succeeded by his descendant emperors without using the word 'sekai'. However, the usage of the term 'sekai' in the prose narratives of the early tenth century Japan enabled them to relativize the established image of the imperial entire world. And the presence of that Buddhist term as the world in the historical treatise on Japanese emperor’s rule in the mid fourteenth century reflected the reformation of Japanese’s worldview to recognize virtual Asian area from Persia to Japan as one world. Moreover, after Western missionaries came to East Asia with their knowledge about and the map of the global world in the late sixteenth century, we witness the process of bleaching out the Buddhist sense from the word 'sekai.'

Following the history of adoption of this Buddhist term into Japanese literary texts in early and premodern times as a case study, we will have an opportunity to rethink how the image of modern Asia was constructed.

The finding of the children is a significant literary theme in contemporary Chinese literature as well as a significant means by which intellectuals in the Republic of China strive to construct a contemporary sense of national identity. The academic community in the fields of modern Chinese literature and cultural history has progressively begun to pay more attention to images of children and women, but the topic of how children and women were discovered and built by modern literature, with “girls” as the key thread, has not yet been completely explored. In order to better understand the survival and mental state of girls during the Republican era as demonstrated by the observation, reproduction, and creation of the girls’ image by writers during that era, this research will examine how girls are portrayed in novels written. By using close reading, literary theorist Susan Sniader Lanser’s female narrative perspective, historical context from the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, and literary theory, this study will examine how the girl image in literature reflects the social and cultural background of the Republic of China and how intellectuals can create a new nation by writing the girl image. The image-building of girls in the Republic of China is a crucial clue for reexamining the literature and social culture of that country. This study also will offer some valuable insights for future research on social change and escalating ideological trends.

As time goes by, native American writers learn about China and Chinese through various channels, and portray the images of China in their eyes into their literary works. Among them, some writers learn about China through others’ literature, mass media, etc., while others have had experiences in China, or gone to China in person to explore Chinese culture they long for, and put the images of China in their eyes into words in their works. Given the topic and length of writing, this thesis selects three native American writers who have had a long-term Chinese life experience and their masterpieces to research on: Pearl Buck, Bill Porter and Peter Hessler. In addition, imagologie in comparative literature is selected as the theoretical framework to study on the images of China in their literary works.

The essay aims to make contributions to the study on the theory and application of imagologie and its practical significance. Through the images of China in Pearl Buck, Bill Porter and Peter Hessler from the perspective of the American, on the one hand, it may be conducive for American readers to have reflection on the themselves and the US. On the other hand, reviewing the changes of the images, it may be helpful for Chinese to reflect on the past, take actions at present and look forward to the future.

Zhou Shoujuan (1895-1968) was a pre-eminent author of popular fiction in modern China. Being fluent in English, he was also a prominent and versatile translator of world literature into Chinese, classical and vernacular. Being proficient in English, Zhou facilitated the introduction of a diverse array of literary works to Chinese audiences from different literary traditions through the method of indirect translation. The present study aims to examine Zhou Shoujuan’s indirect translation of Italian fiction, focusing on the choice of works and themes and the rendering of the same popular appeal in the Chinese context. The corpus under scrutiny includes the translations of three short stories by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1919, 1922, 1924) and especially the juvenile novel written by Benito Mussolini (1941-2), which contains all the ingredients of the popular feuilleton. The methodology of this study will combine close and distant reading and will be derived from two fields of research: translation studies and a socio-historical analysis of the production, transplantation and reception of popular fiction from Italian to Chinese literature through English or American intermediate translations.

A second-person narrative is a storytelling style that directly addresses the reader using the pronoun 'you,' casting them as a character within the story and fostering a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and immersion. Although often dismissed as unnatural by both professional and non-professional readers, some cultural producers have consistently embraced the second-person narrative as a tool for artistic experimentation and political expression. For instance, novelists like Italo Calvino have written works that challenge authoritative narrative structures and highlight the reader’s agency through the use of a second-person narrative. Recently, second-person narratives have gradually gained prominence, particularly with the advent of digital art forms such as virtual reality (VR). This narrative style has been used to foster deeper empathy and understanding among viewers by immersing them in the experiences of victim-survivors of various injustices. For example, American journalist Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria (2016), a short VR documentary that recreates the experiences of Syrian refugee children during the civil war, transforms the viewer into both a character and a second-person observer, allowing them to vicariously experience the children’s pain and sorrow.

Building on the political potential of second-person narratives, some cultural works have taken bold steps to address highly sensitive and controversial topics, such as sexual violence. Two such works stand out for their innovative approach—depicting rape through immersive second-person narratives—encouraging critical reflection on the complex relationship between victim-survivors of sexual violence and consumers of related artistic works. One example is director Gina Kim’s Comfortless Trilogy, which addresses the issue of U.S. military-centered prostitution in South Korea (commonly referred to as camp town prostitution). In Kim’s trilogy, a viewer also becomes an observer-character and repeatedly experiences moments of oneness with the character of a camp town sex worker, vicariously feeling her suffering from sexual violence as if it were their own. For instance, in the second film, Soyosan, the viewer wanders through a detention center for camp town sex workers with sexually transmitted infections. Wandering through the remnants of bloody medical equipment, which resemble torture devices, they soon encounter a sex worker and hear unsettling noises—most notably, the sound of her footsteps growing faster and louder, culminating in a sudden thud, as if she has abruptly embraced them. At the moment of this embrace, the viewer hears the final sound of the sex worker leaping from a high floor to commit suicide in the heavy rain, feeling as though they, too, are being compelled to take the plunge with her. This plunge evokes the real suicides of camp town sex workers who could no longer endure the pain of repeated penicillin overdoses to treat STDs, compelling the viewer to acknowledge how unbearable their suffering must have been.

Debunking the general assumption that second-person narratives are rare in conventional literature, Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) features several scenes in which the reader is temporarily positioned as an observer-character. Although the entire narrative is told by the camp town sex worker-protagonist herself, when she recounts her rape by American G.I.s, she does so as though it happened to someone else, adopting the perspective of a nearby observer. This narrative shift is not uncommon among feminist writers and is more than a stylistic choice, as it reflects the protagonist’s psychological dissociation and externalizes the trauma. By adopting this perspective, the protagonist’s experience becomes simultaneously distanced and shared: distanced from herself as she assumes the role of a detached observer, and shared with the reader, who is drawn into the scene by standing alongside this new observer and ultimately adopting the same observer role. This blurring of narrative boundaries reduces the usual distance between narrator and reader, compelling the latter to confront the broader implications of violence and complicity. The reader, now positioned as a silent participant, becomes enmeshed in the story’s moral and emotional landscape, unable to detach from the narrative’s weight.

Given the widespread amnesia surrounding U.S. military-centered prostitution in both South Korea and the United States, the second-person narratives of The Comfortless Trilogy and Fox Girl can be seen as a reasonable attempt to evoke compassion, empathy, and solidarity among viewers and readers. However, these narrative strategies also carry ethical risks that warrant critical examination, as they reinforce the positionality of the viewer and reader as subjects while perpetuating the very structures of othering and objectification of camp town sex workers that they ostensibly seek to challenge.

First, immersion in VR operates through what Samuel Coleridge describes as the “willing suspension of disbelief.” This process begins when the viewer perceives a graphically constructed virtual reality as genuinely existent by engaging with it through their bodily senses. The more vividly these sensory experiences are felt, the deeper the immersion becomes, and the subjectivity of the viewer is further reinforced.

Accordingly, the more the viewer momentarily forgets themselves and attempts to empathize with the suffering of camp town women as if it were their own, the more their subjectivity is paradoxically amplified. This paradox is also evident in Fox Girl. The novel’s use of a second-person portrayal of the sexual violence and suffering of camp town sex workers can inadvertently transform the audience into voyeurs. This reinforces a dynamic of spectatorship, reduces the women’s experiences to consumable sensations, and ultimately objectifies their trauma for artistic or political purposes. Similarly, The Comfortless Trilogy compels the viewer to “feel” the pain of these women as if it were their own, further reducing their suffering to a consumable experience.

Both works, through their immersive second-person narratives, risk amplifying the “us vs. them” dynamic. By immersing a presumably non-Korean audience in the lives of Korean camp town sex workers, the works might unintentionally frame these women as symbols of suffering rather than as complex individuals. This framing risks reinforcing their otherness rather than dismantling it, particularly for audiences unfamiliar with the historical and cultural context of U.S. military-centered prostitution in Korea. Last but not least, while the immersive techniques of these works aim to foster empathy, they may fall short of challenging the audience’s implicit positionality of power. This raises important ethical questions about whether such portrayals truly empower the women they depict or serve primarily to provoke a moral awakening in the audience.

Ultimately, second-person narratives, as suggested by the intervening slash in the title, “Subject/ification in Representing Rape through Second-Person Narrative,” do not necessarily foster profound mutual understanding between subject and object. Instead, by immersing the audience in the experiences of others, these narratives paradoxically amplify the subjectivity of the viewer or reader, making the object—the camp town sex workers—subject to the subject’s framework of power and interpretation. As such, despite their initial aim to challenge the boundaries between subject and object, second-person narratives become complicit in perpetuating the very structures of othering and objectification they claim to critique.

This paper examines Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads TV monologue series in its first (1988), second (1998), stage adaptation (1991) and remake (2020) manifestations, showing how it reflects the changing cultural psyche of (mostly) female North England Britons during the period from Thatcherism to Brexit and Covid Lockdown in the UK. Addressing the plight of individuals suffering loss, isolation, marital trauma, or mental health problems in a society that is gradually abandoning its responsibility to take care of them, the monologues are notable for the way they show how their subjects are affected by the gradually deteriorating social environment. In 1988 the mood is reflective, nuanced, and understated; the speakers uncomprehendingly innocent and naive in their self-made prisons. By 1998 however, the tone has darkened; personal entrapment has a darker and often criminal aspect, articulated through bitingly witty and sarcastic repudiation. Finally, when the series was remade by the BBC in 2020, at the time of the Covid lockdown, new actors rework the monologues from their millennial perspective, reflective of the anger and frustration of an increasingly disaffected and alienated community. This gradual evolution of social malaise, apparent not only in Bennett’s thirty-year-old monologues, but in their performance, raises the question of whether drama’s role in society is representative or proactive. Bennett’s Talking Heads constitutes a valuable addition to this debate, showing the effect of social and political degeneration on a previously unvoiced section of the geopolitical community.

This essay examines the interplay between artificial intelligence (A.I) and human identity in Thomas Gibbons’ Uncanny Valley and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People. Both plays delve into the complexities of human relationships in a technologically advanced world, highlighting the ethical dilemmas and existential questions raised by AI. Gibbons introduces Julian, an A.I character whose struggle for acceptance challenges traditional notions of humanity and empathy, while Crimp explores the emotional void created by digital communication in Celia's fragmented reality. Through their narratives, both playwrights critique the impact of technology on personal connections, revealing how it often exacerbates feelings of isolation rather than fostering genuine relationships. The essay argues that the essence of humanity lies not merely in biological attributes but in emotional depth and the desire for connection, urging audiences to reconsider what it means to be human in an increasingly mediated world. Ultimately, Uncanny Valley and Not One of These People serve as cultural reflections on the challenges and implications of navigating identity and connection in the face of rapid technological advancement.

This study explores Park Wan-seo’s (박완서, 1931–2011) engagement with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), focusing on her understanding of his theories and how she discovered Freudian elements within contemporary Korean women. By examining the desires and complexes of Korean women that permeate her works, the study aims to reveal how Park incorporated and transformed Freudian concepts in her literature. Unlike conventional literary studies that utilize Freudian psychoanalysis as a critical framework for analyzing individual works, this research highlights how Park, often referred to as the ‘Mother of Korean Literature,’ actively engaged with Freud’s theories and deliberately integrated them into her writing. It seeks to trace the ways in which Freud’s ideas were received and refracted within her works. While Park acknowledged that Freudian psychoanalysis helps in understanding gender differences in Korean society, she also maintained a cautious perspective on it, as its subtle and pervasive influence often goes unnoticed by Korean women, despite governing their lives. Through her literature, she urged women to recognize and reflect on these hidden forces shaping their lives.

Michel Foucault defined Freud as a "trans-discursive author" because his psychoanalytic theories established a new discourse and introduced paradigm shifts across various disciplines. Freud’s influence extended beyond medicine and philosophy to literature, and in Korea, his psychoanalysis was first introduced during the Japanese colonial period. Since then, it has garnered significant interest from Korean writers. Notably, literary circles engaged with Freudian theory more actively than other academic fields at the time. Despite recent scholarly efforts to examine how Freud’s psychoanalysis was introduced and translated in Korea, research analyzing its interpretation, transformation, and reception in specific literary works remains insufficient.

This study not only investigates how Freud’s theories were adopted but also examines how Park Wan-seo’s literature transcends and challenges the Freudian worldview. Park believed that Freud’s concept of the female Oedipus complex could explain Korean mothers’ excessive attachment to their sons. She interpreted the preference for male children—commonly represented by the figure of the mother-in-law—as a manifestation of women’s desire to compensate for their own societal oppression, particularly stemming from the historical devaluation of women due to their lack of a phallus. According to Freud, women struggle more than men in resolving the Oedipus complex, which could lead to potential ethical dilemmas. However, even Freud himself acknowledged the limitations of his theory regarding the female Oedipus complex, suggesting that it did not achieve the same level of theoretical clarity as its male counterpart.

Yet, Park Wan-seo did not view the female Oedipus complex as a fixed structure. Instead, she advocated for overcoming this Freudian framework. Rather than accepting Freud’s theories as an inevitable fate, she treated them as obstacles to be surmounted, envisioning literature as a means to enlighten reality. A prime example is her novel, Are You Still Dreaming?, which was inspired by her experiences as a member of the conciliation committee at a family court. As she stated in an interview, this novel was conceived as a direct attempt to transcend the female Oedipus complex, guided by a clear commitment to enlightenment. Even in her final novel, His House, Park continued her literary exploration of transcending the Freudian world.

This study seeks to analyze how Freud’s theories were received and refracted throughout Park Wan-seo’s body of work, to identify the Freudian elements she observed in Korean society, and to explore her commitment to using literature not just to interpret reality but to enlighten and transform it.

The proposed paper will examine the poetry of Cathy Park Hong and the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to uncover how their works rely on technological motifs to address the difficulty inherent in the communicability of their respective experiences as Korean-American immigrants. The works of both poets employ stutters, fragmentation, silences, and erasures to reflect upon the untranslatable and unbridgeable gaps in experience and the inadequacy of available communicative modes to inscribe and convey their individual and collective experience of exile, diasporic travel and assimilation. While Cha’s works employ technological apparatus in various forms (photographs, videos, and art installations) to contemplate upon the themes of immigrant assimilation, untranslatability, and the history of the Korean-Japanese conflict, Hong’s works employ futuristic and fictive scientific images to ponder upon similar questions of exile, linguistic colonialism, and the violent histories that circumscribe Korean-American immigrant experience. The proposed paper is specifically invested in examining how the works of both poets in their unique ways emphasize on the performative and embodied aspects of their subject matter, and in doing so present a poetic performance that resists easy subsumption into algorithmic pattern-seeking or text mining.

This study examines the liminal and diasporic experience of reading aloud Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE as a performative enactment of a shamanistic ritual. As an artist’s book that defies conventional genre classifications, the experience of reading DICTEE differs significantly from that of typical literary texts. Many readers have noted the distinctive impact of reading DICTEE aloud compared to silent reading, as evidenced by the recent surge of read-aloud sessions of DICTEE in both the United States and South Korea. To identify anew the unique form and aesthetics of reading DICTEE aloud, this study conceptualizes oral reading of DICTEE as a performative and ontological event that transcends the boundaries of the typical literary reading experience.

DICTEE invents two opposing modes of translation between spoken and written language: dictation and recitation. While orality is often linked to Otherness, including primitivity and femininity, literacy is closely associated with modern Western imperialism, a relationship that extends to the sensory hierarchy between sound and vision. Therefore, DICTEE employs a strategy in which orality actively infiltrates and disrupts the structure of textuality, through techniques such as the manipulation of punctuation and spacing, the use of homophones, and the destruction of syntax. Fragmented by the penetration of orality, DICTEE forms a new borderline language that simultaneously embodies and dismantles orality and textuality.

Reading aloud, on the other hand, serves as a material translation that brings the text of DICTEE to life through the reader's body. In DICTEE, the Diseuse experiences speech as physical exertion, foregrounding the material dimension of language beyond the semantic. Theorists such as Walter J. Ong, Hélène Cixous, and Mladen Dolar highlight the subversive potential inherent in the voice: whereas writing anchors the spoken word within the visual domain, sound creates an aural space that dissolves the boundaries between the subject and the Other.

By being performed through the reader’s voice, the oral reading of DICTEE functions as a shamanic ritual that restores voices that have never been spoken or heard throughout history. By allowing multiple voices to speak through the reader's body simultaneously, the oral reading of DICTEE breaks down bodily and ontological boundaries between the subject and Other, fostering an affective community that transcends the division between gender and race, extending across both historical and fictional space-time. However, this community also shares sensory alienation, as DICTEE is marked by fundamental unreadability — manifested in its use of multiple languages, unreadable photographs, diagrams, and margins, etc. The community emerging through the oral reading of DICTEE inhabits this epistemological and sensory void, opening an interstitial and diasporic space-time that will be continually performed and reconstituted through shamanic invocation.

Since aeons, in popular culture and literature, imaginary beings have been a part of the cultural and social mnemoscape and myths of the place, offering a vision of the world of choice and analysing the practical world of conflicts. In the contemporary cinematic world, the kaiju genre representing strange, large creatures (Godzilla) often represent or attack overly large but real human issues like colonization, pollution and scientific ethics among other things. This paper will look into the representation of two imaginary beings –the Korean Gumiho (or the, nine- tailed fox) and Dakhin Rai (a revered deity/ demon king of the Sunderbans, India)- using the theoretical framework of eco postcolonialism and critical place (Trinh T. Minh-ha, Butler, Biana) and explore how the realms of the fantasy and the real often become blurred and the monstrosity that gets created is rooted in realism, place-politics and everyday occurrences.

These mythical imaginary beings are often ‘betwixt and between’; their marginality is often seen as a threat as well as a promise of a new world order to the existing patterns of socio-political structure. The researcher will analyse Amitav Ghosh’s Jungle Nama and the visual text of Han Woo-ri’s Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938(available on OTT platforms) and look at the portrayals of identity (both personal and social), loss and recovery (Nandy) and the hegemonic ‘immanent’ techno- cultural understandings of place and being.

The Japanese novel took shape at the turn of the twentieth century, as many of its counterparts from all around the world, under the influence of European literature, especially Russian, English and French, and the most famous early Japanese novels are fiction, like Ozaki Kōyō’s Konjiki yasha (1897–1903; The Golden Demon), Tokutomi Roka’s Hototogisu (1900 ; The Cuckoo) or Natsume Sōseki’s Wagahai wa neko de aru (1905-1906 ; I am a cat). However, by the 1920s, Japanese writers were questioning the very nature of what constituted a ‘proper novel’. They generally agreed on the fact that a novel’s artistic value of a novel lay in the truth it is conveying about the world, leading them to question the value of fiction. Some of them considered that this truth could be achieved by making up characters and creating an entire world of fiction. On the other hand, others argued that true artistic expression required writing about one’s own life experiences, advocating for what was then called shishōsetsu (I-novel). In these debates, there is a strong tendency to identify ‘fictional’ novels with a Western aesthetic exemplified by Tolstoï, Flaubert or Balzac, while the I-novel was supposed to embody a Japanese way of writing. This paper examines key literary discourses to understand how the contempt of fiction has been used to define what is “Japanese” literature, and it investigates the extent to which these perspectives were shared or contested among writers of the time.

The systematic silence regarding Dalit fiction in India, reflects the established caste hierarchies, extending to published literary works. Initially, Dalit writing was not acknowledged in mainstream media, literary festivals, or academic settings; lack of translation, as most Dalit experiences are also regionalised, also contributed to the suppression of Dalit voices.

Rohith Vemula's last letter to the world inspired a large number of young Dalit writers to pen their stories. Contemporary Indian literature has these vibrant writers working with multiple genres such as science fiction, speculative fiction, and graphic narratives, highlighting several Dalit issues. However, those works can only be found in niche corners of literary topography, rarely talked about in mainstream media.

Although it can be argued that the censorship in publishing Dalit literature has been less concerning, the nature of engagement from readers or critics has been chronically indifferent regarding its acceptance, especially for genres regarding fiction. There is little to mention in reviews or literary criticism about books such as The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF (2024), which is the first of its kind, an anthology bridging the Dalit consciousness of the younger generation, in a genre that has inheritance from both European science fiction and Afrofuturism. The references to Dalit literature have stayed zoomed in on only autobiographical elements, as if the ‘Dalit-ness’ of the writer must bleed down to the pages with a strong truth claim to be considered Dalit enough. Dalit non-fiction writing, especially autobiographies, has more visibility; books such as Jhoothan (1997) by Omprakash Valmiki can be found in the syllabi of Indian universities. On the other hand, Bama’s Sangati (2005), though a novel, is considered to be a collective autobiography. Both of these texts are extremely important and are part of syllabi in their own right, but this is a high time to question why Dalit literature should be only read within the aspect of pedagogy.

Along with the discomfort towards Dalit aesthetics for a society that shares collective responsibility for the tradition of suppression, even the scope of creating conversations with newer fiction has been a rare case and often ‘untouched’ by the wider readership.

The Brahmanical patriarchal system, along with their ideological alignment with right-wing nationalist politics, is another direct threat to the proliferation of Dalit literature. Silencing is a tool of systemic Otherization; continuous under-representation lengthens the silence that shrouds the hegemonic oppression. Given the rise of the right-wing populist nationalist narrative, this erasure means a fatal failure for India as a nation.

This study would mainly focus on the lack of representation of Dalit fiction in the Indian reading scene and its silencing effect towards Otherization.

Contemporary fiction is caught between contradictory ethical demands for inclusivity and authenticity, tasked with making multiple experiences visible without engaging in supposedly damaging forms of cultural appropriation: authors must lay claim to the right to represent a particular experience. This is one explanation for both the tendency toward personal narrative and the turn toward the factual and the particular. Conversely, contemporary defenders of fiction often praise its capacity for impersonality and its projection of an imagined collectivity. This paper considers a related phenomenon, drawing on examples from French- and English-language literature: the recent tendency to characterize first-person fictions as forms of impersonation, involving the usurpation of identity and a fundamental failure of empathy. The rejection of fiction as impersonation arguably goes back at least to Book 3 of Plato’s Republic, with its attack on the moral impact of imitation on the actor – and, by extension, on the cunningly polymorphous poet. Today, however, the fear of fiction as impersonation is a symptom of new anxieties around personhood, identity, and performance.

Cette communication vise à analyser le rôle du médecin humaniste, qui a toujours été présent au long de l'Histoire de la Médecine, et à réfléchir à la manière dont la littérature peut être utile dans la formation des médecins d'aujourd'hui et du futur.

En effet, en tant que littéraire, nous nous demandons si nous sommes sur le point de sombrer dans l'ère de l'intelligence artificielle et de l'imposition technologique en ce qui concerne les relations humaines, en prenant le risque de perdre tout référentiel humanisant.

Nous allons, donc, utiliser la médecine narrative (à savoir, l’approche théorique de Rita Charon, de Maria de Jesus Cabral et/ou Gérard Danou) comme outil méthodologique pour réfléchir à l'importance de la relation médecin-patient-soignant, qui suscite un souci croissant chez les enseignants de médecine, directeurs de services des hôpitaux, entre autres, ainsi que chez le patient et sa famille.

I would like to write a paper on the A-bomb literature written in Indian Languages. The mournful incident of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a deep impact on the Indian authors. Indian citizens were not directly affected by the nuclear weapons or by the nuke-war threats but the Indian authors, from a humanitarian viewpoint, expressed their concern over the nuke-power demonstration during the Cold War and raised their voices against all types of nuclear weapons. The trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was often portrayed in several short stories, poems and plays written by the Indian authors.

Badal Sircar, the pioneer of the Third Theatre and a famous playwright, wrote a play named ‘Tringsha Shatabdi (30th century)’. In this play all the real-life characters associated with the atomic bomb-dropping incident stood in front of the 30th century human beings to be judged for their action. He presented contemporary nuke-politics also in other plays as a minor theme. Famous Indian poets like Sahir Ludhianvi, Amulya Baruah, Agyea and others wrote poems reacting to the destructive mushroom cloud. In a short story written by Deependranath Bandyopadhyay, a mother was deeply worried for her child’s future in a nuke-threatened society. After the experimental nuke-bomb test done by India in 1998, a renowned poet Joy Goswami composed a long poem criticizing the anti-humanist celebrations and jingoism of the state machinery. The traumatic events of the atomic bomb explosion were mentioned in many other Indian literary texts.

In last three decades Indian Govt. tried to build several nuclear power plants and imported nuke-technology from other countries. Such decisions gave birth to protests and agitations from the common mass. Not only in Bengali but in other Indian languages such reactions have been narrated. Tamil writer and playwright Sankaran Gnani staged plays written by the Indian playwrights during anti-nuclear movement in Kudankulam. Trauma of Bhopal gas tragedy and Chernobyl triggered fear in Indian citizens’ minds. Also, the degradation of bio-diversity in the neighborhood areas of those nuke plants instigated eco-political movements. several Indian authors expressed solidarity with such movements. On the other hand, a nationalistic propaganda associated with nuke-bomb emerged through the ideological propaganda of the state as well through a few literary texts.

How did the writers in Indian languages present the nuke-power reality in literary texts? How did the anti-nuclear war consciousness of Indian citizens merge with the worldwide socio-literary scenario? How did the trauma and fear of the atomic bomb turn into nationalist pride?

I would like to analyze the above-mentioned texts to trace the answers to these questions.

Japanese literary works depicting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actively translated and introduced in the Soviet Union. Such works had a political significance amid the Cold War since they served to criticize the inhumane violence conducted by the United States army. Soviet poets such as Rasul Gamzatov and Mikhail Matusovsky composed pieces of poetry concerning the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, conveying messages of peace. Moreover, science fiction writers, who were particularly aware of the potential futures that the development of nuclear technology might bring, showed great interest in Japan’s experience of the atomic bombings and explored this theme in various ways in their works.

This presentation analyzes the image of the atomic bomb in Soviet science fiction from three perspectives. The works primarily discussed are The Inhabited Island by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Ice Is Returning by Alexander Kazantsev, and The Last Pastoral by Ales Adamovich.

Firstly, many works deliberately emphasize the history of “evil nuclear power,” from the development of atomic energy to the dropping of the atomic bombs by the United States. At the same time, however, the existence of Soviet nuclear weapons is rarely mentioned, while the use of nuclear power for transforming nature is presented as an example of “good nuclear power” in Soviet science fiction.

Secondly, although the theme of human extinction due to total nuclear war in the near future was common in science fiction around the world during the Cold War period, it was hardly mentioned by Soviet writers. The reason was that the topic of human annihilation would place Soviet and American nuclear weapons on equal footing and would not allow for the demonstration of the superiority of the socialist bloc. A nuclear war could be depicted only by setting the story in the distant reaches of cosmic space, away from the context of real international affairs.

Thirdly, this paper examines the theme of the “human shadow etched in stone,” where the silhouettes of people burned by the atomic bomb were imprinted onto surfaces. This image, which became widely known in the Soviet Union through the work of journalist Vsevolod Ovchinnikov and poet Matusovsky, also inspired science fiction writers. The phenomenon of the “human stone” reminds of the process of optical exposure in photography, however, differently from many atomic bomb photographs, it lacks the subjective gaze of a photographer. Furthermore, the victims burned by the atomic bomb also vanish, leaving only their shadows as traces. Our aim is to explore how this absence (both of those photographing and photographed) is represented in literary works.

* I am the discussant of this panel, so I will not be making an actual presentations. Instead, I will comment on the presentations given by my colleagues.

In post-war German literature, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to be depicted in the 1950s. This was triggered by the impact of the Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. This shock was reinforced by the fact that the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru was contaminated by nuclear fallout from the test. The spread of information about the extensive damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had previously been restricted, also encouraged writers to take up the subject of atomic bomb in literature. Germany, divided into East and West, was at the forefront of the Cold War in Europe. As a result, the fear of nuclear weapons was both a familiar and a very realistic theme at that time. There were many genres of works written, but in this presentation, I will focus on poetry and analyze what kind of nuclear representations are created and how are they formed, paying attention to the following three aspects.

1) I will discuss how the destabilized image of the world caused by modern nuclear physics is linked to the fragmentation of the language of poetry, focusing on poems by Gottfried Benn and Wolfgang Weyrauch.

2) For many poets, nuclear tests and atomic bombings are events they had not experienced in person, but only through the media. Against this background, I would like to discuss how media representations of the damage caused by nuclear tests and atomic bombs are incorporated into the poetic images, concentrating on symbolic motifs spread through the media, such as "mushroom clouds" and the "human shadow etched in stone.” In this context, I will also touch on poems in which the media experience itself is problematized, such as those by Günter Eich, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Marie Luise Kaschnitz and others.

3) In relation to the second perspective, I would like to focus on the theme of memory and “Erinnerung” to discuss how memories of past events, such as atomic bombs and nuclear tests, can be recounted in literary texts. Günter Kunert, Peter Huchel and other contemporary poets are taken as examples here.

World War II had been over for several months on the European continent when Czechoslovak media came with the almost unbelievable news of the destruction of Hiroshima, and a few days later, Nagasaki, by a newly and secretly developed weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb. The scale of devastation was beyond comprehension. Photographic evidence of the bombings and their aftermath was unavailable, and words could scarcely convey the immensity of the destruction.

At the time, there were no survivors or eyewitnesses with first-hand accounts to communicate the tragedy to the people of Czechoslovakia. Geographical distance, language barriers, and censorship — the “outer” censorship imposed by the Allied Forces and later, after 1948, the “inner” censorship imposed by the communist regime — delayed and distorted the dissemination of nuclear-related information. Nevertheless, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the nuclear experiments of the 1950s and the looming threat of nuclear war, became significant themes in Czech and Slovak poetry.

This presentation examines two distinct waves of atomic-themed poetry in postwar Czech and Slovak literature. The first wave, emerging in the years immediately following the bombings, includes works such as František Hrubín’s Hiroshima (1948) and Karel Kapoun’s Night Ride (1948). The second wave, beginning in the mid-1950s and engaging a broader range of poets, features works such as Vítězslav Nezval’s The Sun Sets Over Atlantis Again Tonight (1956) and poems by Ivan Diviš, Milan Lajčiak, and Rudolf Skukálek.

This presentation examines the distinctive characteristics of the two waves of atomic-themed Czech and Slovak poetry within the context of the shifting political and ideological landscape of postwar Central Europe. It also explores how contemporary ideological perspectives, including the communist World Peace Council's campaigns and the rise anti-nuclear movement in the mid-1950s, shaped the literary narrative surrounding the atomic bombings.

We are a group of PhD candidates who meet the invitation of Comparative Literature by working across unexpected and underexplored axes of Japan Studies. In light of the transnational turn in literary scholarship, we seek to foreground comparisons that complicate the traditions of East-West and North-South analysis. Thus we have found productive common ground in our challenge to the assumptions of literary influence. In place of a hierarchy of texts (as implied in popular theories such as Moretti’s law of literary evolution), we seek to read in juxtaposition and consider the multilateral influence and resistance of literary cultures and voices. To this end, we have found genre studies to be a fertile ground for such reconsiderations.

Julia’s presentation examines A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, as symptomatic of a transpacific dialogue in autofiction. Approaching this genre from the perspective of shishōsetsu, or the “I-novel”, a Japanese genre to which Ozeki calls attention in her text, the work is read as an intervention into the deeply gendered generic histories on both sides of the Pacific. Through the doubled voices of Ruth and Nao, two Japanese women who write to each other across an ocean, Ozeki underlines the effacement of women’s writing across time and space, broadening the contours of genre whilst presenting reading as a form of care.

Oliver’s work in crime fiction juxtaposes the earliest detective fiction in Japan and Argentina, a hitherto unexplored axis that sheds light on the impact of genre on an emerging global market. As the successful model of the literary detective spread from Europe and America, its impact had remarkable parallels in both Tokyo and Buenos Aires. Lawyers and policemen found new routes into a literary marketplace, where imported structures of law enforcement and justice were challenged on a narrative level. Read in comparison, the assumptions of imitation embedded in detective fiction must be reevaluated in light of narratives of resistance and rebellion from the Global South.

Harry's paper offers a comparative reading of the Russian exilic poet Eduard Limonov’s It’s Me—Eddie with Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Drawing upon the socio-political context of each author, the presentation identifies unexpected traces of far-right extremism in their earliest literary work. Through their glorification of tight muscles, killing machines, purity, and the absolute binary of Self/Other, both writers hint at a fascist aesthetic driven by a fetish for the perfect and able-bodied male physique. In dialogue, these texts suggest that while the personal is political, the political is also transnational.

The title of this inquiry comes from the question found in a number of Zen koans: “What is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” Its starting point is the fact that the American poet Jane Hirshfield (born 1953) began her practice of Zen in the San Francisco Zen Center, which was founded by the Japanese roshi Shunryu Suzuki in 1959. True to the spirit of the panel, what follows is a number of complications. What distinguishes this inquiry, though, is its attempt to break the very intellectual approach of literary scholarship: an aspiration for transcendence true to Zen.

Although the teaching of beginner’s mind originates from Dōgen Zenji, the first Japanese Zen Master, Suzuki’s own pithy articulation of it is that, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” What meaning does this teaching hold, then, for the titular “mind of poetry” in Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry? What follows, then, is an examination of the influence of Zen Buddhism and Japanese aesthetics in Hirshfield’s first book of criticism.

From this, a complication arises: how does one make sense of the fact that Hirshfield finds the mind of poetry even among poets and traditions that had no direct contact with Zen and Japanese poetry? The first koan from the Mumonkan or Gateless Gate asks, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Similarly, do poets have beginner’s mind even when they had no contact with teachings like beginner’s mind?

The next complication pulls back towards the panel’s theme of Japan studies. Does it make sense to ascribe Zen to Japan and to thus claim that Japanese poetry and spirituality influenced Hirshfield? What about Hirshfield’s poems that bear no explicit trace of anything Japanese? What about Suzuki urging American practitioners to develop their own kind of Zen distinct from their Japanese forebears?

Joshu’s answer to the koan from the Gateless Gate cited above is “Mu!” Although the word literally means emptiness, Zen practitioners take the answer as a call to practice and experience their Buddha-nature for themselves, rather than sinking into intellectualization. Would a focus on Japanese or American husks lead one away from the pith of beginner’s mind/the mind of poetry: from experiencing this mind for oneself? Although the answer might be yes, the Zen definition of nondualism as “not one, not two” then comes to mind. What meaning does Zen hold for Japan studies? How can critics not assume perfect identity between Japanese and American poetry and thereby pay attention to their differences (not one) while not assuming a dualistic separation when comparing literatures (not two)? What does it mean to transcend the intellect while knowing there is no separation between the poet, the critic, and the intellect of both?

Cette communication explore les représentations culturelles dans la littérature judéo-marocaine contemporaine à travers une double approche méthodologique articulant la lecture rapprochée (close reading) et la lecture distante (distant reading). En croisant une analyse stylistique fine de certains extraits d’œuvres de Nicole Elgrissy et Jacob Cohen avec des visualisations issues d’un corpus élargi (forums numériques, blogs diasporiques, archives littéraires numérisées), il s’agit de démontrer comment les outils technologiques permettent de renouveler l’étude des identités diasporiques, des stéréotypes et des mémoires collectives. Cette approche hybride s’inscrit dans les perspectives actuelles de la littérature comparée numérique, interrogeant à la fois les conditions matérielles de production des textes et les technologies d’exploration littéraire. Elle propose un dialogue entre humanités numériques, imagologie et études postcoloniales, en mettant en lumière les effets de médiation opérés par la technologie sur l’expérience littéraire et les récits culturels.

A Tale for the Time Being not only depicts the unfortunate life of Nao, a Japanese girl, but also portrays the identity crisis of her father, Haruki, who is dismissed by a technology company. Haruki's experiences point to the relationship between technology and ethics. This paper uses Haruki's encounters as a thread, employing literary ethical criticism as the core methodology, and combining it with historical and cultural context to analyze the profound impacts of technology on individual identity, ethical choices, and interpersonal connections in the novel. Technology firstly brings Haruki respect and honor, enabling him to achieve a decent life in America. However, when faced with the divergence between technology and morality, Haruki makes the right ethical choice, allowing his conscience to prevail: he opposes the application of the interface he designed for military weapons and attempts to persuade his team to incorporate an ethical awareness program to remind users to use it ethically. The company rejects his proposal and dismisses him. Yet, his complete detachment from technology later leads him to suffer a severe identity crisis: his hatred for technology robs him of his livelihood, and he returns to Japan consumed by self-doubt, repeatedly attempting suicide. Upon learning that his uncle, a Kamikaze pilot, had made the same choice during WWII, Haruki faces up to technology and uses it to rescue his daughter from online violence. Through the lens of literary ethical criticism, we see that the novel on one hand showcases the conflict between technology and ethics, criticizing the alienation of human emotions by technological rationality. On the other hand, it suggests that technology can also serve as a medium to heal trauma, reclaim ethical identity, and reconstruct ethical relationships.

Michel Clouscard and Christopher Caudwell are neglected Marxist theorists both globally and in their own respective countries of France and Britain. This presentation seeks to engage in a comparative analysis of their work on a highly understudied topic within Marxist theory, namely love. Clouscard’s Traité de l'amour-fou and Caudwell’s numerous writings on love and literature are also little discussed in the scholarship on these two figures. Both writers begin from critiques of the mythic return of psychoanalysis to the literature of ancient Greece (Oedipus). From here, they trace, each in their own complementary way, the development of bourgeois conceptions of freedom and individuality and their instantiations in historically variable relations of family, property, and selfhood. When read together, Clouscard and Caudwell provide a materialist history of love. For both writers, love is a crucial form of praxis at the center of human social being. In turn, they provide a radical social ontology of love rather than musings on “philo” and “sophia.” Crucially, Clouscard’s conception of bourgeois love, developed through his reading of the myth of Tristan et Iseut and influenced by the work of Pierre Gallais, updates and develops Marxist theories of love within a universal historical totality, breaking with Eurocentric conceptions of love on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

The paper begins with a confrontation of Borges’s ‘forking universe (narrative)’ and ‘ontological denarration’ (Brian Richardson) that characterizes certain strands of experimental prose (as seen in the texts by the Czech writer Karel Milota, or in the Nouveau Roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon). Extending this comparison to other forms of multilinear and many-worlds narrative (hypertext fiction, split-screen techniques, interactive action-adventure, and open-world videogames), I will examine multilinear fiction through the lens of (1) the forms of an audience’s attention and interest, (2) the technical modes of artefact production, and (3) philosophical and scientific discourses on the multiplicity of worlds. If multilinearity can be understood as a phenomenon that transitions from a state of potentiality to one of actualization (including ever more layered technical implementation), the question is how it collides with the temporal, linear aspect of perception and also the more general and long-term waning of interest in semantic densification and demands on re-reading (cf. John Guillory). What kind of investment does multilinear and many-worlds fiction/world expect from the perceiver across different media forms and how are the differences tied to the scale of perception modes, the different claims to and forms of attention (Karin Kukkonen), and the forms of an audience’s interest (James Phelan, Alice Bell and Astrid Ensslin)? The element of contradictory gaps – where events are partly incongruent, prompting the search for the largest common denominator – will be a focus of examination. Do the variant events relate to a single context, or are they mutually exclusive? In what sense are these strategies part of a broader search for the ‘new epic’? How does the development of narrative multiplicity relate to philosophical discourses on possible worlds as well as physicists’ theories of the multiverse (such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics and the cosmological multiverse; e.g. Paul Halpern)? These questions suggest that the basic distinction between simultaneity and sequentality needs to be refined, as if retroactively, across several different modes or layers of the artefact, creating different conditions for (narrative) experience.

This paper situates literature as both a participant in and a commentator on media transformations, and advocates for viewing literature and computer games not as discrete forms but as co-evolving media that illuminate the temporalities of representation, engagement, and critique in an increasingly digitized world.

While the intersection of literature and computer games has long been recognized, the complexity of their interrelation has been obscured by the evolution of computer game studies. This paper documents a reciprocal relationship between literature and computer games, demonstrating how literature influenced the development of computer games and vice versa, and arguing for an approach to literature as a catalyst for the emergence of new forms.

The first part of my paper revisits on 3 key moments in videogame history. The inception of Spacewar! (1961) identifies the origin of human-machine interactivity in the pulp science fiction read by its programmers; the evolution of adventure games in the 1970s reveals the impact of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings on the interface technologies and digital depictions of space; the impact of the Atari 2600 platform (1977) and Taito’s Space Invaders (1978), on literary texts is evident by comparing two versions of Orsen Scott Card's Ender's Game, a highly-influential text for the Golden Age of the 1980s. Through these case studies, I demonstrate how literature provided narrative frameworks, aesthetic strategies, and conceptual underpinnings that shaped gaming’s emergence as an expressive medium.

Gaming reciprocally informs contemporary literary analysis, and the second part of my paper examines how computer games reveal latent aspects of literary temporality and reading practices. Here, my case study is like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy which, I argue, mirrors the structures and logics of video games, inviting readers to engage with a hybrid literacy, integrating the immersive depth traditionally associated with novels and the procedural, surface-oriented attention demanded by games. I describe how elements unique to the videogame medium operate to establish the relationship between the gamespace and the real world, to control the treatment of character, and, finally, to enfold the reader into the game world by eliciting from her “an explicitly hybrid form of attention” that videogame theorist Brandan Keogh calls “co-attentiveness.”

My approach to literature as both a participant in and a commentator on media transformations, and my argument that technological innovations reconfigure reading practices and vice versa, seems directly relevent to the panel's theme of literature as a medium in constant negotiation with evolving technologies, both a receiver and producer of media practices.

Bernard Stiegler is critical towards what he – in the spirit of Adorno and Horkheimer – calls the cultural industrial technology. He perceives it as composed of marketed media of capitalist control of production and consumption, enforcing the takeover of subjectivity which is thus denied the possibility of individuation. Furthermore, as he shows in De la misère symbolique 1. L’èpoque hyperindustrielle (2004) on the example of Alain Resnais’ film On connaît la chanson (1997), temporal industrial objects such as popular songs invade our subjectivity, “stealing” out time and swallowing the temporal vector of our existence as well as our sense of community and agency. In 1997 another remarkable monument of the media representation of the workings of media was published: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s novel La télévision. The narrator – a scholar on a residence in Berlin unable to continue with his writing after the first sentence of his essay – had just stopped watching TV yet it haunts him everywhere, as well as other media. The mediated experience is counterbalanced by the felt perceptions of his body, momentary environment and mood, of what is out there, present in the world, what is unmediated or immediate. In my paper I will play out these two aesthetics and politics of media, Stiegler’s and Toussaint’s, against each other, in order to show what critical effects can be drawn from the representation and presentation of media in other media.

It is no exaggeration to say that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku (Ryōma Goes His Way), presented in Japanese as『竜馬がゆく』, caused a social phenomenon in Japan. SHIBA Ryōtarō (1923−96) is a Japanese writer very well-known for his historical novels and essays. Unfortunately, most of his works were not translated into English or any other languages, and thus, he is not widely known outside Japan.

SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku is one of his most popular novels in Japan. Generally, this novel has been read as a historical novel, but it can also be regarded as a biofiction because it centers around SAKAMOTO Ryōma (1836−1867), written down in Japanese as 坂本龍馬, a samurai who lived near the end of the Edo period. It is said that SAKAMOTO Ryōma successfully negotiated the so-called “Satcho Alliance” (i.e., united the two most powerful rival domains, Satsuma and Choshu, to work against the Edo Shogunate) and made happen the “Meiji Restoration” (i.e., a political event that restored practical imperial rule and started the Meiji period in 1868).

What is notable about SAKAMOTO Ryōma is that he became widely recognized and gained popularity after the publication of SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, first serialized in the daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun from 1962 to 1966, and later published in book form in 1974. TV dramas adapted from this novel were broadcast in 1965 and 1968, attracting a large audience. Most recently, a manga with the same title began serialization in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun in 2022. Nowadays, SAKAMOTO Ryōma has many enthusiastic fans and is often listed as the first or second most favorite historical figure in Japan.

However, a couple of years ago, news about SAKAMOTO Ryōma made a big uproar in Japan: his name is to be removed from the Japanese history textbooks used at high schools. This is mainly because, from the perspective of historical science, the achievements attributed to SAKAMOTO Ryōma are considered inaccurate or, at the very least, unprovable by evidence. This suggests that Ryōma（竜馬）, the fictional character created by SHIBA Ryōtarō, has surpassed Ryōma（龍馬）, the actual historical person, and the image of the former has come to be regarded as more “real.” It is interesting that SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku, a biofiction, triggered this social phenomenon in Japan.

In this paper, I will elucidate the points briefly outlined above—in short, the impact SHIBA Ryōtarō’s Ryōma ga Yuku—and consider how strongly biofiction can influence the establishment of the image of an actual historical person and transform people’s perception of him or her.

My contribution will deal with Konrad Bayer’s text Der Kopf des Vitus Bering ("Vitus Bering’s Head") from 1963 as a special example of biofiction that is set within the specific context of post-war avantgarde experimental poetics.

Bayer, one of the most important authors of the avantgardist "Vienna Group", allegedly sets out to (re-)narrate the biography of a historical seafarer and discoverer who, while not as famous as the likes of Columbus or James Cook, led two large Russian expeditions and had the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, and Bering Island named after himself.

However, what Bayer actually offers is a provocative dismantling and fictionalization of Bering’s actual life-story and a subversive and provocative deconstruction of the classical narrative scheme of a ‘heroic biography’. This deconstruction happens on the level of 'discours' as well as 'histoire': First of all, the text does not present a coherent 'grand récit' of Bering’s life and achievements, but follows a rather complex montage technique that combines fragmentary narrative episodes from Bering’s life with excerpts from a variety of sources that only deal vaguely, if at all, with the protagonist’s concrete biography.

One common denominator of these fragments which I’m going to highlight in my contribution is the idea that Bering’s creativity, and perhaps creativity in general, has to be understood as a product of chance and happenstance instead of individual ‘genius’: The protagonist’s actions are shown as driven by heteronomous circumstances which he can’t (and is not even willing to) control. With regard to the undeniable colonial context of Bering’s story (and the ‘exploration paradigm’ in general), Bayer’s text can be seen as both trivializing as well as at least implicitly criticizing it. Last but not least, I am going to discuss the ways in which "Der Kopf des Vitus Bering" explores the general question as to whether any narrated biography is, in fact, (bio-)fiction.

In his essay “In the Laboratory of the Novel” (1963), literary critic Peter Brooks provides a compelling account of the return of experimental realism as metafiction in the French Nouveau-Roman movement of the 1960s, recalling late nineteenth- and early twentieth century debates on the possible scientific function of literature, particularly concerning writers like Émile Zola and Samuel Butler, for whom the novel would quite literally figure as a laboratory space, fit for substantial experimentation. Brooks highlights a notable remark made by nouveau-novelist Michel Butor (1926-2002), who argues that the novel “the ideal place to study how reality appears to us or can appear to us; this is why the novel is the laboratory of narrative” (transl. mine). What seemingly distinguishes Butor’s approach from Zola’s, is that the author’s rendering and writing of the novel as a laboratory, fit for scientific experiments which could reveal hidden truths and shed light on reality anew, itself becomes the new novel’s problematized subject. If Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series (1871-1893) and Butler’s semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh (1903) both employ the novel as a framework through which to incorporate as well as incite verifiable lived experience, Butor’s last novel Degrés (1960) instead questions the extent to which these scientific attempts at life-writing are viable. In Degrés, Butor narrates the attempt of schoolmaster Pierre Vernier to write an absolutely truthful novel about the life of the lycée where he teaches. As the blurb of the English translation reads, for Vernier “the study of reality is the study of things as they are: the surface of objects, the observable behavior of people, words that one hears.” Such an undertaking soon proves more complex than anticipated: realizing that he occupies a privileged position which might influence his observations, Vernier decides to incorporate the notes of his nephew and student Pierre. Failure and triumph paradoxically ensue; the “novel scientist” of Butor’s meta-narrative is at once recognized and ridiculed. Interested in the convergence of experimental aspiration and literary technique, this paper introduces the notion of the “novel laboratory” in the context of Biofiction, in an attempt to explore the possibilities and problems that scientific experimentation poses when considered in or employed as literary form. Taking Butor’s novel as a case-study to think through, this paper grapples with ethical and epistemological complications that emerge when flesh is made word.

This paper examines the representation of nonhuman animals in seven contemporary Philippine novels in English, exploring their roles in shaping cultural and national identity. Drawing from critical animal studies (CAS), postcolonial ecocriticism, and folklore studies, the research bridges the symbolic and material dimensions of nonhuman animals, analyzing their literal and allegorical significance. By juxtaposing the folkloric depictions cataloged in Damiana Eugenio’s Philippine Folk Literature series with their literary counterparts in works published over the past decade, this study investigates the enduring and evolving roles of nonhuman animals in Philippine storytelling.

Highlighting the agency and symbolic flexibility of nonhuman animals, the analysis contributes to global CAS discourse, which critiques speciesism and explores the intersections of ecological and cultural marginalization. Moreover, it situates Philippine literature within international conversations on zoocriticism and the human-animal relationship, while also addressing gaps in local literary scholarship. The findings reveal how nonhuman animals in Philippine novels function as more than narrative devices; they are integral to constructing hybrid identities, challenging anthropocentric frameworks, and addressing pressing ecological and social issues from a postcolonial context.

This study advances comparative literature by examining how nonhuman animals mediate relationships between postcolonial human experiences and the environment. It underscores the importance of Southeast Asian narratives in diversifying global ecocritical perspectives, advocating for an inclusive approach that considers the nonhuman in cultural and literary discourses.

Swiss linguist Fardinand De Saussure (1857-1913) is known as father of modern linguistics and semiotics. Saussure first time introduces the concept of Sign, Signifier and Signified and declares the relationship of signifier and signified arbitrary. Saussure calls this particular linguistic domain as Semiology. Being a linguist, Saussure only includes verbal signs in his analysis. Americian logician Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914) makes a remarkable contribution to semiotics by adding non-verbal signs to Fardinand`s Semiology based on verbal signs only and calls it Semiotics. Pierce does not deny Saussure`s basic concept of arbitrariness of the relationship of signifier and signified, but categorizes Sign into three categories as Icon, Index and Symbol. French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980) further elaborates signifier and signified by introducing the concepts of denotation and connotation.

It is very surprising and important to look back at Indian knowledge and scholarship developed in 9th Century in Sanskrit language and in the same domain with the formulations of Acharya Anand Vardhan as Shabdshatis or three powers of word Abhidha, Lakshna and Vyanjana in his famous work Dhavanyaloka. In his interpretation of Lakshna, Anand Vardhan describes twelve types of Lakshna including Roorhi, Paryojnavati, Saropa and Sadhyavasana having almost very close and similar description of the intent or signification as defined by Pierce and Roland Barthes later in 20th Century. Moreover, the terms Upmana and Upmeya are almost similar to signifier and signified. Many other formulations of Indian scholars as Dharmakirti, Dingnag and Bharatrihari and concept as Apoha has similarities with Saussure`s view of oppositional differences between signs.

Present paper will focus on a comparative analysis of Indian and Western notions of various semiological and semantic concepts introduced by Acharya Anad Vardhan, Bhartarihari, Ferdinand De Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce and Roland Barthes. Main objective of the study is to bring forth the certain relatable congenerous parameters or factors and convergent aspects obtained in the viewpoints of given scholars towards their formulations of semiotics and semiology.

歌集（Shijing）在中国传统学术中具有规范地位，在历史上被视为具有政治意义的文本，作为治理国家的宪法典范。各个王朝对*Shijing*的研究主要集中在语言学、语义学和文本批评上，强调其实际功能。然而，在共和时期，*Shijing*经历了一系列的重新解释，最终被纳入文学史，并被归类为现代文学学科。这种从正典文本向文学分类的转变反映了现代中国学术体系的转变。这种转变的具体过程在共和党学者对*诗经*的民间解释中，强调其抒情价值以及对文本作为诗歌在文学史起源的地位的重新定义中显而易见。这种变化与当时学者不断发展的人文主义观点和新思想的推广密切相关。

For a long period, red hair has been mentioned and endowed with special connotations and assumptions in literature. As one of the time turning points, the Medieval Age left a huge impact on British society appearing in several spheres, especially in literature. Being the trait of the wild nation that historians define, red hair presented two opposite connotations in two periods. In this essay, three questions are put forward. The first one is what are the different connotations of red hair between the Anglo-Saxon period and the Medieval period in British literature? The second one is how the religious connotation of red hair affected the public image of secular literature and what is the specific manifestation of it. The third one is that with the process of the shift of the public cognization of redheads, what is the change of social power? In the theory of Northrop Frye, the dark mythological forces should be identified with the heathen empires that can be connected with the strong political slant of the Bible. Therefore, in this essay, I will select typical literature genres as examples including The Canterbury Tales and illustrate the original image of red hair before the period influenced by Catholicism in the Anglo-Saxon period as well as the religious origin of the redhead connotation and try to explain how these changed images became popular and well-known connotations and the transformation of the social power.

The paper revisits the highly contested concept and method of “comparison” by examining Jean Genet’s novel Querelle of Brest and Werner Fassbinder’s film adaptation Querelle, while situating the two within the moving image work of Filipino contemporary queer artist Jon Cuyson, who visually translates Fassbinder’s film into Kerel. In illustrating the comparative relations across these works, the paper frames its presentation around the following questions: What happens when works like the queer classics of Genet’s fiction and Fassbinder’s film adaptation are visually translated into a moving image by Cuyson? What kind of worldmaking is shaped through the process of visual translation? How does the moving image visualize comparison, especially as we acknowledge the presence of what Benedict Anderson calls “specters of comparison”? In acknowledging our comparative relations with Europe, what becomes our practice and technique of comparison? What meaning of comparison can we generate from Kerel’s visual translation of Querelle? With these questions, the paper also initiates discursive conversations with one of the major theorists of Philippine comparative literature, Lucilla Hosillos, whose powerful conception of comparison, described as concentric circles—a rippling movement enabled by pebbles being dropped into a pool of water—also serves as her framework for imagining spheres of cosmopolitan influence and cross-contact. By allowing such ideas to percolate across the selected works, this paper envisions a germinal hydro-perspective on comparative methodology, which may also be relevant to the field of world literature as it grapples with challenges posed by climate disasters, mass extinction, and sinking nation-states.

This study examines the destabilization of Southeast Asian creative industries through the lens of capitalist commodification, drawing historical parallels with how ancient religions once reshaped cultural landscapes in the region. It argues that neoliberal capitalism, much like these earlier religious systems, functions as a totalizing force that reorganizes the production and circulation of art and literature. Through comparative analysis, the study explores how creative practices are increasingly subsumed into the logic of global markets, transforming art into a sub-industry of capitalism. This transformation diminishes the political and ideological complexity of creative works, with artists and writers prioritizing immediate material concerns over deeper engagements with identity, resistance, and history. Furthermore, the temporal conditions of creative labor now mirror the accelerated rhythms of commodity production, forcing creators to produce at a pace dictated by market imperatives. By drawing parallels between the historical spread of religion and the contemporary influence of capitalism, the study interrogates how these dynamics have reconfigured the relationship between creativity and socio-political critique in Southeast Asia, ultimately questioning the role of artistic expression within a capitalist system that instrumentalizes art as both product and spectacle while dimming the agency of those who create it.

The idea of water in Philippine culture is an area that needs to be studied. As an archipelago in Southeast Asia, water is an integral part of the natural environment through the seas, rivers, typhoons, floods, as well as the habitat of native spirits.

Water cosmologies require that the Filipino native respect the presence and habitat of native deities. Practices and rituals are performed to help protect fisherfolk, travelers, or communities in the open seas or rivers. Early colonial Spanish texts portrayed and argued the easy conversion of the Filipino natives to the new Catholic faith through baptism. But the Filipino natives at the time may have read the ritual of using water differently, possibly as medicine for healing, or as an act of friendship. This paper explores the world of water from the native point of view, as against the Spanish interpretation of easy conversion to the new faith. Aside from the daily ritual of sanitation and hygiene (washing one's hands and feet before entering someone's home), we see that water and its medicinal properties are an integral part of Philippine culture.

Using Gaspar de San Augustin's text, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (1565-1615), selected folk tales and practices, I argue water is seen as a means to communicate with the spirits in the natural environment, and as a way to heal illnesses attributed to actions that displeased the native spirits. Using Peter Boomgaard's landmark text, A World of Water as a framework, this study hopes to contribute to a decolonial exploration of the Filipino worldview of water.

The 1960s and the 1970s in the Philippines were militant times since the United Stated backed despotic governments across Southeast Asia. With the rise of the anti-imperialist discourse during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., writers from the youth and the student movement questioned the highly elitist nature of literature. They pushed for poetry that fights for social change. However, an overwhelming majority elected the son of the former dictator as Philippine president in 2022, fifty years after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972. This prompted a resurgence of examining the literary and artistic production during Martial Law. These texts counter the nostalgia surrounding the dictatorship that was marked by censorship and human rights violations.

This paper delineates the ways poetry written during the Marcos dictatorship can be taught to the present generation of students who have no memories of Martial Law. One examines the contradictions of writing in English, a foreign language, to articulate a nationalist discourse. In relation, one also notes the proletarianization of these writers as they eschew their bourgeois class origins to embrace the life of the peasant and the working class. The paper also analyzes how the targeted audience of these poems informs the literary style and expressions. Ultimately, this paper articulates the postcolonial question on how the English language—despite its colonial imposition—can be used to fight back against oppressors through literary and artistic expressions with a critical and anti-imperialist message. In teaching these poems to a younger generation who were born decades after Martial Law, these poems can be vessels of remembering.

The Collection of Foreign Novels (Yuwai Xiaoshuo Ji, 1909), co-translated by Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, represents a significant milestone in the emergence of modern Chinese literature. Of the included works, three stories (two by Leonid Andreyev and one by Vsevolod Garshin) were translated by Lu Xun from German, while the remaining 13 were rendered by Zhou Zuoren from English. This study examines the English translations of Chekhov’s works used by Zhou Zuoren, and Zhou’s intentions, strategies, and misreadings in translating Chekhov. By doing so, it seeks to elucidate Chekhov’s influence on the development of modern Chinese literature and the short story as a literary form in the modern Chinese literature.

Abstract: The epic poem "Manas" is a cultural bearer that unites the spirituality of the Kyrgyz people and a monument in living form that manifests the charm of oral literature. The Manas has become world-famous through the transmission and singing of the Manasch, and its related research has been promoted in several countries in a planned and scaled manner. Among them, Manaschism in Russia is the earliest started and the most mature. Russian Manaschis and Manasology experts continue to document, study, and promote the epic. The Russian scholarly community has focused on the epic nature and ethnohistorical value of Manaschka, and the 100-year history of research reflects the interdisciplinary nature of research thinking, the disciplinary specialization of research results, and the internationalization of the scale of research. The Russian research community has not only solved the basic problem of the classical construction of the epic through exploration and research, but also made an important contribution to the promotion of national spirit. Therefore, it is worthwhile to learn from its research process, refer to its research experience, and reflect on its current situation, so as to contribute to a new level of research on Manas in the world.

Chinese cultural canons are the concentrated expression of traditional Chinese philosophical thought and cultural essence. As a key initiative of the strategy of ‘Chinese culture going out’, Russian translation of canonical books has built a bridge between Chinese and Russian culture.With the cultural turn in translation studies，The historical and cultural context behind the act of translation and the issue of translator subjectivity have received increasing attention in translation studies. Differences in identity also determine the ideology behind the act of translation, the cultural background and the linguistic style of the translated text, which ultimately leads to the formation of unused translation styles, and conveys a very different cultural ideology and image of China to the outside world, and this results in a different culture-shaping force.

Among Russian sinologists, Lukyanov (Анатолий Евгеньевич Лукьянов) stands out for his comparative philosophical and cultural typological approach. He has a fascination with ancient Chinese culture, “Tao” and “archetype” and the relationship between “Ren” and “Tao” are two pairs of key concepts in his study of ancient Chinese culture. Lukyanov has a very clear understanding of the rhythmic nature of the Chinese canon and argues that none of the sinologists who preceded him realized the problem of the rhythmic nature of the Chinese canon.

On the basis of this, this paper intends to combine the theory of manipulation in the cultural school of translation studies with the theory of translational behavior in the German functional school of translation studies, examining Lukyanov's translation of the Chinese canons from three basic aspects: ideology, poetics, and patronage, respectively. In terms of ideology, it mainly examines the translator's cultural identity in the historical, social and contemporary context in which Lukyanov lived. In terms of poetic, it mainly examines Lukyanov's choice of translation strategy based on his cultural identity, the inner laws of the text and his own poetic view of translation, as well as the translator's value orientation behind this choice of translation strategy. In terms of patronage, this paper will focus on the influence of Lukyanov's ‘moral’ school of Russian Sinology on his direction of research, his target audience, and his choice of translation strategies. On the basis of research in the three areas mentioned above, this paper goes beyond the level of linguistic research to expand the research horizon to the translator's personal background, emotional tendency and the social communication dynamics in which he lived, aiming to construct a three-dimensional translation history of Lukyanov's person and expecting to provide more insights and references for the Russian translation of Chinese canons.

Abstract: Before and after World War II, there was a surge of interest in Chinese poetics in Czech, driven by the friendly relations between China and Czech at the time. A group of scholars researching China dedicated themselves to absorbing the essence of Chinese culture for the development of their own society. In 1944, four songs adapted from Chinese poetry were sung in the Terezin concentration camp, created by the imprisoned musician Pavel Hass (1899–1944) based on translations of ancient Chinese poetry by Czech translator Bohumil Mathesius (1888–1952). The ideals of eternity, balance, and harmony expressed in Chinese poetry constructed a "utopia" in the hearts of the Czech people during the Nazi regime, helping to soothe the psychological trauma of innocent victims of war. Czech scholars employed Marxist literary theory to carve out an interpretative path for Chinese poetics that bridged the ancient and modern, as well as Eastern and Western perspectives. This allowed Chinese poetry to become a warm current flowing into the spiritual homeland of the people amidst the fires of war. In a time of severe national crisis, the Czech people, caught between socialism and capitalism, yearned to find a social development path to address their problems. They employed Marxist theory to explore the realm of traditional Chinese poetics in search of spiritual nourishment that aligns with modern societal values, seeking cultural strength embedded with modern genes within the ancient wisdom of the East.

King Gesar is a long epic that gathers the collective wisdom of the Tibetan people in China. It has flowed to different ethnic groups and places through many modes of dissemination, such as trade and commerce exchanges, wars, artists' singing, and Tibetan Buddhism. In the long process of transmission, Gesar constantly adapts to the new requirements of life and undergoes several innovations, which not only leaves traces of the changing times, but also compatibilises the different national temperaments of Mongolian, Tibetan and Buryat into Gesar, making an important contribution to the enrichment of the world's literature and the inter-ethnic cultural exchanges. The research of Gesar in Russia can be divided into three stages. The first stage began in the late 18th century, when scholars discovered Gesar and traced its origins, and the research on Gesar was interrupted in the 1940s due to the influence of political factors; the second stage began in the mid-20th century, when the reputation of Gesar was restored, and its research was put on the right track, and the pioneers of Gesarology devoted themselves to the collection, collation, translation, publication, and research of Gesar to lay an important foundation for the development of Russian Gesarology. The third stage began in the 21st century, when a new generation of Gesar scholars injected new vigour into the study of Gesar, and a wealth of academic and folk activities promoted the inheritance and development of Gesar.

Liang Qichao, who was the first modern scholar to use the term “science fiction”, to begin translating and writing science fiction, and to advocate a revolution in the world of fiction, wrote his science fiction novel The Future of New China in 1902. In The Future of New China, Liang envisioned China in 1962 as a country that had already established a constitutional monarchy through reforms and become a world power, from the perspective of the future perfect tense. Unlike Western utopian novels that mimic travelogues, Liang Qichao does not stretch and fictionalize space, but stretches time to the future, and the place where his story takes place is still the land of China, similar to the transplantation of the imagery of the Western world of the recent past to the China of the future, and the use of utopian imaginings as the political ideals of the future perfect tense, thus forming a transcendence of the Western utopian tradition. Between 1918 and 1920, Liang Qichao personally visited and toured Europe, the blueprint of his utopia, where he accomplished the transformation of his scientific outlook and cultural outlook on the East and the West, realizing a non-dualistic transcendence of secondary school and Western learning, improvement and revolution, and proposing a new conception of the construction of national identity in modern China. Therefore, this paper intends to start from Liang Qichao's science fiction novel the Future of New China during his travels to Japan to his travelogue My Travel Impressions in Europe during his travels to Europe, and explore the time-space transformation of his science fiction and travelogue to the Western utopian tradition, which is implied by the creative transplantation of his creative methods, contents and themes, and the intertextualization of the literary imagination and the social reality, i.e. the entanglement and paradox of scientism and humanism inside and outside of the text, and between the text and the reality. The intertextualization of literary imagination and social reality, that is, the entanglement and paradox of scientism and humanism inside and outside the text, between text and reality. Liang Qichao, from his firm support of Western learning and his advocacy of destruction and revolution to his rethinking of the value of secondary school, tended to a kind of fusion of East and West, and this kind of thinking, which abandons the dichotomy and strives for a certain kind of balance between the ideas of “the world's commonwealth” and “qiqiqi” can be regarded as the “shadow” of science fiction of the later generations. This idea of giving up the binary opposition and striving for a certain balance between the ideas of “commonwealth of the world” and “unity of things” can be regarded as a reflection of the “dark consciousness” and modern consciousness of science fiction in the later generations, as well as a small reflection of the post-human poetics in the birth of science fiction in China.

In 1922, the French newspaper La Politique de Pékin（《北京政闻报》）published Les chevaliers chinois, roman de mœurs et d'aventures, which is currently widely recognized by academic circles as the earliest French single-volume translation of "Water Margin"（《水浒传》）. The translator, Panking, was described as a "French scholar," but there are varying opinions on which chapters of "Water Margin" he translated. This French single-volume edition bears the Chinese title "武松说荟," and it selectively translates the portions featuring Wu Song from chapters 22 to 32 of "Water Margin." In reality, Panking was Pan Jing, a native of Nanhai, Guangdong Province. Pan Jing was not only a student at the Imperial University of Peking, one of the last batch of jinshi (highest degree in traditional Chinese imperial examinations) in the late Qing Dynasty, but also one of the early officially-sent students to study in France. After returning from France, Pan Jing primarily served in the political sphere and later engaged in education and cultural and historical work. In the history of Sino-French literary exchanges, Pan Jing actively participated in the external communication and translation of Chinese culture. His writings possess both distinct era characteristics and a strong personal style and unique ideological perspectives. During a time of social unrest and intense ideological and cultural change, while Pan Jing was not a pivotal figure capable of turning the tide, his ideological concepts and cultural horizons were nurtured in this era of transition between old and new. His writings document the culture and thought of modern China and European society, reflecting the cultural identity, value orientations, and spiritual demeanor of a generation of Chinese scholars. His rich and forward-thinking Sino-French cultural exchanges and literary practices directly participated in the construction of the world identity of Chinese literature and culture. From the list of students at the Imperial University of Peking, government gazette appointments, and notes and articles by figures such as Qian Zhongshu, among other documents, we can roughly outline Pan Jing's life trajectory of academic pursuit and political career. However, it is through his poetry, prose, and translations, to which he devoted great effort, that we gain a deeper understanding of Pan Jing's cultural horizons and ideological concepts. Although his thoughts and voice lie deep within history and memory, they still shine brightly.

With the advancement of media technology, people increasingly rely on images, videos, and even simulacra in the mass media to construct the "collective consciousness" of foreign countries. The result of this deep mediatization is that the imagination of a foreign country becomes a textual representation, blurring the boundaries between "reality" and "virtual," as well as between "author" and "collective." Consequently, the study of foreign country images transcends the scope of comparative literature research and become part of cultural studies. This broad-sense image research has brought a broader research domain for the study of foreign country images, enabling the study to radiate into various aspects of social life.

Macroscopically, the prevalence and over-spread of image research reflect the consequences of the "pictorial turn" in culture. It brings about a series of media landscapes, and even spectacles, generated by stimulating the senses, producing meaning, and guiding consumption under the "logic of visual existence". Microscopically, the construction of exotic images involves cross-regional, cross-national, and cross-cultural communication, which is worthy of further investigation. Therefore, the research on foreign country images needs to transform from the previous scattered research that emphasizes “description” into an integrated research that can interpret and construct the texts of foreign countries in mass media.Semiotics can provide an operational theoretical solution for understanding the production, formation, and evolution of foreign country images.

This study will select Northern Europe as a specific case for the construction of a foreign country image. Firstly, Northern Europe seems relatively unfamiliar and distant, to some extent, marginalizing our perception of it. Secondly, it is precisely the "sense of alienation" in culture, geography, or society that makes our imagination of Northern Europe purer. Brands, geographical landscapes and socio-cultural characteristics have formed a large number of vague and fragmented semiotic impressions, making us more reliant on imagination to build the image of Northern Europe. Finally, we have to pay attention to the rapidly changing world, such as the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, and Finland and Sweden joining NATO. This will have a subtle impact on China's future exchanges with Northern Europe in various fields. In-depth understanding of the Chinese society's image perception of Northern Europe can provide some background references for future peaceful exchanges between the two sides. Ultimately, as an imagination of the "other," the ultimate goal of the image of a foreign country has never been to become a corresponding "fact," but to become a mirror to reflect the "self." This study attempts to find a way to understand the self through the research on the construction of the image of a foreign country.

In the post-human era of the 21st century, artificial intelligence has transformed every aspect of human life, including literature, aesthetics, and reception. Contemporary creation has gradually entered the poetic age of post-human AI. With the constant update of communication media and the cyberization of humanity, the creation and interpretation of poetry have developed in multiple directions. In this context, contemporary Chinese poets have actively explored the writing of science fiction poetry, with Ouyang Jianghe's The Dormant Ink and the Quantum Boy and Zhai Yongming's Full Immersion Apocalypse Script standing out as representative works. These two poets' creative approaches exhibit different aesthetic tendencies: "embedding sci-fi elements" and "integrating sci-fi backgrounds," in stark contrast to how Western poets such as Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot approach science fiction elements. One of the most notable aspects is Zhai Yongming's depiction of the human paradox in the post-human era, where technology has deeply integrated with the human body, making it difficult to separate the two. In this technological age, humanity must reassess its relationship with non-human beings. Meanwhile, the emergence of AI-generated poetry has sparked significant debate among critics, providing new insights into contemporary poetic writing. From the perspective of reception theory, before readers and critics start evaluating AI's creations, their reading experiences are already shaped by poems from both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western traditions. As a result, when encountering similar imagery, their associations are not formed by the AI's creation itself, but rather by these prior poetic experiences. Even though AI can generate sentences with leaps and heterogeneity, from the reader's perspective, these often violate grammatical rules and fail to create a poetic effect. This highlights that current AI poetry cannot yet question or explore human essence and future destiny, nor empathize with history and the present in the way contemporary poetry can. It is here that contemporary poetry can expand its creative possibilities. In the face of the interweaving of virtual and real realities in the post-human era, contemporary poets, from the perspective of the development of the times, will increasingly depict the future of humanity through science fiction poetry writing, marking a new trend.

Chinese civilization has the richest historical records, and its literature is unique in world literary history. Chinese characters remain the only continuously used classical script and the origins of Chinese literature are intertwined with the genetic foundation of Chinese civilization, embodying principles such as Wen Yi Zai Dao, Xiuci Li Qi Cheng, etc. and a pluralistic yet cohesive textual tradition. These elements form the Chinese core thought and become distinct symbols of Chinese civilization. Unlike other civilizations, Chinese literature was shaped by the origins and characteristics of its civilization—while oral literature provides insight into early Chinese literature, it was not its foundation. Artifacts like jade over the past ten thousand years and late-Paleolithic stone tools and ornaments functioned as unique material strategies and skills, laying the groundwork for the literary concepts of “Wen-Tao”, “Wen-De”, and “Xiuci” in the writing age. Related to ancient cosmology, belief and ideology, these issues cannot be fully explored through empirical or a text analysis method alone, necessitating new approaches.

Unlike overseas studies that focus on written literature or even believe Chinese literature began in the Zhou or Eastern Han Dynasty, research on literary origins from the lens of Chinese civilization genes integrates the conceptual germination, spiritual foundations, and functional origins of literature with the Chinese nation’s characteristics. It also positions material culture—Wu (“Thing”) in early Chinese civilization—as the starting point, and the formation of mature literature as its endpoint.

The project Tracing the Origins of Chinese Civilization now supports new ways of studying the origin of Chinese literature through the lens of Chinese civilization genes. Longitudinally, the interaction and formation of the five characteristics of the Chinese nation can be examined. Distinctive ideas, categories and early literary genres can also be traced and constructed through the Heaven-Earth-Human-Things framework and databases. This approach explores the formation and transmission of Chinese cultural genetics from the pre-writing period to classical texts by examining cosmological thought, geographical forms, the concept of Wu, and text origins. Over the past ten millennia, the concept of Wu has contributed to the evolution of Chinese characters, influenced written narratives, and shaped literary genres. Along this trajectory, literature not only recorded history and culture, reflected literati thought, and shaped a distinct Chinese literary style, but also facilitated cultural integration, advancing literary innovation through the adaptation of foreign literature. The interactive study of Chinese civilization genes and the origin of Chinese literature not only offers a new model for the tracing project but also engages with the international debate on early Chinese writing, providing a response from Chinese academia.

As a staple food essential to human survival, grains have been closely linked to human life since ancient times. Early humans sought to explain their origins, giving rise to mythological figures such as Houji, Demeter, and Inari, along with grain origin myths. This study analyzes the Shennong–Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth in Hunan, China, examining its origins and formation process.

Grain myths have emerged and spread globally, attracting significant scholarly attention for their diversity and deep connection to human life. Among them, grain origin myths constitute the most important category. Existing research classifies the myths into several types, such as the Corporeal Transformation type and the Flying Rice type. In China, the Animal Transport type—mainly found in southern ethnic minorities—exhibits variation depending on the animal protagonist.

As a key branch of this type, the Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth originated in Yunnan and has spread widely across China. While preserving the defining characteristics of grain origin myths, it also incorporates elements of human origin myths (the Panhu myth). This myth centers on a dog obtaining grain seeds from a distant land, explaining the origins of grains. Based on specific narrative variations, this study categorizes the myth into three subtypes: the basic type, the Dog/Pig Fetching Grain type, and the Dog Pleading to Retain Seeds type.

During its transmission, the Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth adapted to regional cultures, leading to localized variations. In Hunan, local Shennong Worship influenced its transformation, incorporating Shennong to form a new subgenre—the Shennong–Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth. In typical Shennong myths, Shennong appears as a solemn God of Agriculture, which contrasts with his more humanized role as the Progenitor of Humanity in the Shennong–Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth. This study argues that Hunan’s longstanding rice-farming tradition played a crucial role in shaping this myth. Not only did it ensure that rice remained central to the myth, but it also influenced the emergence of Emperor Yan Shennong as a key figure in the myth. Additionally, Shennong worship in Hunan promoted his transformation from an ancestral figure to a deity, placing Emperor Yan Shennong—a locally adapted image—into such myths. Notably, the relationship between the dog and Emperor Yan Shennong in the myth also exhibits parallels to the corn spirit described by James Frazer, suggesting a dualistic unity between the two figures.

Therefore, this study argues that Hunan, with its unique geographical and cultural conditions, gave rise to the Shennong-Dog Fetching Grain Seeds myth. Shennong in this myth, shaped by local Shennong worship, embodies a figure that simultaneously acts as the dog’s traditional owner and merges with the dog’s role. While influenced by conventional depictions of Shennong and Panhu, this localized Shennong ultimately diverged due to the distinctive culture of Hunan.

This paper focuses on the concept of "Gu" (ꈭ) in the culture of the Liangshan Yi people, exploring its historical evolution in cultural translation and ecological aesthetics. Through an analysis of the Yi people's rich oral traditions and field research materials, the study finds that "Gu" in traditional Yi beliefs is not a single species but a sacred, typological bird whose meaning transcends zoological classification, reflecting the Yi people's unique ecological cognition. Under the influence of multi-ethnic interactions and Han Chinese culture, "Gu" gradually became associated with the wild goose (Anser cygnoides). This process incorporated both the Han Chinese understanding of the wild goose and the lyrical imagery of the wild goose in minority literature. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, this correspondence was increasingly reinforced in written texts as the sense of the Chinese national community grew stronger. In recent years, driven by local tourism development and ecological conservation needs, the black-necked crane (Grus nigricollis) has been introduced as a new cultural symbol into the cognitive system of "Gu," reflecting a shift in species representation under ecological aesthetics. This study reveals the dynamic evolution of Yi bird cognition in different socio-cultural contexts, providing new perspectives for understanding ethnic cultural exchanges, evolution of ecological concepts, and the mechanisms of cultural translation.

Robert Payne has presented the wartime landscape of Chongqing to the Western world through diverse literary forms. As a war observer, Payne integrated the three images of "the bombing", "the bathhouse" and "opium", not only portraying the shocking dark landscapes of the war but also constructing a landscape framework distinct from those of other Western writers visiting China. As an urban wanderer, from the urban fringes to the center, from individuals to the crowd, Payne focused on the two symbolic images of "the rivers" and "the falling towers", as well as the "crowd" and "individuals within the crowd" in specific urban spaces such as banks, clubs, teahouses and buses, presenting a modern urban landscape where tradition and modernity, the East and the West, interacted vigorously. Payne uncovered the eternity, the sacredness and the poetics of Chongqing landscape from the natural mountains and waters, the religious culture and mythologies, and the daily life through the synthesis of senses. "Rocks" were not only the symbol of Chongqing created by Payne but also a metaphor for his urban writings. The multi-dimensional Chongqing landscape transcended temporality and locality, and became a symbol of eternal Chinese landscapes and even human landscapes.

Protest, as an integral part of public culture since the 19th century, is today deeply engraved in the minds of young people as well as left-wing thinkers. Protests were initially composed mostly of proletarians until the 1960s, when college students from the New Left, the descendants of the French and American middle classes, became involved as protesters. Bob Dylan's lyrics document the changing culture of protest during the years of agitation, as well as the changing discourse of proletarian revolution. Geographically, liberation shifted from intervention in the public sphere to the liberation of the private individual body; at the level of knowledge and discourse, from an intellectual emphasis to a sensual redistribution; and in artistic form, from the straightforward notion of political protest to the notion of artistic selfhood and and the selfhood of life. Bob Dylan used the pop music industry, which is full of the power of cultural capital, to update the classic discourse of pop music and to give the audience an embodied way of experiencing it, injecting the global pop culture industry with the power to liberate the audience. Bob Dylan's public performances focus on the chanting of lyrics, and the verbal power of his performances is intertwined with the public protests of the 1960s in the American sense of John Searle's “words for things”. The culture of protest encompassed in Bob Dylan's art rejects notions of reversing status, eliminating hierarchy, and presupposing distance. In the performance space of his music, the hierarchical distance between singer and audience is eliminated, and community between singer and audience, and between audience and audience is no longer necessary, as his art makes room for personal experience and private life, resulting in a sense of proletarian liberty and emancipation that happens at the end of the performance.

Toward the end of her recently published Eloge de la traduction, protesting in typically rebellious mode against the inhumanity of the migrant camps in Calais, the distinguished French Hellenist, philologist, and theorist of the ‘untranslatable’, Barbara Cassin, reflects on the deeply apposite word ‘entre’ in French, split as it is between the prepositional Latin root inter-, -- thus pivotal to any thinking of difference and translation, or of any interval between two -- and as an imperative form of the verb entrer (to enter); in the context of migration and the refugee crisis, it becomes thus for her the most hospitable word on the border separating insider from outsider, while at the same time figuring translation at the heart of the deeply ambivalent nature of hospitality.

Somewhat surprisingly, readers of Tony Hillerman’s extraordinary Diné/Navajo crime novels have never paid attention to the fascinating role that translation, more often untranslatability, plays in many of them. This often comes at quite pivotal moments in the plot and is crucial to the process of interpreting and reading, both metaphorically and literally, as the two central characters and tribal policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, set out to solve the most puzzling and seemingly impenetrable of crimes, in the time-honoured mode of detection as decryption.

As well as thrilling and compelling story-telling, I see Hillerman’s novels as culturally significant in their treatment of the complex question of communicability between contemporary Native American communities (principally Diné, Hopi and Zuni), and their richly diverse language, myths, spiritual beliefs and ceremonies (notably what can or cannot be spoken about), and the non-Native world that surrounds them. The novels also dramatize the forms of protest available to these communities in the context of the longer devastating history of American colonial oppression and cultural eradication. I will focus my own reading on two such ‘scenes of translation’, from Talking God (1989) and Coyote Waits (1990), arguing that alongside translation and untranslatability, the shape-shifting figure of anamorphosis is mobilised to powerful and telling narrative effect by Hillerman.

References

Barbara Cassin, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : Dictionnaire des intraduisibles : Paris : Seuil/Le Robert, 2004. [English translation, Emily Apter et al eds, Dictionary of Untranslatables, Princeton University Press, 2014).

Barbara Cassin, Eloge de la traduction [In praise of Translation]. Paris : Fayard, 2016.

Tony HIllerman, Talking God. New York: Harper Collins, 1989.

Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.

This presentation explores Parallel Polis as a dynamic framework for protest cultures across two distinct historical and geopolitical contexts: dissident movements in 1970s Czechoslovakia and contemporary globalized art collectives such as the Propeller Group. Both cases illustrate the creation of autonomous spaces that, while deeply rooted in local histories, also engage with transnational influences. This talk examines Parallel Polis as an enduring strategy of cultural resistance and creative innovation by juxtaposing underground samizdat networks with art installations that critique power structures. This comparative analysis highlights how protest cultures adapt to shifting sociopolitical landscapes while maintaining continuity in their tactics and philosophies.

After having been involved in the Hong Kong protests of 2019, Chung Siu-hei left the city and carried on the struggle for self-determination abroad, through an online, participatory performance. "In Search of Our Common Ground" involved a physical audience in Stockholm and Zurich, as well as an online audience located in from Hong Kong. Together, they corrected and rewrote a manifesto provided by the artist, just as citizens of a democracy would amend and rewrite a law.

Concurrently, as the Hindu-nationalist parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act targeting the Muslim community (11 December 2019), the theater group Jana Natya Manch (“People’s Theater Platform”) created an inclusive, participatory performance to counter the discriminatory law. "We are the People of India" took place in disadvantaged neighborhoods in the suburbs of New Delhi and within protests against the CAA in the center of the city (as well as online, like Chung's performance, during the pandemic).

Not only did both of these performances shatter the wall that traditionally separates performers and spectators, but they also crossed the border that traditionally separates political arts from political action. These performances amounted to protests. They were devised by theater makers who were themselves—their artistic activity aside— protesters, and they turned silent spectators into vocal citizens. The script was their original creation but was based on official documents. The artists were the original leaders of the performances, but their part faded as they redistributed speech and action to participants.

Based on fieldwork with theater makers and active audiences, this comparative presentation will present analogous contributions of contemporary artists to current politics and question the formal separation between artistic and political action. It will situate these works within a geography of people’s theaters—referring to pioneering figures such as Romain Rolland, Bertolt Brecht, Utpal Dutt or Augustine Mok Chiu-yu—and speak to common debates in the humanities and the social sciences that pertain to the concept of “democracy” today. As they involve participants in the public space and address burning issues, people’s theaters lead to protest performances.

This paper takes the "Qushui Liushang" (cups drifted on meandering waterway), a shared literary ritual in East Asia, as a vivid case of cultural exchange and civilizational mutual learning in the region. From the perspective of academic research, through theories such as the concept of communication rituals, it deeply explores and interprets the rich connotations and profound significance embodied in Lanting culture. Lanting Gathering in the ninth year of Yonghe had a profound influence on surrounding regions of China. The core elements of the ritual—poetic creation, calligraphy, and philosophical reflection—remained consistent, each country adapted the practice to reflect its unique cultural values and aesthetic preferences. A "winding stream" site called Poseokjeong has been perfectly preserved in the southern suburbs of Gyeongju, South Korea. Throughout Japan such as Kyoto's Kamigamo Shrine, traces of "Qushui Liushang" remain. In Vietnam, Emperor Lê Hiến Tông constructed the Flowing Cup Pavilion within the imperial palace. The culture of Lanting embodies the philosophical ideas and concepts on life and the world shared across East Asia, rooted in the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions of ancient China. In South Korea’s ancient shamanic songs, hyangga, sijo, one can sense the intrinsic, organic connection and harmony between human life and the universe. The Japanese view of the birth of gods and the formation of the human world is almost equal, as the impermanence of divine death is deeply connected to the transience of human life and death. Over thousands of years, East Asian cultures have shared a nearly unanimous resonance in their reflections on life. Such shared contemplation is perfectly encapsulated by Wang Xizhi's observation in The Preface to the Orchid Pavilion. Moreover, the "Qushui Liushang" ritual embodies the ancient ecological philosophy of harmony between humans and nature ("Tianren Heyi") and an aesthetic preference for curves, as symbolized by the "Eternal Harmony" of flowing water. East Asian countries are geographically adjacent and share a cultural emphasis on the importance of the natural environment. This tradition established a model for integrating reflections on life with joyous gatherings amidst natural beauty. It continued to spread and endure, shaped by the shared yet distinct cultural traditions and imagery of East Asian countries, including their views on nature and life and death. By analyzing the homogeneity and heterogeneity of traditional cultures across East Asia, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between cultural continuity and variation in East Asia, and uncover the hidden ideological and cultural essence within shared rituals and forms, thereby promoting the humanistic and spiritual values of Chinese and East Asian traditions, deepening and broadening cultural exchange and mutual learning between East Asia and the world, fostering meaningful dialogue and harmonious coexistence among humanity.

As a renowned 20th-century writer and a representative of the stream-of-consciousness novel, Faulkner has had a profound impact on Chinese and even world literature. This influence has inspired a group of Chinese scholars to conduct academic research on him. Over the years, Chinese Faulkner studies have yielded fruitful results, encompassing the fields of influence studies, parallel studies, and cross-cultural studies, with distinct characteristics of comparative literature, making them an excellent case for comparative literature analysis. On the one hand, reassessing Faulkner studies in China from a comparative literature perspective broadens our understanding of Faulkner’s influence and provides a unique Chinese experience in Faulkner studies. On the other hand, examining China’s Faulkner studies from the perspective of world literature injects a global perspective and value into China’s Faulkner studies, aiming to better promote world literature studies.

It can be said that from the perspective of world literature, we can see that Faulkner research in China: on the one hand, Chinese Faulkner research has constructed the Chinese experience of Faulkner research with China’s unique culture and context. On the other hand, it provides a world perspective and practical cases that overflow the boundaries of Chinese national literature and constructs universal literary experience and aesthetic values. Both of them are integrated into the construction of world literature with the experience of cross-cultural literary exchange and interaction, providing a reference for the construction and reconstruction of world literature. With its possibility of cross-cultural influence, cross-cultural similarity, and interdisciplinary exploration of mutual interpretation, Chinese Faulkner research provides theoretical support for world literature, and also demonstrates the vivid practice of literary interpretation in the context of world literature through specific cases. In the final analysis, Chinese Faulkner research, a regional cross-cultural research practice with a global perspective, provides a possibility of cross-cultural communication, which is the premise for the realization of world literature. In addition, placing Chinese Faulkner research in the perspective of world literature will give Faulkner research a wider meaning. At the same time, taking care of Faulkner with a global perspective will enable Chinese researchers to form a conscious awareness of dialogue with international scholars, and better promote the breadth and depth of Faulkner research.

This research will interrogate how the Polish British writer Joseph Conrad, as an outcast of British society, possesses a cultural self-awareness by presenting the exotic people and world outside Britain. After abandoning his maritime career, Conrad turned to writing novels and stories that deeply drew upon his seafaring experiences. These experiences shaped his depictions of life and death in the jungles of the Malay Archipelago and Africa, and alienated boats floating above the temperamental seas unknown to land people. Frequently Conrad brings up cases of cultural conflicts and trans-cultural communications. Even tragic death caused by the encounter between westerners and the indigenous occur repeatedly in his texts like “Amy Foster” and “Karin, A Memory”. How men and women from different cultural background deal with each other is obviously a motif haunting Conrad’s literary creation. As calling himself a “homo duplex”(the double man), Conrad’s identity of both a Pole and a British gives him a double vision to see the world while the hideous years on sea forms his habit of intensified mediation and reflection upon different cultures. This cultural self-consciousness allows him to evaluate not only the otherness of foreign cultures but also the assumptions, limitations, and contradictions of his own cultural backgrounds which are both from Poland the oppressed and Britain the Empire. In Conrad’s case, his self-consciousness as a Pole in British society, and his critical engagement with the imperialist mindset of the time, makes him acutely aware of how Western cultures perceive and interact with the exotic. In this aspect, Conrad’s consciousness could be understood in relation to Fei Xiaotong’s “cultural self-awareness” refering to a “self-knowledge” on the level of culture and the whole humanity. In the turn of the century when Conrad lived, cultural transformation would be inevitable for British Empire, its colonized areas and other European countries in competition. Hence, cultural self-awareness deeply embedded in Conrad’s works is of great significance in terms of exploring the value of different cultures and the fate of humanity in an increasingly turbulent world manifested at the end of the 19th century, an issue that still bears significant relevance today.

Wenxue Xunkan (Literature Trimonthly) plays an indispensable role in the introduction of World Literature into China. Existing studies examine the literary contention and background of the journal but lack further investigation into its endeavors in translating World Literature. In this process, the editors functioned as patrons. They influenced the literary field via the journal by managing its content and translating selected articles. The current study also examines how the editors employed World Literature to explore a new path of Chinese literature and justify China’s entry into the international community. It then discusses defiance and exploration, two of the main themes of translated works, based on the journal's reality concerns. Finally, it analyzes the translations of literary history and critique as vital sources of new knowledge since they provide substantial references for the study of Chinese literature.

Abstract: The perception of the independence of ancient Greek civilization and the belief that Western civilization originates solely from ancient Greece are among the historical foundations of Western superiority and Eurocentrism. However, ancient Greek civilization was not immune to the influences of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. The spread of civilizations across regions occurs through the mobility of their members, and mutual exchange and learning between civilizations is a fundamental law of their development. Ancient Greece was never geographically isolated from the East. The Eastern civilizations around the Mediterranean continuously contributed to the rise of ancient Greece through trade, migration, and other exchanges, laying the foundation for the flourishing of ancient Greek civilization. The formation of this brilliant civilization was never a product of isolation. Efforts to obscure the influence of Eastern civilizations on ancient Greece, to disparage Eastern civilizations, and to disregard historical facts must be addressed and clarified. The wheel of history, driven by exchange and mutual learning, turns alongside the progression of time. Historical truths must not be distorted by constructs such as "civilizational superiority" or "civilizational centrality," and ancient Greek civilization is no exception.

In the educational and cultural services of national museums all over the world, there are often publications aimed at younger audiences or those who are more distant from art history. There are also tourist guides or itineraries which often become objects of memory (so-called merchandise), or proof that you have been there and are very interested in what you have learned. There are also catalogs of temporary exhibitions, or special edition books about the museum's milestones, or even editions of famous works that contribute to the identity and recognition of the museum where they are kept and displayed.

In addition to the information, mysteries or ambiguities that works of art contain and which constitute material that feeds general knowledge and activates curiosity, and their use in digital media, with the help of AI, and dissemination through social networks, these works of fine art give rise to books which are also considered objects that require the participation of the reader, activated by their architecture and the engineering of paper.

We know that the book, and its materiality was an old revolution, without much surprises nowadays for designers, publishers and bibliophiles. What could perhaps be a more important contribution would be to museology and the relationship to be consolidated in favor of this area of knowledge application with literary reading studies. As we read in the session summary for sub-theme 14, these are works, genres and formats that raise “important questions on the nature, practice, and relevance of comparison, and indeed of the notion of literature itself.”.

In this communication, we will use two examples of pop-up books about the São Vicente Panel, painted by Nuno Gonçalves around 500 years ago, a piece of art in the collection of the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon that is most valuable because of the uncertainties of those portrayed (a crowd of 58 characters around a Saint), and we will compare them with two other books - one is mostly a fiction text about the Panels and the other one is non-fiction about the “surprising object” that is the printed book.

The book as a panel or a panel as a book, two artistic objects that merit an approach that we will only begin to address in this communication which in our perspective has promoted an encounter that can be replicated in other cases, beyond the strictly didactic and the “trivial pursuit” spirit that some pedagogical instruments propose. We will highlight the contribution of the book as an object to the reading of a panel enhanced by the skills activated in multimodal reading (in this case seeing, manipulating and understanding) that create a closer relationship between visitors and the museum.

Since the mid-20th century, scholars in the English-speaking world have explored the theme of image replacement in Xinmenhua (New Door Paintings), deconstructing the threefold subject of the Xinmenhua phenomenon as an artistic event: political power, the artist community, and the general public. They have also delved into two key spatial relationships. The first focuses on changes in wartime artistic patterns and the reconstruction of artistic sectors, particularly the differentiation and cooperation between the occupied zones, the Nationalist-controlled areas, and the liberated zones. The second examines the interaction between public space for wartime propaganda and the private spaces of people's lives. Through these layers of analysis, Western scholars have gradually unveiled the significance of Xinmenhua in the context of modern Chinese art history. This paper examines the unfolding of this narrative mode, combining image and text, and applies a perspective from the history of social thought to analyze the social influence and power of Xinmenhua, with particular attention to the deeper meaning of “image replacement.” It first discusses the mission of wartime art and Yan’an art, focusing on the social transformation efforts behind them and how cultural representation helped mobilize the Anti-Japanese National United Front. Furthermore, it distinguishes Ximenhua from traditional door god paintings by shifting from a wishful icon format to a more celebratory and participatory social expression. By analyzing several key Xinmenhua works, this paper reveals the transformation of the public’s mentality—from a focus on prayers to one of active participation in wartime celebrations and the changing form of social organization, from "small family" to the collective "big family." It also highlights the influence of traditional New Year prints on the posting style of Xinmenhua, particularly its placement on anti-Japanese households' doors, propagating ideas of “Anti-Japanese glory” and “Illustrious doorways,” while exploring the evolving functions of New Year prints: not only as tools for Anti-Japanese mobilization and decoration but also as symbols of recognition and social affirmation.

The academic community has already widely recognized the intermedia writing in the work The Unconsoled. This paper explores the relationship between the artistic philosophy and political justice conveyed by Kazuo Ishiguro in his intermedia writing. The small Central European city in the novel is plunged into an inexplicable crisis, and the citizens place high hopes on art, especially expecting the arrival of the protagonist, Ryder, to resolve this crisis. However, Ryder’s absurd experiences seem to confirm Plato’s view that art should be banished from the “Republic”. However, the exploration of various musical genres and art forms in the novel, along with its polyphonic writing and Kafkaesque experimental style, illustrates the close relationship between art and politics. The paradox of the use of art is shown in a humorous way, implying a contest between dependent art and autonomous art. The novel suggests that dependent art, represented by mass art, weakens the perceptual consciousness of the people. Commercial temptation and political manipulation lead people into a state of being unconsolable. Meanwhile, the people in crisis have already begun to develop a consciousness of change under the enlightenment of modern/postmodern music, experiencing painful metamorphosis, seeking the path to future freedom and happiness, and striving to build a just and good life.

The Goldfinch (2013), a classic work by the renowned American author Donna Tartt (1963-), took her over two decades to complete and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. The novel weaves the famous painting The Goldfinch and the protagonist Theo's growth narrative into a central thread, presenting Theo's inner activities and ethical choices at each stage of his development through visual imagery. It also charts Theo's journey from initial confusion and hesitation following trauma towards eventual identity reconstruction and awakening. The paintings featured in the novel, including The Goldfinch, serve as important symbols. Other notable works mentioned include Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Frans Hals' Boy with a Skull. When Theo gazes at these paintings, they seem to gaze back at him. Unlike typical subject-object gazes, the paintings' gaze is non-specific and void, meaning it can be directed at anyone who views it. This creates an interactive dynamic where the viewer's gaze is guided by the painting, leading to a sense of equality between the artwork and the observer.

In the era dominated by visual culture, the concept of "gaze" has long been a topic of scholarly interest, often associated with dichotomies such as "self-other," "seeing-being seen," and "subject-object." Contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) introduced the theory of "the gaze of the portrait," which extends traditional gaze theory. Nancy posits that portraits exist in three simultaneous states: resemblance, evocation, and gaze. This reveals that the gaze is a process where the subject actively emits and returns to itself through outward expansion, aiming not to emphasize an absolute dominant other but to facilitate self-understanding and reconstruction. Nancy's theory transcends the traditional subject-object dichotomy, achieving equality between subjects. Expanding from portraits to broader visual fields and even social contexts, Nancy's theory offers profound insights: the gaze is fundamentally a self-reflexive act, where the subject's visual attention expands outward and ultimately returns inward for self-examination and reconstruction.

The paintings in The Goldfinch, such as those viewed by Theo and his mother at the exhibition "Portraits and Still Lifes: Masterpieces of the Northern Golden Age," are all portraits. Works like Boy with a Skull and The Goldfinch significantly influence Theo's identity formation and growth experience. As a coming-of-age novel, why did Donna Tartt choose portraits as the ethical thread guiding Theo's life? How does Theo become entangled with these visual artworks throughout his growth? What impact do these visual works have on Theo's identity consciousness, leading him to achieve self-reconstruction and redemption after continuous struggle and hesitation? Portraits differ from other types of paintings in that their subjects possess autonomy. Painters endow them with the power to actively gaze at others, transforming them from passive objects into active participants. In the context of visual culture, this interaction between portraits and viewers often involves ethical issues, implying certain ethical premonitions and revealing relationships that influence ethical choices. These dynamics point to the era of visual ethics we face today. Visual ethics is not a fixed academic concept or rule but rather a reflection of the ethical issues, awareness, and behaviors involved in visual activities within a specific historical context, reshaping people's existing behavioral patterns. In the museum, the protagonist Theo directly appreciates the portrait paintings from the perspective of a tourist. Under the powerful visual impact of "viewing the paintings", it metaphorically implies a certain spiritual similarity and resonance between people and paintings, as well as the undercurrent of Theo's ethical dilemma that surges under this similarity. After the museum explosion, Theo, carrying the famous painting The Goldfinch, lived in multiple places, experiencing a period of wandering and instability: from the Barber family in New York to his father's home in Las Vegas and then to the Hobie family in New York. As a teenager, the radiance of the painting awakened his deepest and most hidden pursuit of self-identity and a sense of belonging, allowing him to make new choices and establish new ethical relationships. The misfortune of losing his mother at a young age and being left unattended led him astray, but in fact, Theo's inner self was always struggling. Every time Theo saw The Goldfinch again, he had different moods and thoughts. While he was "gazing" at The Goldfinch, the painting was also "gazing" at him. The gaze he sent out spread outward to the painting and eventually returned to the self-examination of himself - he was looking at the painting, but in fact, he was looking at himself. There was no dominant party between Theo and The Goldfinch. People and paintings were equal, and the gaze was mutual. It was through the "gaze" at the painting that he continuously re-recognized himself and pursued his self-identity, ultimately making the right ethical choices.

The reason why Donna Tartt chose "portraiture" as the ethical thread that accompanies and guides Theo throughout his life is that portraiture, with its "spiritual life", ultimately responds to the connection between the subject and the entire world. In the unique visual experience of "viewing a painting", it involves Theo's ethical consciousness and the ethical dilemmas he faces, which prompts him to re-examine and change his ethical behavior patterns. In the visual perception of painting, the similarity between the painting and Theo foreshadows the upcoming ethical dilemmas and life changes; further, Theo associates the elements in the painting with his own emotions and transforms this emotion into practice, thereby establishing new ethical relationships with others; ultimately, under the gaze of the painting, he conducts a profound reflection and examination of his past behavior, thus achieving the reshaping of his ethical self. Therefore, reading a painting is no longer a simple visual activity, but an active visual behavior filled with ethical implications, which not only influences Theo's personal will but also fundamentally alters his life trajectory. Through the similarity of the painting, the evocation of the painting, and the gaze of the painting, Theo gradually realizes the value of his spiritual life and gains the courage to face life's failures in the continuous practice and failure of his identity.

As Nancy said, "Portraiture makes death a work: it makes death a work in life, in the image, in the gaze."Although Fabritius' life ended in the Delft explosion, he captured the ordinariness and tenacity of life in the image of this yellow bird, allowing viewers thousands of years later to perceive it. Donna Tartt also uses the most delicate visual writing to juxtapose the lost, confused, and shattered despair of this young man with his yearning for love, belonging, and intimacy, outlining Theo's tortuous yet sincere inner journey. Portraiture, still life, and other visual artworks carry not only the art itself but also the spiritual resonance that spans thousands of years with the viewer, thus enabling this "young man with a skull" to awaken and examine himself in the constant struggle and wavering, ultimately achieving ethical redemption of himself, and allowing the self that was lost in the process of growth to be rediscovered, recognized, and given the power of life.

Based on these preliminary thoughts, this article, based on Nancy's theory of artistic gaze, intends to explore the process of the protagonist's identity search reflected in the visual ethics of "The Goldfinch", hoping to provide a new perspective for multi-faceted interpretation of the text.

Kantatare Projapati stands at the cross roads of biofiction and left social historical fiction which has a long tradition in Bengal. It is set in the period of the final bid for freedom from British colonial rule, the partition, and the massive peasant movement in Bengal known as the tebhaga movement. While novels by Sabitri Roy (Paka Dhaner Gaan /Harvest Song) and Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas (Khwabnamah) cover broadly the same terrain, Kantatare Projapati is distinctive because the central figure, Ila Mitra, was a historical figure, a leader of the tebhaga movement in Nachol in East Bengal, subsequently a leader of the Communist Party of India, multiple times Member of the Legislative Assembly in West Bengal. This has given rise to an almost inevitable misconception. As Michael Lackey points out, biographical novelists do not see the paper person and the real person as one and the same. But readers have sometimes assumed differently. Jaya Bhattacharya reviewing a work on gendered dimensions of the partition of Bengal (Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003) unselfconsciously refers to Kantatare Projapati as "evidence" of the nature of violence on women. This paper will argue that the political and historical context (both sides of Bengal had a strong left) put some pressure on authors writing about those historical persons and periods to conform to the ‘historical truth’, yet given the contested nature of that truth one need not take a completely agnostic stance, nor accept Lukacs’ strictures about the weaknesses of biographical novels. It is possible, instead, to read the novel, at one level in conjunction with those by Roy or Ilyas mentioned earlier, and at another level as the image of Ila Mitra that developed among the poor peasants of Nachol as well as the left leaning intelligentsia, rather than as an archival image of Ila Mitra.

Colm Tóibín’s The Master is a richly textured biofiction that interrogates the complexities of Henry James’s inner life, offering a nuanced portrayal of identity as a dialectical process shaped by experience, reflection, and artistic creation. This paper situates Tóibín’s novel within John Dewey’s pragmatist framework, particularly his concepts of experience, identity, and the reconstruction of self, to argue that James’s life and work exemplify Dewey’s assertion that the self is not a static entity but a dynamic, ever-evolving construct. Dewey’s Art as Experience posits that identity emerges through the interplay of lived experience and reflective engagement, a process mirrored in Tóibín’s depiction of James’s struggles with intimacy, creativity, and self-understanding.

Tóibín’s James is a figure perpetually in flux, his identity reconstructed through a series of existential and artistic negotiations. The novel’s episodic structure, which mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and experience, brings new light to Dewey’s emphasis on how a continuity of experience can be constructed as the basis for selfhood. James’s relationships—with figures such as Constance Fenimore Woolson and his family—are not merely biographical details but sites of existential reckoning, where his sense of self is continually challenged and reconfigured. Tóibín’s portrayal of James’s creative process further underscores this Deweyan dynamic: writing becomes a means of synthesizing disparate experiences into a coherent, though provisional, sense of self.

This paper will offer a close reading of key scenes in The Master—such as James’s haunting reflections on failure, his ambivalent relationships, and his meticulous crafting of narrative—to illuminate how Tóibín’s biofiction aligns with Dewey’s philosophy. It will argue that Tóibín’s James embodies Dewey’s vision of the self as a work in progress, perpetually reconstructed through the interplay of experience, reflection, and artistic expression. By framing The Master within Dewey’s pragmatist lens, this analysis seeks to deepen our understanding of both Tóibín’s novel and the philosophical underpinnings of identity as a lived, experiential process. Ultimately, the paper contends that Tóibín’s biofiction not only reimagines James’s life but also enacts a profound meditation on the dialectics of selfhood, resonating with Dewey’s assertion that the self is always in the process of formation.

Introduction

The “Catkin LuXun” sketches a decentered, universal world of Southeast Asian literature via the agency of LuXun’s literary tradition. This transcultural project aims to transcend the existing regional patterns of Sinophone literature by presenting a diverse and complex cultural-political dynamics of LuXun’s literature flowing in the contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

The term“catkin (荑tí)” addresses a specific methodology, which is a“creative transformation” of Professor David Der-wei Wang’s“post-loyalist”(後遺民) theory. In Chinese, “catkin (荑tí)” is derived from the character 「艸」, which originally meant to be “growth and development”. On one hand, it echoes the idea of 「後夷民」, which is used by scholars as means of transforming the barbarians「夷」 into ethnic Chinese「華」. On the other hand, it symbolises a literary way to “rise from the dead” in works of the three selected writers in East-Asian literature, Lee Waiyi, Nieh Hualing, and Chia Joo Ming. They should not only be regarded as the“others”in relation to Greater China, but also critical challengers to the orthodoxy of Chineseness through writing “from memory to history” rather than “from history to memory”. These writers use literary language to express remembrance as new forms of reality that penetrates the blind spots obscured by political discourse, as well as the way to carry on the redemptive nature of LuXun’s literature in the contemporary.

The world of "catkin LuXun" is constructed on the basis of Goethe's concept of “cosmopolitan literature,” while specifically following on the concept of "Chinese cosmopolitanism” by Leo Ou-fan Lee and Pheng Cheah's theory of "cosmopolitan literature". The idea of “heterotopia” is an organic compound of the above concepts, redefining reality by transgressing the heterogeneous and intertwined liminal space of “fiction” and “reality”, “freedom” and “order”. This paper aims to put Foucault's blueprint of "heterotopia" into practice by constructing the world of "Catkin Lu Xun" as a “reflexive mirror” for regional literature, so that historical memories from different places can be compared and contrasted, as well as jointly performing the “disturbing potentials” of literary space in relation to Reality and Western colonial utopia: using language to express one's own history as a kind of existence, in order to challenge the status quo, the irrational political situation; and to bring into play the “Messianism” of literature. The writing of ‘memory-history’ transcends the dichotomy of "colonial/post-colonial", "marginal/centre", thereby fundamentally revolutionizes the worldview of "Sinophone", then continues the tradition of literary revolutions (鼎革以文), from Zhang Taiyan to Lu Xun. Therefore, Lu Xun's heterotopia is not only a literary unit, but also a“prototype of a new form of governance” which have been constructed through literature. By interpreting Li, Zhu, and Zhang's post-descendants “memory-history” narratives as a form of “creationism” (Jacques Lacan), and to discuss how “post-descendants” writings create a “heterotopia” that is intermingled with reality, fiction and “extraterritoriality.” This is a literary-political revolution to reconstruct memory and redeem history through words.

3.1 The Return of the Soul in “Dark Tradition”（幽傳統）: Li Weiyi's “Selfless” Heterotopia

If LuXun’s Old Tales Retold has initiated the “dark tradition” through rewriting folktales from a “post-May Fourth” standpoint, then, the “word cultivator,”（文字耕作者） Weiyi Li, has inherited LuXun's “literary-social” dual identities in the “post-1997” context. She intervenes in social issues via novel, cultivates history with words, explores the possibilities and specific forms of “memory-politics” through a combination of realism and magical literary devices.

“A Trying Journey”（《行路難》） and “Chen Xiang”（《沉香》） point out that the new experience of enlightenment comes from the people, and the novels are mostly written from the perspective of ghosts and small histories that are “full of the breath of people's life” , in which ghosts and phantoms are used to create a postulate of writing that goes beyond one's own experience and subjectivity, a “selfless” postulate of “stand by and watch” . Through the creative transformation of LuXun's dark tradition, Lee Wai-yee established a literary heterotopia of “do-it-yourself” based on the centerless ideology constructed between the two post-colonial ideologies of “the crevice theory”（夾縫論） and “the theory of imagining Hong Kong moving North”（北進論） in post-1997 Hong Kong. By doing so, she liberates Hong Kong from the dilemma of self/other dichotomy induced by nationalism and utilizes the constructive function of literary devices to reconstruct Hong Kong's historical memory. The “selfless” heterotopia of “Chen Xiang” illustrates that when one’s free will is imprisoned by the language of power, literature can loosen the fetters by symbolically cutting down the reality/truth, so that historical memory of the community can be spared from the current time and be retained in the heterotopia of literature. This is undoubtedly a localization of Lu Xun's “Moroism” （摩羅主義） and his Philosophy of life（生命哲學）, which emphasizes the truthfulness of visceral feelings. However, in the eyes of the word cultivator, life is not only about truths, but the imagination of literature can also change one's “conception of the individual self and the world outside”, making a “better world” comes true.

 

3.2 History, Memory, and Cultural Politics: Zhu Tianxin's Imagination of Communities in the context of post-diaspora.

In the midst of social contradiction and incompatibility of provincial and local communities, Zhu Tianxin strives to find the local positioning for the provincials and to rewrite Taiwan history. Like Lu Xun, the “old soul” （「老靈魂」，指朱天心） style of memory-history writing, is in fact an ethnic politics of history.

The nostalgic narrative of The Old Capital（古都） restores the beautiful “ruins”（Walter Benjamin’s allegory of history） of Old Taipei（老台北） by reversing the past and the present, the documentary and the fictional. It is an imagined community constructed by the writer with the historical memories condensed from their personal experiences. Among them, Zhu summarizes and transforms Taiwan's national experience in the form of “spatialization of history,” demonstrating the historical energy of Meta-historical poetics that assembles freedom of thought, skepticism, intellectual curiosity to transform and elevate. Zhu maps Taipei amid memory and fiction. In The Old Capital, she had dialogues with the past self, the fading era, and the dwindling community, exemplifying the spirit of “post-modern witch”（後現代巫者） who creates a sacred space for daily life, an open habitat for Taiwanese diasporas in the contemporary. This cultural heterotopia is a result of “Horizontverschmelzung” between the provincial and local communities through the second-person narrative, which has the meaning of universality, and utilizes the “plurality and universality” to form “community without community”. True communion is composed of differentiation.

3.3 Affective Narrative History of “Post-humanity”: Zhang Guixing's Association and Circulation from Human to Non-human

Zhang Guixing's imagination of primitive ecological history and his writing of cultural memories is a remix that projects anti-colonial consciousness. This essay interprets Zhang’s writing as an alternative politics of time and memory. Zhang's Wild Boars has crossed is in fact the long river of history that has emphasized enlightenment and rationality since the May Fourth Movement, in which he has inherited part of Lu Xun's dark consciousness and the avant-garde thinking of the madman's（「狂人」） to the times and history, as well as the part that has been creatively transformed and subverted against the spirit of Lu Xun's “Cultivation of people”（「立人」精神）. Zhang has no intention of enlightenment, but he reveals the possibility of practicing Enlightenment in a reverse way: to return animal nature from humanism, and to reassess human civilization in the heterotopia of literature by means of the non-human affect This contributes the possibility for Zhang Guixing to surpass Lu Xun.

The “post-human affective narrative” in Wild Boars Cross the River（《野豬渡河》） demonstrates a new perspective to enter the world of post-colonial literature, which helps to respond to related political, ethical and ecological problems. Both Zhang and his wild boars “transcend” the boundaries of colonial/post-colonial and local/dissociated identities and politics, demonstrating the “desire to cut off language from ethnicity and nation,” shattering the illusion of self-certainty for human beings. From “object” to “thing”, Zhang invites us to reflect on the inhumanities that historians have overlooked, revealing the “lost hell”——- the human condition in which subject coexists with the other. Zhang's post-human affective narrative is precisely a literary reconstruction of the relationship between the subject and the coexistence of the other. At a literal and symbolic level, Zhang uses objects to induce emotions and to spark off a tendency by reintroducing affect into rationalized political space, using narrative to reconstruct reader's political perception and war memory of Malaysia. Zhang transforms repressed wilderness into first-hand historical materials that recall human inwardness, reconstructing a historical world that transcends the dichotomy of humans and non-humans, thereby diconstructing the colonial hegemony and Malay cultural hegemonic blockage of Chinese history. In his novel, Zhang constructs Borneo as a heterotopia where multiple ethnicities, subjectivities (human and non-human), reflexive history narrative collaborates, calling out the world through literature. Through literature, he roars upon the world to return to the natural status of life, to associate with animals, and to regain the true experience of living. This is not only a continuation of Lu Xun's “fire on the eternal life” of retelling ancient history/nation’s history from memories, but also a political ecology of “thing-power”: by transforming the experience of survival in the rainforest into an ecological-political resource that evokes emotions, he re-interprets the “universa humanity” in a series of dialectical interactions between humans and objects, nature and civilization, colonialism and post-colonialism, also between memory and history. On the ground of these, Zhang transcends the regional boundaries of Mahua Literature and Taiwanese Literature; beyond dispersion and naturalization, he strikes a chord with the universality of World Literature, opening up the liminal space of Sinophone literature. Since the history told in Wild Boars Cross the River is the history of anti-Japanese resistance shared by Chinese people all over the world, it is a traumatic complex of history. Therefore, the memory-history writing of “direct, existential, and physical engagement” not only breaks through Lu Xun's dark tradition, but also revolt as a political spirituality to construct a heterotopia in Chinese history.

Conclusion

To summarize, the emotion-based, virtual-real world of Chinese catkins, is precisely the literary heterotopia that this paper ultimately seeks to create. The construction of a heterotopia must be centered on the life-based historical emotions, and through literature, emotions can be summoned to transform the virtual into the real, constructing a place-based historical community. In this paper, we believe that this is a possible way out of the theoretical deadlock in Sinophone studies. The light that leads the way in dark, is the“fire on the eternal life” inherited from Zhang Taiyan, Lu Xun, to the Chinese catkins: Lee Waiyi, Zhu Tianxin and Zhang Guixing.

The functioning of ekphrasis, the description of an object of art in the text of a literary work has been the subject of research by scholars, especially in the field of interdisciplinary studies. The question of the functioning of ekphrasis in the text of travel literature seems interesting in terms of the functions and qualities that ekphrasis acquires in such texts. Ekphrasis is a symbol of material culture, a bearer of the signs of national culture. In time and space, ekphrasis becomes an element of aesthetic transit between peoples and eras.

In the literature of travel, from an interdisciplinary point of view, ekphrasis can fulfil distinct functions. The object of material culture can be a point of orientation for the journey. For example, in the case of pilgrimage, for François-René de Chateaubriand it is the journey to sacred places, for Theophile Gautier it is a quest for new cultural experiences, for Jules Verne, it is the creation of new worlds. This, in turn, breaks down into a number of more descriptive elements of both contemporary and antique art for the traveller. One could say that one can observe an aesthetic change in the way ekphrasis works, depending on the place and time of the journey.

Ekphrasis as a point of reference between eras and cultures has an amalgam nature, which in turn gives it the power to transform the description of an art object for the reader into an element of travel. Journeys of an abstract nature for the more educated reader will reveal ekphrasis in its full force. A text presented to a person from another reality will not be as effective as the author originally intended. But it may lead to an entirely different creation of reality in the matter of acceptance of aesthetic criteria.

The study of ekphrasis in the text of French travel literature is a necessary element in understanding the interdisciplinarity of the work in terms of the modification of aesthetic criteria across time and space.

Under the context of AI as compounded in the form of Large Language Models (hereinafter referred to as LLMs), there have resulted in the decreased translation rates and work volumes in respect to the consequences of issues related to translation ethics. In the age of AI, translation ethics have re-emerged as an issue that is worthy of researching in order to improve the performance and effectiveness of the industry. Now with the convergence of AI and LLMs, as well as the exceedingly and ever-increasingly fierce competition amongst all translation companies and linguists, those professionals and entities in the translation industry cannot compromise the issue of the new translation ethics. The paper discusses the aforesaid issues and provides solutions to the problem of the new translation ethics in the age of AI and LLMs. The new translation ethics comprises integrity; originality, efficiency, and the respect for IP protection, which are considered as the effective translation training and practice for a win-win situation accomplished amongst translators, the translation companies, and clients.

Regularly viewed as creating characters so stylized that they both fall short of and exceed the category of the human, Oscar Wilde’s preoccupation with actual puppets, marionettes, and animated statues spans his career. Like the masks which for Wilde make truth possible by concealing the truth-sayer, these post-human bodies function ironically, providing the non-humanity which is the precondition for human expressivity. Nominally cisgender, male-identified characters seem to mimic modern scholarly dismissal of the puppet as both monstrous and empty in ways which paradoxically open a space for queer nostalgia through posthuman embodiment. From the early poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885) and short story “The Happy Prince” (1888) to mentions in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and De Profundis (1897), Wilde combines what Svetlana Boym has called “reflective nostalgia” with a disruption of the imagination and a queering of bodies that are transformed in Halberstam’s notion of “queer time” through the materiality of death and decay. In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde explicitly invokes the Russian literary examples, especially Turgenev (whom Wilde translated) and Dostoevsky, that inspired his first play Vera, or the Nihilists (1883). He emphasizes the internal psychological complexity and idealistic nihilism out of which he creates his own artificial avatars. Wilde disrupts time and realistic embodiment so as transmit shared queer memories, given their lack of institutional space, so as to fashion possible imagined futures that exceed current paradigms. Drawing on both religious and socialist visions of utopia, Wilde anticipates Muñoz “dissidentification” with its recycling of a painful past so as to make possible the imagining of queer futures. London sex workers become undead dancing marionettes. A spoiled prince is transformed into a statue which a self-sacrificing swallow dismantles to feed the poor. Henry’s longing for lost beauty, Sybil’s self-destructive sincerity and Dorian’s blackmailing imagination, along with the superfluity of Shakespeare’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, are all metaphorically rendered as puppets. Unlike Wilde’s empty “leading men,” whether Russian czars, Danish princes, or English lords, their queer excessive affect is made possible precisely by their paired-down, fragile, broken, and extra-human bodies.

The university space offers to the students, emerging out of the panopticon schools, a new sense of liberty, and alongwith it opportunities to express and explore themselves. In India, students usually enter the university at the end of puberty, and at the age of majority—having to navigate the newfound space and self, often using new media of communication: the digital social media being prominent among them. The University of Delhi, one of the country’s premier higher educational institutions, is one such diverse and complex space, comprising of students coming from different backgrounds, including those from the sexual and gender minorities. The intersectionality of queerness and the social media when analysed in context of these students assumes a distinct significance.

This paper attempts to explore the multifarious dimensions of queerness, and its expression on the social media by looking at the University of Delhi and its student population, and the extent to which they daily use the digital medium to articulate their queer identity in a campus that remains extremely heteronormative and patriarchal even after the reading down of Section 377. The paper for this purpose shall analyse the social media handles of various societies and queer collectives that function in the various constituent colleges of the University, exploring whether such platforms provide any viable safe space for queer companionship, intimacies and solidarities. It shall also problematize the relationship between queerness and digital space by noting the case of the Hindu College Straight Pride Collective that had surfaced on Instagram spreading queer-phobia online against queer students.

The paper shall seek to understand the processes and the experience of students, who belong to the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and use the digital space, through recorded testimonials (gathered by means of an interview questionnaire created using Google Form and circulated among the students through the social media platforms, following strict norms of maintaining the respondents’ confidentiality). The paper shall develop a nuanced approach, building its arguments on the basis of existing critical studies from that of Michel Foucault to Sam Miles, attempting to understand whether or not a manifestation of queer companionship, resistance and community-building is possible among the student population of an Indian University over social media, looking at ways in which marginal groups interact everyday, negotiate in university spaces dominated by the heteronormative majority, and use digital media platforms in potentially subversive ways.

Nüshu is the only syllabic script in the history of humanity that is designed and used by women only. Meaning “female writing”, nüshu was arguably developed in the 13th century by the peasant women in Jiangyong County in Southern China. In the pre-Liberation patriarchal agrarian community that would deny women education and learn the official Chinese hanzi characters, nüshu became a ‘secret’ mechanism for women to give voice to the experiences and emotions of kelian, the miserable, the oppressed and powerless women of the community. An updated version of my 2022 paper, the present paper situates nüshu vis-à-vis the tradition of woman-words. I used the phrase ‘woman-words’ to designate the languages, language uses and paralanguages that women around the world have formed and used. The title of this paper refers to a comment by one of my students who, in their bid to assert a decolonial stance after my talk on nüshu, said, “so, before écriture féminine there was Nüshu!”. My paper broaches the critical-affective features of that statement in order to explore the tradition of woman-words in the world.

Abstract: Female bodies as sites of contestation and censure have garnered much critical attention. Conditioned to fit into predefined notions of femininity, feminist movements find the systemic control of female bodies an especially challenging territory to manoeuvre. Female autonomy has been at loggerheads with social desire to contain and manipulate women into submission. This study analyses the nuances of this manipulation through an analysis of female appetites and the implicit social fear that necessitates a stringent monitoring of female bodies. The two selected Asian literary texts, foreground the causal trajectory and consequent implications of women’s assertion over their food choice, portion size and consumption pattern. Isabelle Lorey’s theorization of Governmentality through Precarization and Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys (Affect Aliens) form the methodological lens for situating the role of vulnerability in making bodies governable. To locate the site of the festering wound of female anger and suppressed desire and to contextualise their response to neoliberal suppression of their bodies, the role of Haan (roughly suppressed anger) shall be studied to understand their individual response to collective oppression.

Western and Tibetan Tibetologists have taken up the subject of literary genres and the definition of literature in the Tibetan context. To a much lesser extent, it was of interest to Mongolists. In the case of “Mongolian literature,” we deal with literature written in Mongolian and Tibetan, as well as literature translated from Tibetan and, to a lesser degree, from Chinese to Mongolian. For several centuries, Tibetan literature exerted a strong influence on Mongolian Buddhist literature. In the nineteenth century, the influence of Chinese literature intensified, especially in Inner Mongolia. Given the intricate and complicated history of neighboring Mongols, Tibetans, and Chinese, many topics in the field of literary studies require comparative studies, without which it is impossible to understand issues such as the understanding of literature, even in the context of, e.g., defining it in relation to oral tradition.

I want to make a small contribution to filling the gap in this literary study by discussing the example of one story about Molon Toyin descending into hell to save his mother in the context of Mongolian and Buddhist literature. The story was well-known in China, Tibet, and Mongolia. It was translated and circulated in various narratives. Some gained popularity and circulated through written communication, sometimes combining verbal, visual, and probably even performative expressions. Western and Mongolian scholars variously defined the story of Molon Toyin, e.g., as a story of peregrination through hells or a story of Indian origin. Depending on its version or even particular text, the copiest, translators, or maybe even its authors defined it as a sutra, biography, or, e.g., an illustrated tale. I want to place this one story in its various versions in Mongolian and Buddhist literature through a comparative approach considering various literary traditions and how literary studies approached them.

The full history of rhetoric in Asia—understood in the traditional sense as the art of oral persuasion—remains largely untold. This project seeks to illuminate overlooked aspects of this history, offering a fresh perspective on the concept of “literature” through the lens of the Chinese character wen (文). By examining the initial introduction of Western rhetoric to Warring States (Sengoku) Japan and late imperial China (late Ming to early Qing), as well as its reintroduction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I aim to trace its interactions with the intellectual, literary, and cultural forces that shaped China’s rhetorical tradition as we understand it today.

To do so, I adopt a Benjaminian constellation of key historical encounters: the Mohists of the pre-Qin period and their late imperial reappropriation, the Jesuits’ rhetorical engagements in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century China and Japan, and the rhetorical discourse of the Meiji period, particularly its influence on Chinese intellectuals studying in Japan at the time. By focusing on these pivotal moments, I explore the complex exchanges between Eastern and Western traditions, revealing the deep interconnections between rhetoric and the literary and cultural history of the region. Ultimately, this paper challenges the prevailing scholarly view that rhetoric played only a marginal role in the literary developments of the East.

The theme of "romantic adventures" in Eastern and Western literature is not merely a depiction of male-female relationships but serves as a crucial reflection of the moral and ethical values of each society. Comparing Yang So-yu from The Cloud Dream of the Nine and Don Juan from The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, this study examines how Confucian and Christian ethical frameworks define and evaluate romantic adventures.

In Confucian society, a man’s romantic relationships are closely linked to social success and familial honor. Yang So-yu’s relationships with multiple women are justified within the Confucian value system, portraying him as an "Achiever" who fulfills societal expectations through his success in government service and family prosperity. His multiple romantic engagements do not tarnish his image but rather enhance his status as a successful individual.

Conversely, in the Christian ethical framework, sexual desires are viewed as part of original sin, necessitating self-restraint. Don Juan’s relentless pursuit of women represents a direct challenge to moral and religious order. Unlike Yang So-yu, Don Juan is not socially accepted but condemned as a "Challenger" who defies ethical norms. His fate—being cast into hell—demonstrates the Christian perspective that unrestrained desires lead to divine punishment.

By comparing these two characters, this study highlights how different cultural and philosophical values shape the literary treatment of romantic adventures. While Eastern literature legitimizes such affairs as a means of achieving success, Western narratives depict them as moral transgressions warranting divine retribution. This contrast underscores literature’s role as a cultural product deeply intertwined with ethical and philosophical values. Future research may explore how these traditional perspectives on romantic ethics have evolved in contemporary literature and film, reflecting shifting moral landscapes in modern society.

The body can serve as a medium for self-expression, a subject shaped by power dynamics, an object open to influence and stimulation, and a space where cultural, religious, and political practices and conflicts intersect. This article examines the body as a contested site of racial, ethnic, gendered, and sexual conflicts in Ali Bader’s The Infidel Woman (2016) and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005). Through a comparative analysis, the study highlights how both novels, despite their distinct cultural contexts, depict the body’s vulnerability and resilience within oppressive structures. By investigating how certain bodies are centralized, marginalized, or fragmented culturally, the research explores literature’s ability to illuminate shared struggles and diverse forms of resistance. The selected novels present characters whose bodies bear the weight of cultural expectations and societal prejudices, demonstrating how intersecting identities shape individual experiences of oppression and resilience. The Infidel Woman portrays its protagonist’s identity as an “infidel” under intense cultural and religious scrutiny, situating her body at the center of conflicts over gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Similarly, On Beauty explores the experiences of Black and biracial characters in Western academia, where their bodies symbolize cultural “otherness” in predominantly white spaces. Both narratives interrogate how societal norms shape bodily autonomy and self-expression. This study employs postcolonial feminism and Valerie Bryson’s Feminist Political Theory as its theoretical framework to analyze thematic and narrative strategies employed in the novels. Ultimately, the article argues that literature remains instrumental in fostering critical discourse on gender, race, and identity, encouraging a deeper understanding of how intersecting oppressions shape the lived experiences of marginalized individuals across different cultures.

There were two major climaxes in the reception of T. S. Eliot in China, the first was from 1930s to 1940s, and the second was in the 1980s. The first climax, or what we call the early reception of Eliot in China, directly arose from educational activities of a group of British and American scholar coming to China during 1930s to 1940s, the most influential ones among whom were I. A. Richards and William Empson. They made three main contributions in introducing and promoting Eliot in China: 1. initial introductions in courses and lectures, arousing Chinese scholars and students’ interests in Eliot; 2. collaboration with Chinese scholars to translate and introduce Eliot in newspapers and magazines; 3. enhancing the face-to-face communication between Eliot and Chinese scholars. Richards and Empson both had their own academic inclinations, and thus inevitably carried personal scholarly imprints and preferences when promoting Eliot. This led to two major tendencies in the early reception of Eliot in China.

The first distinctive feature was that Eliot’s literary theory was widely regarded as a kind of “practical criticism”. Another important tendency was an emphasis of “intellectuality” in Eliot’s poetry, which contributed to the formation of “The Intellectual Poetry” Movement in China. Apart from the influences from the early promoters, Chinese academy’s overall preferences and the demands of Chinese modernist literature were all factors contributing to how Eliot’s poetry and poetics had been translated, interpreted and reshaped in 1930s and 1940’s China.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was published at a time that saw an unprecedented proliferation of means of mechanical reproduction. Not only images, but also sounds – music, voices, or sheer noise – were becoming reproducible. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the effects of this reproducibility in art are well known. Many scholars have also remarked upon the increasing significance of media of reproduction in modernist texts.

This paper discusses the presence of what was at the time one of the primary media of sound reproduction, the gramophone, in “The Waste Land.” What Conrad Aiken called Eliot’s “allusive method” encompasses not only (inter)textual, but also (inter)medial practices. I argue that the mutual entanglement of these practices radically alters the quality of the many allusions pervading “The Waste Land,” and that by entwining textual and medial (re-)production, the poem offers a meditation on memory, its strange workings and undoings.

I begin by reading the allusion to Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (line 253) in conjunction with the gramophone (line 256) to show how the text of “The Waste Land” reflects upon the (re-)productive practices it engages. Building on this close reading, my paper goes on to discuss the critical implications of the poem’s textual-medial practices for how we might think about verbal forms of expression in today’s multi-medial landscape. Finally, I will link these changing forms of expression to questions of memory – individual, generational, and cultural.

Suryakant Tripathi, one of the four pillars of the Chāyāvādī movement (often compared with romanticism) in the twentieth-century Hindi literature, used a pen name ‘Nirālā’ which means ‘distinctive’ in English. His writings justify his pen name aptly. The poems that Nirālā wrote were indeed distinctive in features and content. He was the first Hindi poet to write in free verse. Nirālā, right from his childhood, suffered the pangs of bereavement. He lost his mother at the age of three and then his father at 20. The epidemic caused by the First World War devoured his uncle, brother, and sister-in-law, and in its later phase, it gulped down his wife and only daughter, who was already widowed by it. This continuous suffering due to the deaths of his dear ones made him devise an alternative to keep from feeling the anguish. This anaesthetic he developed from his poetry— an aesthetic object. Recounting the losses that turned him dry, he writes that ‘the waterfall of his affection has dried up; his body remains like sand. This branch of the mango tree (his body) that looks dried says – now no bird comes here; I am a written line with no meaning— life has burned out. He finds his life devoid of love, and writing poetry is a compensatory experience for him. This paper is intended to read into the psyche of the poet, analysing the poems written during and after the period that caused him all the losses with reference to his biographical narratives. The anguish forms the core of Nirālā’s poetry, which the poet was trying to pour out from within. His ‘Saroj Smriti’ he wrote lamenting the death of his daughter, is considered the best-ever written elegy in Hindi.

Antonio Machado (1875–1939), a Spanish poet, and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), an English poet, played pivotal roles in revitalizing Spanish and English poetry during the first half of the 20th century. Despite distinct historical, cultural, and linguistic milieus, both poets shared a deep preoccupation with the inner world of individuals amidst the upheavals of modern society. Their experiences of war seemed to have shaped significantly their poetic identities.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked the collapse of Spain’s imperial era, leaving a deep scar on the national psyche. In response, the “Generación del 98” emerged, examining Spain’s decline and envisioning its renewal. Machado, closely associated with this movement, explored identity, memory, and historical disillusionment. Influenced by Symbolism and Modernism, his early poetry features dreamlike imagery and introspective themes, transitioning later to a more direct style engaging Spain’s sociopolitical reality. Campos de Castilla (1912) marks a turning point, using the Castilian landscape as a metaphor for national decline. Cancionero apócrifo (1924-36) introduces heteronyms like Juan de Mairena and Abel Martín, allowing philosophical dialogues on knowledge and poetic discourse. During the Spanish Civil War, Machado’s poetry took on a more political tone, blending mourning with resistance. His literary evolution captures both the crises of his time and the effort to preserve Spain’s cultural memory.

For T. S. Eliot, World War I (1914–1918) epitomized the moral and spiritual disintegration of modern society The Waste Land (1922), a cornerstone of Modernist literature, reflects alienation and existential anxiety in a fragmented civilization. Through intricate symbolism, the poem depicts the chaos following Western civilization’s collapse while hinting at spiritual renewal, a theme that later defined his poetry. Eliot’s conversion to Christianity in 1927 marked a shift in focus. During World War II, Four Quartets (1943) reached the pinnacle of his poetic achievements, contemplating spiritual redemption through philosophical and theological lenses. Together, these works establish Eliot as a towering Modernist poet who examined the crises of modern civilization, the void of human existence, and the possibility of spiritual recovery.

Both poets reflect the early 20th-century shift from an optimistic modern outlook to a fragmented, experimental, and often pessimistic view of modernity. They grapple with the collapse of traditional values and articulate the anxieties of a rapidly changing world, shaped by wars and political turmoil. Their works offer valuable insights into early 20th-century Modernist literature beyond linguistic traditions.

This study moves beyond traditional qualitative comparisons and employs digital methodologies to explore their complete poetic works. Computational tools uncover patterns and connections that remain hidden in traditional qualitative approaches. Part-of-speech (POS) analysis examines syntactic patterns, while word frequency and N-gram analysis highlight lexical preferences. TF-IDF analysis extracts keywords reflecting thematic priorities, such as Eliot’s focus on temporality, mortality, and existential disillusionment, and Machado’s emphasis on Spanish landscapes, memory, and national identity. Topic modeling maps existential and political concerns, while sentiment analysis tracks emotional fluctuations in response to societal upheavals. Eder’s Zeta method examines stylistic evolution, shedding light on shifting thematic and lexical tendencies. Comparatively, Machado situates his reflections within Spain’s sociopolitical landscape, blending national identity with personal memory, while Eliot navigates the breakdown of Western traditions and the search for meaning in a fragmented world. Machado’s symbolic landscapes contrast with Eliot’s cultural and historical references, yet both poets seek renewal amid decline.

Initial findings suggest thematic and stylistic parallels as well as key differences between Machado and Eliot. Both poets grapple with the collapse of traditional values and the search for renewal, but their approaches reflect unique cultural milieus. Machado’s poetry, deeply rooted in Spanish landscapes and folk traditions, emphasizes cultural memory and national identity. Eliot’s works, informed by a broader Western intellectual tradition, focus on philosophical abstractions and the fragmentation of modernity. Machado’s early Modernist-influenced work transitions to historical and political engagement, while Eliot’s poetry evolves from postwar despair to spiritual contemplation. Sentiment analysis confirms Eliot’s shift toward positive sentiment after his conversion, indicating an increased focus on redemption and renewal.

This research also highlights the dynamic potential of combining traditional literary scholarship with computational technologies. While traditional qualitative studies tend to focus on select works, digital approaches allow for an inclusive examination of a poet’s entire oeuvre. For example, Eliot’s fragmented style poses challenges for co-occurrence analysis due to frequent shifts in tone and subject, while Machado’s symbolic language complicates sentiment analysis. These limitations underscore the need to integrate computational and traditional methods for nuanced interpretation.

By bridging linguistic and cultural divides, this study emphasizes the universality of human concerns reflected in poetry. Both Eliot and Machado engage with themes of identity, spirituality, and societal upheaval, crafting works that resonate with the crises and possibilities of their time. Their poetry reflects the shared anxieties of modernity, while their distinct approaches illuminate the richness of their respective traditions. Digital methodologies not only enrich the study of these poets but also provide new ways to explore the intersection of tradition and modernity in global literature. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the transformative potential of combining literature and technology, paving the way for future scholarship at the intersection of the humanities and digital innovation.

Under the perspective of mutual learning of civilizations, the image of the Miao people in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China is a diverse and complex topic. The image of the Miao people in this period was not only influenced by their own cultural traditions, but also deeply imprinted with the collision and integration with foreign cultures, especially the western Christian culture and the mainstream culture of the Central Plains. With The West China Missionary News (1899-1943) as the center and through the image of Miao people in this period, we can have a deeper understanding of the uniqueness and diversity of Miao culture, and a better understanding of the communication and interaction between different cultures.

Firstly, the portrayal of the Miao in the The West China Missionary News is examined, focusing on three aspects: the natural environment, social culture, and psychological essence. This analysis reveals a Western depiction of the Miao as "primitive" "backward" "poor" and "ignorant" reflecting a derogatory and negative perspective. This stereotype stems from Western labeling, portraying the Miao as a group in need of Western "salvation" and "enlightenment". Further, the construction of the Miao image in the publication is scrutinized through historical, textual and authorial contexts, elucidating how the Miao have been represented as "the other". The examination explores the dynamics behind the formation of their image. Lastly, the value of the "foreign gaze" is assessed, revealing the Miao's image and its implications. This reevaluation serves as a mirror to reflect on unnoticed cultural issues and exposes the significance of the representation of Southwest China's ethnic minorities under modern Western discourse.

Through foreign eyes, we can observe that news reports featuring images depicting Miao people not only serve as personal creative records reflecting what Western writers have witnessed, but also offer colorful depictions reflecting cultural histories among southwest Miao people during late Qing Dynasty up until the Republic of China. Unique news styles coupled with narrative elements present throughout The West China Missionary News contain intertextual values bridging textuality with reality when examining literary imagery.

This historical experience offers important insights for mutual learning between Chinese and Western civilizations. Firstly, cultural exchanges must be based on the principles of equality and respect, avoiding cultural hegemony and assimilation. Secondly, cultural transformation should focus on the protection and development of indigenous cultures, rather than simply transplanting foreign cultures. Finally, cross-cultural exchanges require sincere cooperation and mutual understanding from both parties to achieve true mutual learning and win-win outcomes.

The study of Russian Oriental literature and Chinese literature is conducted within the overall framework and academic lineage of Russian Orientalism. The Soviet edition of History of World Literature inherits the tradition of regional holistic comparative research on Central Asia, China, and its border regions within Russian Orientalism. It examines the distinctive development and value contributions of Chinese literature within the developmental process of world literature, thereby presenting the characteristics of "History of Eastern Regional Literature". The work opposes both Western and Eastern centrism but reflects a worldview and cultural stance centered on Russia, which can be described as "Orient-Russia-West." By transcending the scope of national literature (Sinology) research and integrating the holistic literary history and historical typology research methods of Orientalists during the Soviet era, we objectively evaluate the characteristics and literary historical value of the book's research on the history of Chinese literature.

As two ancient civilizations, Latin America and China, bear rich historical and cultural legacies. In the works One Hundred Years of Solitude and Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the authors vividly depict the intricacies of personal, familial, and historical traumas with their unique narrative styles, presenting readers with a profound canvas of compassion for trauma. From the perspective of the trauma theory, this article incorporate narrative perspectives, explores how literature reflects and shapes the interconnections between history and culture by contrasting and analyzing the expressions of trauma across different cultural backgrounds.

The late twentieth and twenty-first century have witnessed a significant explosion of Victorian revivalism. Central to this trend is what I call a proliferation of ‘neo-Victorian’ novels. They highlight key historical moments – the cholera pandemics, the Crimean War, the rapid expansion of cities, and the British migration to the settler colonies, to name just a few – to prompt authors, readers and critics to revisit the Victorian past and rethink the broader context of Victorian imperial history and its ongoing legacies.

As a result, a series of terms such as ‘retro-Victorian’, ‘Victoriana’, ‘neo-Victorian’ or ‘post-Victorian’ have emerged, seeking to emphasise the different impulses resident in this young genre. For example, borrowing from Fredric Jameson, Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich use ‘post-Victorianism’ because they consider most neo-Victorian works as popularized cultural products or mediocre Victorian ‘imitations’ (xi) in the marketplace, resulting in ‘a new depthlessness’ and ‘a consequent weakening of historicity’ (Jameson 6). However, I would contend that dismissing the ‘neo-’ prefix fails to acknowledge the critical potential inherent in the genre. Rather than saying that neo-Victorian narrative is marked by ‘a loss of a sense of history’ (Kaplan 3), my paper offers a counter-argument that neo-Victorianism marks the emerging of a new historicity. It is not so much about the loss of history but a revision of “a singular linear, authoritative history’ (Lowenthal 22) in our ‘epoch of simultaneity’ (Foucault 22).

To participate this ongoing discussion, I would like to direct the attention of this field from neo-Victorian canons set in London to an unexpected body of neo-Victorian writings that see London as the point of dispersion to the outside world or set on/by the sea. These depictions of Victorian waterscapes range from the embankments of Matthew Kneale’s Sweet Thames (1992) to the filthy underground sewers of Clare Clark’s The Great Stink (2005); from the coffin ship across the Atlantic during the Irish Famine in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002) to the maritime trades at the age of British Empire in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008–15). Inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), I propose that the depictions for waterways, ships and maritime journeys are highly useful in ‘produc[ing] an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective’ (15) in the genre.

The paper puts a special emphasis on the critical potential of watery places that came to be associated with marginality, liminality and national identity. My investigation builds on works of geographers and literary scholars like Rob Shields (1991), Jimmy Packham (2018) and Hannah Freed-Thall (2023) who see coastlines, falls and beach resorts as potent sites to rethink our perceptions of national/cultural borders and identity. What distinguishes liminal spaces, such as watery borders, is their inherent fluidity and lack of clear definition in contrast to other borders which, although equally arbitrary, are often treated as rigid, fixed and unyielding in their social and political significance.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27.

Lowenthal, David. “Revisiting Valued Landscapes.” Valued Environments, Edited by John R. Gold and Jacquelin A. Burgess. Allen & Unwin, 1982, pp. 74–99.

Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, 2005.

Kaplan, Cora. Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Sadoff, Dianne F., and John Kucich. “Introduction: Histories of the Present.” Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, edited by Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

The study of hospitality has been carried out in Beowulf. While Heffernan (2014) and Michelet (2015) either inadvertently or advertently incorporated Derridean hospitality into their discussion, they have not adequately illuminated the profound connotation of the violence juxtaposed with hospitality due to their rough interpretation of violence itself. Their studies also register a tendency to ignore the nexus between main narrative and digressions, which is of decisive significance for comprehending the narrative cohesion and ethical correlation between violence and hospitality in this poem.

This paper explores the juxtaposition of hospitality and violence in Beowulf through conducting a closer inquiry into ethical norms in Anglo-Saxon England as represented in Beowulf and beyond, specifying violence as vengeance, which plays a pivotal role both in the ethical paradigms and haunts through the narrative of the epic. Given the preeminent fact that all hospitality occurs between people from disparate nations and monsters from an allegorical foreign land, this paper delineates hospitality as sovereignty hospitality. Meanwhile, this study investigates main narrative and its digressions with attention to their interplays across integrated narrative layers to unveil how Beowulf unfolds the coalition between hospitality and vengeance and demonstrates disparate yet complimentary aspects of this coalition within such an artfully designed interplay.

Against the unsettling social milieu of England following the decline of Roman rule and preceding Norman conquest, the pronounced preoccupation with the question of the foreigner in Beowulf exhibits a rather pessimistic outlook, revealing the difficulty of practicing hospitality and the aporia embedded within the concept of “hospitality”. This paper argues that Beowulf deepens the convergence between hospitality and vengeance incrementally in its main narrative and digressions, which reaches a climax in Beowulf’s battle with Grendel’s mother where harmonious hospitality and bloody vengeance become inextricably intertwined and even identical in terms of rhetoric, forms and purposes. This overt intermingling of hospitality and vengeance and the analogous transgressions of ethic norms among humans and monsters transcend the prevailing monologic discourse of myth and epic. In this vein, Beowulf offers a fresh reevaluation of the dominant ethical values and questions the symbolic demarcation between humans and monsters.

L'étude psychanalytique et structurale nous permet de concevoir la féminisation de l'ancien régime dans la littérature de la Révolution. A la place de l'intrigue commune du patricide, le roman aurevillien représente la Révolution de 1789 par la séparation de la mère. La métaphore familiale de la politique ne constitue pas une technique nouvelle mais la métaphore maternelle demeure un sujet peu exploré. A notre connaissance, seulement Johann Jakob Bachofen et Jean-Marie Roulin confirment la matricide dans la littérature de la Révolution. Notre objetif sera de remplir une telle lacune et mettre en relation la maternisation de l'ancien régime avec la crise de la démocratie en France des années 1960.

This presentation aims to explore the intricate relationship between the r/evolution of literary canons and hierarchies within the context of globalization. It examines how the traditional notions of "classical" literatures interact with contemporary media and popular literatures, emphasizing the role of intermediality in reshaping these hierarchies. It delves into the dynamic interplay of literary history and the history of globalization with a focus on both national literary histories and the emergent concept of a "connected" history of literatures.

The presentation will employ various theoretical approaches such as postcolonial theories,world literature studies, comparative literature theories, and transnational literary perspectives to offer a comprehensive analysis of the complex relationship between canons, hierarchies, and globalization. Aspiring to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discourse on the ever-changing landscape of comparative literature in the 21st century, the presentation will engage the audience into a debate on the theories of scholars such as Molefe Kete Asante, Jean-Pierre Makouta-Mboukou, Goethe, Richard Grusin, Philarète Chasles, Emily Apter, Longxi Zhang, Pascale Casanova, Alexander Beecroft, Ulrich Beck, etc. in order to review the traditional classifications of "classical" literatures and how globalization has challenged and expanded them. In so-doing, it will showcase African and Diasporic literatures in regard with western literatures to provide a deeper understanding of the complex forces that shape and redefine literary canons and hierarchies on a global scale.

Travel literature and travel of literature both resonate with the movements of literatures in different literary spaces, traditions, and geographies, through which works of literature gain and lose in a process of thrivingness and flourishment. Central to these tectonic movements raises the question of hospitality of literatures in new literary spaces and homes by ways of translation, mistranslation, adaptation, acculturation and finally localization. The debates taking place in the discipline of comparative and world literature over the newly emerged concept ‘Untranslatability’ as a driving force in projecting an alternative ‘world literature’ coincides, consistently, with the debate of hospitality in languages and literatures. The question of translation comes to fore since ‘world literature’ was viewed as ‘literature in translation’, which invokes the possibilities and limitations of translating literature into different literary and aesthetic spaces. As such, this research investigates the way literatures move and circulate through different transnational channels with the Mediterranean space as its focal point, by extending the postulates of world literature through a close reading of Della Descrizione dell’Africa & Leon L’Africain as two samples of Mediterranean literatures that project new spectrums of theorizing world literature

With its constants of size, density and heterogeneity yet infinite variety in terms of demography, culture and atmosphere, the city lends itself particularly well to comparative literary studies. My paper takes a major world city – Mumbai/Bombay – and reads it from a marginal, perhaps unsuspected angle, namely the Portuguese-language Goan short stories of the 1950s-1970s (Vimala Devi, Maria Elsa da Rocha, Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues, Epitácio Pais), which formed the last generation of Lusophone writing in India. I argue that their common theme of big city vs. rural or small-town home, complexly semanticised, reflects a particular critical position between empires and nations. Recent years have seen a significant number of English-language works about Goan Mumbai/Bombay written in the city itself (e.g. Jane Borges, Ivan Arthur, Jerry Pinto). How might these relate to their predecessors across time, language and history?

This article aims to conduct a comparative study of the writing (écriture) of the female body in Women’s Literature and Arts by focusing on the notion of transnational imaginary. The study explores two different narrative materialities: the novel Água Viva (Água Viva) (1973) by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and paintings by Korean visual artist Chun Kyungja dating from the 1960s to 1970, including A Woman in a Bouquet (1960), Western Samoa, Self-portrait (1969), Portrait of a Woman (1977) and Tango Flowing at Dusk (1978). This research explores how cultural issues drive the construction of symbolic-imagetic bodies and their implications in the narratives, contemporary Literature and Visual Arts. This comparative study aims to establish readings of the writing (écriture) of symbolic-imagetic bodies by focusing on the study of constructions of transcultural female bodies in the female writer’s narratives by Clarice Lispector and Chun Kyungja. Thus, I would like to raise some driving questions: What is the association between Comparative Literature, Culture, and Space? How could the écriture in the novel and paintings be described in this study? Therefore, regarding Women’s literature and visual arts, this comparative study leads to an understanding of reading cultural narratives and intertextuality as practices of transnational readings in Comparative Literature. The theoretical framework for this research is composed by Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology; Writing and Difference), Teresa de Lauretis (Technologies of Gender), Susan Bordo (The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity), Gayatri Spivak (Death of a Discipline; Other Asias), Doreen Massey (Space, Place, and Gender; For Space), and Gilles Deleuze (Deux régimes de fous; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; On Theater).

Dans notre communication, nous allons examiner le rôle du narrateur dans la fantasy historique française et son rapport avec le worldbuilding, c’est-à-dire la construction d’un monde imaginaire, une composante centrale de la fantasy.

La fantasy historique est un sous-genre de la fantasy qui combine des éléments de fantasy tels que des phénomènes surnaturels et des choses imaginaires avec du réalisme et des décors de fiction historique basés sur des faits historiques (V. Schanoes, « Historical fantasy » dans E. James & F. Mendlesohn, eds. « The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature », 2012). Il s'agit d'une fantasy qui se déroule dans une période et un lieu historiques précis, qui rejoint parfois l’uchronie.

Depuis les années 2000, de nombreux auteurs français de fantasy ont publié des œuvres dans ce genre, constituant ainsi une des caractéristiques de la fantasy française. Les périodes historiques et les régions choisies comme décors sont très diverses : la France du XVIIe siècle dans « Les Lames du cardinal » du Pierre Pevel, Venise pendant la Renaissance dans « Gagner la guerre » de Jean-Philippe Jaworski, la Première Guerre mondiale dans « Le Chemin des fées » de Fabrice Anfosso, etc. Contrairement à la « medieval fantasy », qui emprunte librement des images superficielles, voir des préjugés, sur l’époque médiévale, ces œuvres sont caractérisées par un travail méticuleux de recherche dans des archives et leur fidélité historique.

Dans la fantasy, où les événements surnaturels, les créatures imaginaires et la magie sont présentés comme du « réel », le narrateur devient un guide qui assure le lecteur de l'« authenticité » de l'histoire et lui explique la vision du monde qui apparaît dans l’œuvre. Dans la fantasy historique en particulier, il est nécessaire de maintenir la cohérence et la consistance du monde imaginaire qui combine deux éléments opposés et apparemment contradictoires : les faits historiques qui se sont déjà produits dans le monde réel et les événements et personnages imaginaires sur lesquels s’appuie le récit.

Qui raconte l'histoire ? Nous analyserons comment les narrateurs de chaque œuvre présentent les informations historiques, comment ils perçoivent et décrivent les éléments imaginaires entremêlés aux événements réels, et nous comparerons les effets produits par divers dispositifs narratifs.