Formalism, as it existed between 1914 and 1930, is regarded as the central driving force behind the establishment of literary research as a literary theory sui generis. This process of theorizing literary studies, which had previously been either hermeneutically inspired, positivistically grounded or essayistically liberated from any systematic approach, essentially proceeded via an approach to literature as a technogenic art form. In other words: to think in terms of literary theory means, in the sense of the formalists, to understand literature technically. Shklovsky's “Technique of Literary Mastery” (Technika literaturnogo masterstva, 1930) gets to the heart of this approach.

This relationship between literature and technology has (at least) five sub-aspects in the writings of the formalists, which by no means unite as a consistent theoretical paradigm of the “formal method”. Rather, they mark a spectrum of partially interrelated, but also competing models. In my paper, I would like to outline these dimensions as (1) the conceptualization of the genesis of the literary work as a crafted artifact, (2) the integration of literary production into the production processes of industrial modernity, (3) the relationship of literature to the technical medium of film, (4) the adaptation of the natural and technical sciences for the purposes of literary theory, and (5) the dissection of the literary text into data sets.

Novelists of the early-modern period were often also members of literary salons and practiced the literary games that served as entertainments in the salon assemblies: improvising a sonnet line by line as a group, painting a portrait with words, or compiling a shared story from an imagined sequence of letters. This talk argues that these games were more than just entertainments. They provided a key technology for the developing genre of the novel in the sense that they enabled novelists to model the creative process of compositing a novel. This argument for games as a technology draws on work in extended and embodied cognition (Hutchins 1998; Noë 2017; Cave 2015; Kukkonen 2019), suggesting that literary practices work as technologies of for the human imagination.

I will take Les jeux d’esprit (1701) by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force as my main example to show how novelists developed games systematically to rethink her practice as a writer, and how smaller literary games lead to an exploration of a final “jeu du roman” (game of the novel), where all these elements are assembled. La Force draws on the gamebooks of the Italian Renaissance, where games as a creative technology draw on early-modern protocols of rhetorics (Bolzoni 2012), but she also deploys the gallant, aesthetic dimension of gameplay with its spontaneity and flow (Viala 2021) – thereby bringing together the contrasting aspects of ludus and paidia (Callois 1958) in the same text.

From Dorrit Cohn to Lisa Zunshine, a great deal of work in narratology has engaged with the representation of characters' mental processes. The focus on formal techniques has been complemented, in recent scholarship, by an interest in how the evocation of fictional minds speaks to recent developments in cognitive science, including the embodied and socially situated nature of mind.

However, this body of work has tended to downplay the question of the technological mediation of mental processes. In cognitive science, work under the rubric of the "extended mind" by Andy Clark and others has shown that the mind is scaffolded and enhanced by a wide range of technological practices. Conversely, technology provides a set of metaphors for understanding mental experience (think about the computational metaphors of first-generation cognitive science). This paper explores how algorithmic technologies, particularly on social media platforms, are inspiring new ways of presenting characters' minds in contemporary fiction. Through their well-known tendency to polarize emotional and moral content, social media represent a cognitive infrastructure that shapes users' psychological propensities. The paper explores how contemporary fiction is developing formal resources to capture the impact of these technologies on the level of characters' "mind style," to use Roger Fowler's terminology.

My examples include Jenny Offill's Weather and Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, two recent novels by US authors who use typographical and stylistic devices to recreate the forms of thinking that are commonly associated with social media, from meme-like irony to short attention spans. I will argue that these texts function as both an exploration of the psychological impact of computational culture and a critique of the biases it introduces in public discourse.

Historically based primarily on literary models (Booth 1961, Kermode 1967, Pavel 1980), almost all theories of fiction have now become inter- or trans-medial since the rise of intermedia studies (Helbig 1998, Müller 2000, Méchoulan 2003) in the 1990s. None of them can altogether dispense with a reflection on the constraints imposed on fiction by the text as a specific medium, insofar as literature in itself has become a special case, instead of the universal model, of the worldwide use and consumption of fiction, and is increasingly marginalised in this role by the expansion of series via streaming. However, literary theory has always given considerable attention to the constraints and possibilities associated with the specific technologies used by different types of fiction (Schaeffer 1999, Paige 2021), whether in the study of particular literary genres (poetic composition games, commedia dell'arte, mystery novels) or in the study of the different material formats of fictional discourse (oral, written, digital, ludic, interactive, etc.). This paper will focus on the way in which the affordances of these different formats are taken into account by theories of fiction, and the role they play in its definition.

Translation is inherently comparative as its production, distribution, consumption, and reception involve cross-cultural and inter-linguistic negotiation and transformation – i.e. it is a network of operations, which are dialogic, and sometimes even confrontational.

Comparative Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS) has gained currency in the 21st century due to three reasons: our Internet-influenced increasing encounter with cultural diversities, the commercial potentialities that translation activities including Machine Translation cover, and the emergence of decolonial/ postcolonial perspectives that identify and question the dominance of a couple of European languages in the planetary translation activities.

An updated version of a 2020 paper, this paper broaches three issues related to comparative translation: first, a comparative analysis of “interpreting” (interpreter translating orally) and “translation” (translator translating or interpreting written texts); second, comparing different translations (from print to subtitle) of a single text (e.g. Hamlet); and, third, critical exploration of the domination of European theories of translation in Translation and Interpreting Studies and explores if exposure to non-European translation theories can be proved beneficial. It is in these changing contexts that the present paper explores the increasing effectiveness of CTIS in the 21st century. It intends to underscore which standpoint may serve planetary translation activities in the 21st century and whether ‘rebabelizing’ the world (Annie Brisset) in this increasingly mulit-logue globalectic world.

For Oustinoff, Lushenkova-Foscolo, and Rasse, contemporary lingual nomadicity and incommunication have given rise to what Salman Rushdie in Imaginary Homelands named “translated men.” Acknowledging that “something always gets lost in translation,” Rushdie “cling[s], obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.” Comparative Translation theorists advocate rebabilizing the world. In this age of globalization and multiculturalism, the maintenance of “global linguistic diversity” is promoted, on one hand, to develop “cultural diversity”; on the other, trans-national and inter-lingual interaction has been increasing. What is, therefore, needed is making the translation flow balanced and participatory – no absolute dominance of one or two languages, no deletion of the ‘minority’ languages. It is a rebabelized world – a world of many yet communicative and understanding.

Nellie Campobello published her fragmentary, violent, and unabashedly villista book of heavily autobiographical short fiction—Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México—in 1931. She then released a much longer version of the text as a second edition in 1940. A few of Campobello’s poems were published in English translation during her lifetime, but the vignettes or estampas from Cartucho would have to wait until 1988, two years after her death, when they were translated by Doris Meyer and published by the University of Texas Press. However, Langston Hughes translated four of Campobello’s estampas (three from Cartucho and one from the later collection Las manos de mama) which remain unpublished but are available to read and study via a digitized archive at Yale University. Hughes performed these translations in the mid-1930s, between the release of the two editions of Cartucho. During this decade, the Mexican Revolution was still in Mexico’s very recent past and the task of reclaiming Francisco Villa as a hero for all Mexicans was still very much on Campobello’s mind.

In this presentation, I begin to offer a hypothetical translation history for Campobello’s Cartucho, asking the question—what would this book’s translation future (or, the book’s trajectory in the English-speaking world) have been like if Hughes had published his translations? I offer a comparative study of the four estampas Hughes translated—what he titles “From our Window,” “My Little Sister,” “Make Them Out of Clay,” and “He Was Bad to Mama”—alongside Campobello’s source texts and Meyer’s translations to offer an alternative translation history of what Cartucho might have been in English. I examine how Hughes changes the pieces by significantly altering three of their four titles and by combining the four stand-alone estampas into one work that he called “Through the Eyes of a Child.” I also consider how these works are situated in Hughes’s larger proposed but never published anthology of Spanish American writers. Hughes’s translation and editing choices alter the texts at the fundamental levels of framing and genre—the new titles reframe the individual pieces, and in Hughes’s broader anthology of translations from Mexico and Cuba, the unwieldy estampas become something more recognizable as a short story. Hughes’s unpublished translations of Campobello exemplify what Karen Emmerich describes as “translingual editing” and create something that is every bit as original as a source text. Studying these digitized archival materials expands our understanding of Hughes’s work as a translator and mediator between Mexico and the United States, and it offers a hypothetical possibility for a different reception of Campobello’s Cartucho in the English-language literary marketplace. In his versions of Campobello’s estampas, Hughes emerges as a consummate author-translator willing to put his creative imprint on Campobello’s revisionary home-front portraits of the Mexican Revolution.

Two hundred years ago, the great German Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe coined the term "world literature" (Weltliteratur) in commenting on the reception abroad of translations of his works into other European languages and on the translation into European languages of Asian classics. Across the same period and into the twentieth century, English spread as the lingua franca. Hence, many non-English-speaking writers want to learn English, have their works translated into English, or both. Such a one is Xie Hong, a Western-influenced contemporary Chinese writer who has lived in New Zealand and has begun writing in English. My co-translator Jicheng Sun and I are rendering his Chinese short stories into an English collection, making our project an East-West collaboration on East-West literature. We have relied on a system whereby Dr Sun performs the rough translations of the stories, which are then polished by me, Dr Swindall. We then collaborate on the proofing and preparation for submission of the stories. Although our use of current translation technologies is limited, we have nonetheless published several of the stories individually in reputable literary journals. We achieve this by paying attention to Xie’s minimalist style, which he claims is influenced by Hemingway, as well as the funny-sad themes of Xie’s work depicting the complications of life for ordinary Chinese in Shenzhen from the 1980s to the 2010s. To render Xie’s style, we first perform a close reading which aligns with Damion Searle’s assertion that translation is “the kind of reading a translator is doing …. when we translate [a] book, we translate our reading of the original.” Our reading of Xie’s stories derives in large part from our personal relationships with him and what he has told us he is attempting. This can be summarized as depicting what has been called the “ultra-unreal reality” of Chinese society today as it constantly changes, especially in Xie’s hometown of Shenzhen, where his stories are mostly set. As a boy, however, Xie claims his favorite reading was Sherlock Holmes, whose “logic, suspense, and detective elements” are evident in his mature writing. Now, he declares that he desires to present “Chinese stories by a Chinese writer” to anglophone readers. Therefore, we make Xie’s ironic narratives of the quests for truth of his protagonists readable in English in all their quite real unreality, showing aspects of the lives of ordinary Chinese probably unknown to most in the West. As contributions to twenty-first-century world literature, our translations make the experiences of today’s China accessible to a global audience that can read English, promoting international understanding and, possibly, identification with others far away.

Johannes Fabian's book Time and the Other urges for 'coevalness' among anthropology’s objects of study. Changing the title’s focus on the gender of the ‘Other’, this paper deals with questions of euphemisms and invisible significations, which one has to deal with while translating Sibylle Berg’s gender discourse present in her four-play series ‘Menschen with Problemen’ into Urdu. These plays are adorned with the West’s cultural pessimism and the gender discourse of contemporary European society. A translation of this kind becomes a linguistic undertaking on the intersections of time, modernity’s progress in Europe, and the post-colonial Global South. This is also an epistemic engagement with the concepts of time and gender. As the understanding of progress, with European standards of the teleological approach to history, often leads to broken forms of engagement with the absence or presence of a concept, in translational engagements of the plays mentioned above, this brokenness manifests itself as problems related to gender vis a vis language like Urdu.

Particular concerns can be raised as to how the 'storm of progress' a la Walter Benjamin functions in post-colonial societies with fragmented pasts and how this phenomenon manifests itself, especially concerning gender-based concepts, such as the question of pronouns and the usage of slang in "high" literature? This paper deals with translation problems in light of these questions.

Yiyun Li has been a prominent Chinese American writer who has produced eight fictions since 2003. She was originally known for her fusion of Chinese elements into her English writing, while for her latest collection published last year, the Anglophone critics start to appreciate its theme and narration, rather than its Chinese-ness. This research endeavors to look through the transformation of Yiyun Li’s writing, ranging from its theme, characterization, to its language style, and particularly, its transition from translation literature to writing for global English readers. The representations of changes, the reasons behind it, and a comparison between she and Geling Yan in terms of their Chinese-ness in their works, will comprise the complete project. There has been research from scholars on Li’s language style, but the focus has been mainly on the Chinese-ness shown in her works before 2018. Therefore, this research would be the first one that could be found pertaining to Li’s 21-year publishing career, from ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ to ‘Wednesday’s Child’. The methodology of literary linguistics derived from Geoffrey Leech’s ‘Style in Fiction: a Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose’ will be employed to present more detailed and objective evidence.

Translation is mostly understood as a lonely activity and calls for discussions on the subjectivity of the translator, her language proficiency, her close reading of the text and the resultant understanding reflecting in the act of translation. However, Anthony Cordingley and Celine Frigau Manning (2017) raise a series of very pertinent questions that challenges the popular image of the translator as a lonely individual at work since the reality of the profession is strikingly different and requires a collaboration of many with different roles. Belen Bistué (2013), traces the practice of collaborative translation to the Renaissance time. She calls the translation of those time the work of “translation teams” where “two or more translators, each an expert in one of the languages involved, collaborated to produce a translation”. This act of distributing responsibilities among multiple agents involved in the practice helped in the inclusion of skills they brought from different linguistic and cultural traditions. This paper would, however, want to look at collaborative translation as an alternate method of translating and preserving indigenous oral literature. This paper will question how collaboration that brings together native speakers can help in eradicating epistemological violence and misrepresentation in translation of indigenous texts? Can this inclusive method of translation become a tool of academic social responsibility of informed translators? How can digitization of translations of oral narratives can help in the preservation and circulation of indigenous literature?

This paper aims at mediating into networks of AI as sites of creativity, and that of cultural translation, which is facilitated through the shared socialites of language use in speech-acts as well as creative writing. With generative AI and LLMs intervening into this site, questions regarding the creation, production, acquisition and dissemination of knowledge become inevitable. While the contribution of AI and LLMs in creative practices is undeniably important, this paper rethinks the manner in which these models acquire existing knowledge and generate responses, thus engaging with the technicalities of prompt engineering and AI training along with concerns of ethics and representation. One of the contributions of text generative AI and LLMs in language use is the act of facilitating a decolonial approach to translation. For researchers working on areas emerging from a decolonial context, the use of such language models becomes challenging and limiting. While projects involving the use of English or other European languages might benefit from these models and incorporate the practice of translation and transcription and data sampling among other practices, those engaging with alternate, marginalized languages and peripheral contexts draw our attention to the limitations inherent in the current LLMs and generative AI models. Even with advanced LLMs, problems such as context window paradox or AI hallucination pose limitations for creative translations. Highlighting the limitations of LLMs in understanding the creative aspect of language, this paper further draws our attention to the manner in which poetic language renders itself inaccessible to computation for AI and hence the aberrations and absurdities. Consequently it mandates a human intervention in the process to ensure ethical considerations and prevent misrepresentation especially for marginal and oral language-cultures. Finally, this study aims to forge newer ways of Human-AI engagement which is underscored by the concerns of plurality and untranslatability emanating from a decolonial context, thus aid in the destandardization or undo standardisation of marginalized languages.

This paper explores a reading mode for now by experimenting with machine/human translation and re-visiting reading theories. It aims to address a series of interlinking literate changes in this digital era and seeks to answer the following questions: how we attune our reading to an AI-assisted/enhanced one, as N. Katherine Hayles says; how AI production suggests different interpretations of a text; and how we navigate them through reading skills and philosophy offered by Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, and Jonathan Culler. These cares evoke an investigation at a conjuncture between classic language, translation, and reading.

My writing departs by comparatively reading Han-shan the Tang poet’s poem in classical Chinese and its two English renditions by Gary Snyder and ChatGPT, respectively. Surface reading denotes their discrepancies in verbal structure and poetic philosophy while close reading highlights a potential to better the understanding of Han-shan’s original. To gain a wider valence, I recruit around 30 participants with a good command of both languages to evaluate the two translations and identify which comes from AI. Concluding with reflection on survey results and re-examination of key notions, this paper emphasizes that what we are reading now is a co-shaped, filtered Text in Barthes’s term and meaningful exchanges rise from testing these filters and re-painting their contours.

This project examines the many points of overlap in conversations about information literacy and translation literacy in the university classroom and muses on how new digital tools and archives incite urgency toward these intersecting competencies or modes of reading and interpreting. As Brian Baer argues, “given that so many of the texts students encounter both inside and outside the classroom are translations, and that machine translation tools are so readily available, it is time for translation literacy to be a key component of both information and global literacy” (4). By translation literacy, I mean the general ability to recognize the mediated experience of reading a translated text and to think critically about the form and socially-situated practice of translation, a mode of literacy that Anthony Pym describes as “the ability to make informed decisions about when to turn to translations, how to read them, how to compare them, when to trust them, when to intervene in them, and [. . .] how to produce them.” In particular, I evaluate the gains of involving students in disparate English translations of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and the ready transferability of information literacy concepts like “reading laterally,” “going upstream,” and looking for bias, sensationalism, and marking the ideological underpinnings of any given source and its subsequent versions or iterations. Through my case study of using digital tools to bring translation literacy into the classroom, I aim to put the metalanguage of information literacy in conversation with recurrent questions and concepts of translation literacy and translation theory.

Sources:

Baer, Brian James. “Is there a Translation in this Class?: A Crash Course in Translation Literacy.” In Teaching Literature in Translation: Pedagogical Contexts and Reading Practices. Edited by Brian James Baer and Michelle Woods. Routledge, 2023. 3-12.

Pym, Anthony. “Active Translation Literacy in the Literature Class.” PMLA 138, 3, May 2023: 819-823. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/active-translation-literacy-in-the-literature-class/AA9D71A6C29677BF1D784FC0379786E5

For writers of autofiction, which, as Jonathan Sturgeon and Rebecca van Laer argue, allows authors to construct a narrative self out of real and imagined experiences, translation offers possibilities of complicating and clarifying the author/narrator's identity through transposition into transnational contexts. Arguing that Korean-born Danish writer Maja Lee Langvad's award-winning narratives Find Holger Danske (2006), Hun er vred (2014), and Tolk (2024) exemplify this autofictional positionality, this paper explores the interpretative spaces their translations into English open up, by translators of different cultural backgrounds and by AI programs. Meaning in Langvad's texts is simultaneously embedded in and obscured by language, which takes on special significance in the age of mechanical translation through artificial intelligence bots that lack both a self and an individual cultural context. Langvad’s texts are at once formally innovative, evading generic categorization and relying on wordplay and cultural allusions, and deeply personal in their treatments of transnational adoption and cross-cultural (mis)communication about food, sexuality, belonging, and identity. In comparing recent translations of Langvad's texts into English by Paul Russell Garrett, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Barbara Haveland, and AI bots, this paper traces how translating autofiction also entails translating the authorial/narrative self into and out of real, imagined, and technological cultural contexts.

This paper explores the dynamics of power in the Chinese translations of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go through the theoretical lens of Stephen Greenblatt’s subversion-containment model. The study juxtaposes Zhang Kun’s human-crafted translation with a GenAI-generated version to investigate how each translation rewrites the source text within the Chinese linguistic and cultural context. By focusing on key aspects such as narrative tone, lexical choices, and structural adaptations, the research examines how the translations engage with the source text's portrayal of power relations, particularly regarding the inevitability of the clones' tragic fate. The study adopts a comparative methodology, analyzing textual features to identify variations and continuities in the representation of the original's themes of control, subjugation, and existential inevitability. It situates these translations within a broader cultural studies framework, emphasizing the role of human translators and artificial intelligence as agents of rewriting. Zhang’s translation is assessed for its nuanced human interventions, while the GenAI version is scrutinized for its algorithmic tendencies and limitations, revealing divergent approaches to narrative fidelity and cultural resonance. Findings indicate that both translations, despite their differing natures, contain elements of subversion and containment. Zhang’s translation subtly reinterprets the clones' plight, embedding it within Chinese cultural values, whereas the GenAI version, while mechanically precise, inadvertently amplifies the deterministic tone of the original text. These findings underscore the potential of translation to not only mediate but also reshape power dynamics, reflecting the evolving interplay between human creativity and artificial intelligence in literary adaptation. This research concludes that Never Let Me Go (“莫失莫忘”) serves as a profound lens to examine the implications of posthumanism and power in the age of artificial intelligence. By shedding light on how translations rewrite the original work’s exploration of human agency and control, the study contributes to ongoing debates in translation studies, posthumanism, and the ethics of AI in literature.

The evolution of world literature shed light on the growing interest and epistemology in translation studies, allowing peripheral countries to introduce their rich culture and traditions to the center stage. This phenomenon bred into what we call “cultural mediator,” a term introduced by Robert Taft referring to the “person who facilitates communication, understanding, and action between persons or groups who differ concerning language and culture” (Taft 1981, 53). Roig-Sanz and Maylaerts emphasized the vital roles of translators as cultural mediators. They act as either customs officers, who want to follow the dominant norm and stop exchanges and work in a context of ideological or political control, or cultural smugglers, who encourage exchanges and often make their norms, circuits, channels, and forms. A closed reading of Tiffany Tsao’s translation of Norman Erickson Pasaribu's "Curriculum Vitae 2015" revealed that her role as a cultural mediator in the translation was shaped by her socio-biographical background, fluency in Bahasa Indonesia, deep understanding of Indonesian culture, and engagement with the community of practice. The process-oriented approach directed this paper to scrutinize culture mediators in cross-border multi-directionality and cultural representations as they are "active at the levels of cultural product production, circulation, transformation, and reception" (Roig-Sanz & Meylaerts). Moreover, this paper explores the socio-political status of Indonesia and how it is brought to a wider audience with respect to political, cultural, ethnic, and ideological boundaries.

Depuis le premier texte traduit en 1994, Gilles Deleuze est perçu comme philosophe de formation, théoricien de la littérature, critique d’arts et critique de cinéma par métier, sa pluralité identitaire vient de sa traduction à plusieurs vitesses. Traduire Deleuze en Chine consiste d’abord à traduire des livres par lui, puis à traduire des ouvrages sur lui, même à éditer des textes à son sujet. A l’appui d’une enquête, le présent article analyse la traduction, l’édition et la réception de Deleuze en Chine.

Le premier chapitre porte sur les initiatives éditoriales visant à faire connaître Deleuze en Chine. Dans l’espoir de comprendre l’actualité de la philosophie française, les chercheurs et éditeurs chinois prennent des initiatives : 1) éditer des recueils avec des extraits des ouvrages de Deleuze, 2) traduire des livres préparateurs, 3) traduire la collection, 4) établir des manuels de la littérature comparée pour mettre Deleuze au rang des théoriciens littéraires. Ces choix éditoriaux mettent en valeur la part de la littérature dans la pensée de Deleuze.

Le deuxième chapitre analyse la traduction des ouvrages de Deleuze en Chine selon quatre modalités : l’intégration, la réédition, la reprise et la révision. Pour l’intégration, les éditeurs chinois prennent des ouvrages pour les fusionner en un seul volume. Pour la réédition des livres les plus lus, la modification des titres est très sensible. La reprise des textes en caractères traditionnels est adoptée dans le souci de publier Deleuze le plus vite que possible. La révision est un mode adopté récemment par les traducteurs chinois, en tenant compte de la différence terminologique.

Le troisième chapitre s’interroge sur l’influence de Deleuze sur les milieux académiques. La pensée de Deleuze permet encore plus de possibilités à travers la traduction qui laisse découvrir des moyens inédits pour créer des notions. Pour les notions comme le « devenir-animal », la traduction chinoise s’essaie de trouver l’équilibre entre le néologisme et la terminologie. Pour celles comme la « machine littéraire », les chercheurs chinois créent de nouvelles notions à partir de la traduction. Pour celles comme la « littérature mineure », les débats, récupérés par les positions différentes, finissent par revenir au point de départ : fonder un savoir local dans une perspective comparée et globale.

En Chine, traduire Deleuze ne s’y limite plus à traduire ses propres ouvrages, l’idée est de faire découvrir une bibliothèque d’ouvrages scientifiques sur lui. De français en chinois, ses ouvrages fascinent par les néologismes philosophique et littéraire, qui transmettent, par la traduction, la possibilité de créer de nouveaux concepts. Pour les chercheurs chinois à l’attente d’un savoir « chinois », Deleuze signifie plus qu’un théoricien : une terminologie génératrice, un arsenal conceptuel, une pensée non dualiste capable de tenir en compte l’inclassable, l’insaisissable et l’impensable.

The world is made up of multiple languages, cultures, rituals, practices and faith and requires steady and dependable transactions and interrelations to formulate a well balanced heterogeneous space. An essential component that has facilitated such transactions and negotiations over generations, across temporal and spatial distances, is translation. Today “translation” is regarded as a multifaceted practice, a skill, a method, even an independent discipline that facilitates and makes possible this inter-cultural, inter-lingual, inter-societal exchange. Translation has its utility in diverse fields – the medical, the legal, the scientific and so on. But the arena that we are going to explore today, is the literary arena. Translation and interpretation have gone hand in hand for generations but the dynamics have changed steadily. Newer processes, technological devices have steadily been coming up. Artificial Intelligence is the talk of the day. It is worth taking a serious call to check out how the connotation of translation is changing within the literary sphere, in keeping with the fast socio-cultural and technological changes that have stormed the entire world. What is the likely impact that machine translation and AI are likely have, in this digital age, on the discipline of Translation Studies as it features within and alongside the discipline of Comparative Literature. Translating literature calls for a certain degree of accountability as it is instrumental in ensuring reception. What then are the ethical compromises that have to be made in terms of fidelity and dependability in the domain of translating literature?

This study delves into the grammatical structures of POS tagging within Tamil lyrics crafted through renowned Tamil lyricists, employing a Firedman model alongside Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Through rigorous analysis, we identify and compute the components of several grammatical categories: Peyarccolkal, Piratipeyarkalkal, Uriaccorkal, Tirmanippavarkal, Vinaiccolkal, Vinaiyuriccolkal, and Munmolivukal. The investigation leverages a dataset containing both dependent and independent variables, facilitating the discovery of robust associations between these variables and POS tagging in Tamil. By applying the Friedmann model and ensuring the model adheres to a polynomial frequency assumption, we achieve a maximum likelihood solution in closed form. The ranking test results affirm the model’s efficacy in analyzing Tamil text, highlighting its potential as a reliable forecasting tool for POS tagging. This work underscores the synergy between traditional grammatical analysis and modern NLP methodologies, paving the way for enhanced linguistic insights in Tamil lyricism.

The study of various grammatical types is significantly enhanced by the concept of grammaticalization, primarily focusing on the formation and organization of grammatical categories within a topologically generalized language. Vallinam and Idaiyinam have been subjects of extensive academic research. This research analyzes the usage of the previously outlined grammatical framework in both spoken and written linguistic discourse. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth study of the numerous factors that influence the development of different languages. Researchers in controlled language have increasingly adopted quantitative approaches to ensure reliable results, aligning with the study’s stated objectives. Utilizing the Latin Square Design, this research investigates the diverse methods Tamil lyricists use to incorporate Vallinam and Idaiyinam into their selection lists. The structured data analysis allows us to derive reasonable inferences, which are discussed in detail.

I wish to revisit the ways in which translations of the distinguished Indian dramatist, Kalidas' Abhijnanashakuntalam into modern Indian as well as European languages such as Hindi, Maithili, English, French and German shaped the idea of Orient in order to rethink the concept of cultural translation in an increasingly digitized world since it appears that there are fissures in its existing conceptualization as is pretty much evident from an otherwise very popular formulation of this concept in Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture. 

Such a rethinking is particularly pertinent precisely because of the fact that there are many contradictions in the manner in which certain advocates of postcolonial whose arguments attempt to emphasize the simultaneous existence of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial "as practices of resistance and subversion in cultural production both before and after the moment of colonization" go on to establish all postcolonial writings in English as acts of cultural translation. This is exactly an erasure of the concept of translation. AI generated translation does, moreover, a huge distortion by often killing the soul of translation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of Orient with a view to redefine the notion of cultural translation by critically revisiting the translations of the above-mentioned, canonical Sanskrit drama from Indian literature and their reception in the domain of World literature coming from different parts of the globe.

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.

Any textual process is an encounter, a willing engagement with difference; every single act of reading and writing is intersubjective- between individuals located in different time spaces and temporal locations; making it cross-cultural. All literary texts are situated in a particular time, space, and structure of feeling and the textual practices of writing and reading are acts of engaging with difference. Translation also, being a textual process, is an encounter with alterity. Difference being a relational concept, the process of translation enables the comparison of differences in language, because of the attempt made by the translator who is willing to go to the other side and engage with difference.

This paper aims to analyze translation, through a comparative approach, that is, focusing on the willingness to engage with alterity across cultural differences. It attempts to explore the ethics of cross-cultural encounters through literary texts, specifically a text in the source language Malayalam translated into the target language English, thus providing insights into various aspects of engaging with alterity. The literary text in consideration is a short story titled “ജനൽപ്പടിയിലെ വിളക്ക്” by Kamala Das which translates to “Lamp on the Windowsill”, which is a part of the author’s autobiography “എൻ്റെ കഥ” (My Story). The concepts put forth by scholars like S. A Syeed, Ipshita Chanda, Ignacio Infante, Hans Jauss, Jaques Derrida, and Venuti Lawrence will be taken into account to understand the ethics of translation.

We enquire into the potential role of ‘translation,’ in its broadest sense, in addressing racial injustice, social inequality, climate change, sickness, and other global concerns. Following the question of poet and critic Fred Morten, can we think of ‘making’ and ‘repair’ as diffused into a rhythmic flow? Can we imagine making it a form of repairing the existing ‘order.’ This reminds us of the ‘piecemeal construction’ of Kafka in his short story titled “The Great Wall of China”. Analysing the great failure in the construction of the Biblical Tower of Babel, Kafka suggested that the piecemeal construction process that the Chinese followed should be the ideal way of construction. To construct the wall as a succession of pieces, a large number of employees were divided into many groups and scattered in various directions. Taking ‘piecemeal construction’ as a useful constructional endeavour in the synergy of ‘black translation,’ which repairs, connects, heals, redresses and generates conversations, builds communes and most importantly nurtures South-South collaboration.

To think black, to feel, to see, to touch, and to taste, we need to look at the resonance between ‘black’ and ‘translation’. Both have been objectified and often conceptualised against ‘light,’ ‘source,’ ‘original,’ ‘fair,’ and ‘pure'. Extending our inquiry further, we can gaze on a similar binary, like ‘west’ and ‘east,’ which later, in the wake of postcolonialism, became ‘first world’ and ‘third world,’ and in the current era of neoliberalism/ globalisation rebranded as ‘global north’ and 'global south’.

This paper wants to look at ‘repair’ as an act of ‘black translation,’ where we will take measures towards redressal of social injustice and healing of wounds created by the environmental Anthropocene through self-fashioning translation projects by looking at practices of translation in South Asia. The idea of ‘non-recognition’ therefore should be used as a weapon—political, social, racial, and academic—to challenge the subtlety through which the Global North operates and tags everything as ‘global’ and ‘universal’. Can the notion of the South be applied to areas of social life that are not directly related to development differences, such as those involving the formation of one’s own identity?

Using concepts like ‘translation as fission, evolution, reparation, and healing,’ available in the translational practices of pre-colonial South Asia, can we heal environmental calamities and sustain world peace and ecological holism by using ‘black translation’ as a methodological apparatus? Can we foster ‘black translation’ as a ‘contact zone,’ a ‘fluid space,’ a ‘liquefied medium,’ for flows of immigration, racial arrhythmia, sexual non-binaries, and decolonial insurgency? Since the current disciplinary discourses of translation studies fail to adequately address the issues and concerns of the Global South, then it is time to un-light and think black.

In recent years, the concept of “reparation” has come to the fore, particularly in connection with decolonization issues (Savoy/Sarr). Reparation practices are seen first and foremost as strategies for restoring lost symmetry, whether through reparation or reappropriation. However, they are also a form of cultural resistance that can alter perceptions of the world, personal projects and lifestyles. In this context, it is above all the process of repair, as a practice, that deserves to be examined, as the question remains whether we can truly repair and compensate: “We can only repair well what we renounce to restore to its initial state”. (Boucheron) This awareness of the irreparable was formulated by Bachir Diagne when he described “the loss of humanity” as irreparable and pleaded: “Just address the irreparable”.

I wish to explore the phenomenon of reparation through literary texts, in particular literary translations made at different times and in different languages, in order to develop a global socio-political understanding of reparation through the ages. Translations, including revisions of older translations, can be seen as vectors of reparation that transmit knowledge, while helping to both reinforce and initiate discourses on reparation, while also critically interrogating them. In linguistic terms, translations can not only address decolonization, but also renegotiate issues of gender (for example, the representation of the feminine or the non-binary). After analyzing theoretical reflections on reparation and translation, notably those of Souleymane Bachir Diagne in De langue à langue: L'hospitalité de la traduction, I would like to examine examples of specific translations.

Translators have observed that the residues remaining to be transgressed, transported, and translated are the obstructed meanings in the contact zone or border zone of untranslatable original language when translating from one language to another culturally and linguistically. In order to ascertain the authorial "unintended" intention of the original language, the unblocking technique is required. In the 21st century, the only feasible method of surmounting the barrier of untranslatability across languages and cultures appears to be through a magic door of Wonderland that must be opened by the peculiar Other, which manifests in the form of the environment both within and without human consciousness: ecology and technology. Human neurological structures, which represent the natural world within, are constituted of neurons that are constructed and subsequently directed by the interaction between genes and the environment. This neurological structure functions analogously to a multi-dimensional map for the AI that represents technology without. The data-processing circuits or pathways will be formed by algorithmically programmed collected data, which will be transformed into feedback loops. In order to endure the new ecological environment, both human intelligence and artificial intelligence function as organic and inorganic organs. This presentation will endeavor to conceptualize translation in the context of the eco-techno turn by examining the organic and inorganic components of translational texts, which, despite their inorganic nature, create an organic text that is living and sustaining in its own environment.

In the process where Western literature came to be equated with modern

literature—and modernity itself was expressed largely as a wholesale

transplantation of Western thought and culture—what tends to be overlooked is

how Buddhism contributed to the emergence of traditionalism and cultural

nationalism in the early history of Korean literature. As the most traditional of

religions, Buddhism gradually evolved into a form of modern knowledge and

discourse, exerting considerable influence on the interiority of modern Korean

literature.

This paper examines the ways in which Buddhism influenced Korean modern

literature, focusing specifically on the figures of Seokjeon (Bak Han-yong), Han

Yong-un (Manhae), and Seo Jeong-ju (Midang). It situates their literary work within

the broader historical process of Buddhism’s modernization, which served as a key

medium linking their thought and writing.

In the context of the profound crisis and upheaval that marked the era,

Seokjeon held a central position in mediating the relationship between Buddhism

and modern literature. He served as a crucial figure connecting disparate systems

—“tradition” and “modernity”—under the shared framework of “Joseon” as a

cultural and political entity. Just as the tension between “mind-only” (yusim) and

“the Beloved” (nim), or “consciousness” and “silence,” reveals that any symbolic

representation is not a synthesis of homogeneous elements but a stitching together

of conflicting impulses, Han Yong-un’s “Beloved” can be interpreted as a literary

object that embodies “Joseon,” “Buddhism,” “tradition,” and “truth.”

What is often ignored in interpretations of Korean modern literature as a mere

product of Western transplantation is the influence of preexisting cultural

traditions in the process by which modernity was translated into concrete literary

symbols. From around 1915, modern Buddhist intellectuals began to actively shape

this cultural tradition.

With the lifting of the 1895 ban on monks entering cities (Seungni Ipseong

Geumji-ryeong), Buddhist religious and cultural activities finally became possible in

urban centers like Hanyang (Seoul) and Gyeongseong (colonial-era Seoul). As

Buddhism sought to reform itself into a modern religion, its greatest tasks included

acquiring new knowledge, establishing modern educational institutions, forming

unified organizations, and developing modern print and publishing infrastructures.

During the 1910s in colonial Gyeongseong, Buddhist activities naturally converged

with the literary world—then at the center of cultural production. The fact that

writers like Yang Geon-sik, Choe Nam-seon, Jeong In-bo, and Yi Kwang-su

interacted with or were introduced to Buddhism reflects this convergence. The

Buddhist reform movement increasingly shifted from being a secluded monastic

pursuit to a form of urban cultural activism and mass religion, necessitating

modern institutional restructuring of the sangha (monastic order) and emphasizing

the need for education and modernization.

For Han Yong-un, this Buddhist reform (yusin) was rooted in Seon (Zen) and the

philosophy of mind-only (yusim), and extended into culture, politics, education,

and thought. Buddhism, for him, was a force for modern transformation.

In August 1968, Seo Jeong-ju (Midang) published his fifth collection, Dongcheon

(Eastern Heaven), and in its preface (“A Word from the Poet”), he revealed that

the poetic experimentation begun in his fourth collection, Silla Grass, had reached

a degree of accomplishment. Of particular note is his admission that he was

“greatly influenced by the unique metaphoric techniques learned from Buddhism.”

As he himself called it “true scenery” (jingyeong), the collections Silla Grass and

Dongcheon—both published in the 1960s—represent the peak of Seo’s poetic

achievement.

At the core of Seo Jeong-ju’s poetic mastery lies what he called “Buddhist

metaphor.”

Its beginnings can be found in his meditations on the “inner Silla” and the

Buddhist notion of “inyeon” (karmic connection). While it is possible to speculate

on the nature of this “Buddhist metaphor,” it is difficult to define it precisely—

because Seo Jeong-ju’s understanding of Buddhism was fundamentally rhetorical,

and expressed almost entirely in poetic form.

서양 문학이 곧 근대문학으로 인식되는 과정 속에서 ‘근대성’이 곧 서구 정신과 문화의 전

적인 이식으로 표현될 때 상대적으로 간과되는 것은 초창기 문학사에서 불교가 개입한 전통주

의와 문화적 민족주의의 탄생과정이다. 불교는 가장 전통적인 종교로서 자체적으로 ‘근대적

지식’과 ‘담론’으로 성장해 가면서 한국 현대문학의 내부에 중요한 영향을 끼친 것으로 확인된

다. 본고는 이러한 ‘불교’ 한국의 현대문학에 끼친 영향과 그 세부적 내용을 석전 박한영과 한

용운, 그리고 미당 서정주의 관계 그리고 그들의 관계를 맺어주는 불교의 ‘근대화’ 과정이라는

역사 속에서 확인하고 밝히고자 한다.

당시 석전 박한영의 위치는 ‘불교와 현대문학’의 상관성 속에서 본다면 ‘위기와 격변’의 상

황 속에서 한용운과 최남선, 더 나아가서는 ‘전통’과 ‘근대’라는 서로 다른 시스템을 ‘조선’이

라는 ‘실체’로 통합하는 과정에서 가장 중요한 매개자 역할을 했다. 유심과 님, 유신과 침묵

사이의 긴장처럼, 하나의 표상은 균질적인 것들의 종합이 아니라 알고 보면 서로 상이한 충동

들의 봉합으로 구성되어 있는 것이다. ‘조선’이라는 실체를 ‘신성한 것’으로 만들어 가는 과정

에서 ‘국토’와 ‘자연’이라는 구체적 표상이 발견되고 그것이 문학적 대상이 되는 것처럼, 한용

운의 ‘님’ 또한 ‘조선’, ‘불교’, ‘전통’, ‘진리’가 구체적 표상으로 나타난 ‘문학적 대상’이라고

할 수 있다. 한국의 현대문학이 서구 정신 혹은 근대 정신의 이식과 그 산물이라고 말하는 견

해에서 간과되는 것은 그러한 근대성이 구체화된 표상으로 정착되는 과정에서 투여된 기존의

‘문화 전통’인데, 1915년을 전후로 한 시점 이후부터 근대적 불교 지식인의 활동은 이런 문화

전통의 한 축을 적극적으로 담당하고 있었다. 1895년 ‘승니입성금지령’이 해제되면서 불교계

종교활동과 문화운동이 조선의 도성 ‘한양’과 식민지 도시 ‘경성’이라는 공간에서 비로소 가능

하게 되었다. 불교’가 근대적 종교로 스스로를 혁신하려고 할 때, 가장 커다란 과제는 신학문

습득, 근대적 교육기관 설립, 통일된 단체 구성, 인쇄, 출판 등의 근대적 미디어 제도를 갖추

는 것이었다. 1910년대 식민지 도시 경성의 중심지인 종로(수송동)일대에서 불교계 활동은 당

시 문화 활동의 중심 역할을 담당하던 ‘문학계’와 연결될 수밖에 없었는데, 양건식, 최남선,

정인보, 이광수 등의 불교계 입문이나 교류는 그런 사실을 반증하는 사실 중 일부이다. 경성

에서의 문화 활동이 ‘불교 유신’의 큰 핵심축을 이루게 되는 과정은, 승려의 도성 출입이 허가

되고 식민지화가 진행되면서 ‘불교’의 ‘산중 불교’ 체제가 새로운 도시 문화 활동으로서의 불

교, 불교 대중화로 전환될 뿐만 아니라 승려 교육의 중요성 증가로 인한 ‘교육기관’의 필요성

등 종단 자체의 근대적 제도 정비가 절실해짐으로써 나타난 현상이었다. 이런 전후의 상황을

고려해 보면, 한용운에게 불교의 유신은 불교의 선과 유심 사상을 바탕으로 ‘문화, 정치, 교

육, 사상’의 전반에 걸쳐 불교가 영향을 미치고 그 근대적 혁신을 주도하는 것을 의미한다.

1968년 8월 서정주는 그의 다섯 번째 시집 동천을 출간하면서 ｢시인의 말｣이라는 서두의

글을 통해 제4시집 신라초에서 이미 시작된 그의 모종의 시적 모색이 동천을 통해 어느

정도 성취를 이루었다는 속내를 밝힌다. 여기에서 유난히 관심을 끄는 부분은 “불교에서 배운

특수한 은유법의 매력에 크게 힘입었음을 고백”한다는 표현이다. 서정주 스스로 ‘진경’이라고

말한 내용에서 알 수 있듯이, 신라초와 동천 두 시집이 발간된 1960년대는 서정주가 한

국의 대표적인 시인으로서 그 시적 매력과 완성도가 거의 정점에 이르던 시기라고 할 수 있

다. 한 마디로 서정주의 뛰어난 시적 성취의 핵심에는 그가 말한 ‘불교적 은유법’이 존재하며,

그 시작은 ‘신라의 내부’, 그리고 ‘인연’이라는 화두에 있었다고 할 수 있다. 서정주가 말하는

‘불교적 은유법’이 무엇인지는 추측은 가능하지만, 그 실체를 말하기는 실제로는 쉽지 않은데,

그 이유는 그의 ‘불교’에 대한 이해가 기본적으로 ‘수사학(은유법)’의 형태로 터득되었고 그것

이 고스란히 시의 형태로 표출되기 때문이다

이 글은 조선시대 승려 행장 109건을 대상으로 하여, 승려 행장에서 반복적으로 등장하는 '꿈' 의 서술 양상을 분석함으로써, 승려를 이야기하는 문법의 하나로 꿈 화소의 기능을 고찰하고자 한다. 조선시대 승려 행장을 전수 조사한 결과, 꿈은 출생, 수행, 입적 등 승려의 인생에서 주요 전환점에 해당하는 대목에 반복적으로 등장하는데, 이를 종합해보면 승려의 일생을 서술할 때 꿈이 승려의 정체성과 초월성을 구체화하는 핵심적 서사 장치로 작용함을 확인할 수 있다. 이 글에서는 특히 꿈의 등장 시점, 꿈을 꾸는 주체, 내용 및 유형, 기능을 기준으로 삼아 분류하고, 이를 유가 사대부의 행장 구조와 비교하는 방식을 통해 승려 행장에서 꿈이 갖는 특수성과 장르적 기능을 살펴볼 것이다. 승려 행장에서 꿈은 출생의 비범성 및 출가를 예고하는 태몽, 승려의 성향 및 법맥 등을 고지하는 계시몽, 입적을 예고하고 육신의 초탈을 증명하는 입적몽 및 사리몽 등 다양한 양상으로 나타나는데, 결과적으로 '승려' 라는 존재를 초월적으로 형상화하는 데 기여하고 있음을 알 수 있다. 이는 조선시대의 승려 행장에 드러나는 특징이나 그 서사적 연원을 더듬어보면 중국의 고승전이나 더 나아가서는 인도의 불교 설화 등의 서사 전통과도 맞닿아 있다. 이에 이 글에서는 승려 행장에서 꿈 화소의 양상과 기능을 살펴 승려의 생애가 조형되는 서사적

문법을 분석함으로써 승려 서사의 구성적 특성과 형성 논리를 밝히고자 한다. 나아가 불교적 서사 전통과의 연속성을 고찰하고, 유가 행장과의 비교를 통해 승려 행장의 독자적 서사 문법을 규명하고 그 문학사적 정위를 시도하고자 한다.

Kim Hae-gyeong, that is, poet Lee Sang (李箱) is a brand of the individual Lee Sang. The influence of the Lee Sang brand that has spread throughout Korean society has continued since his debut in 1930. Interpretations of his poetry have also become more profound over time. The sentence “Do you know the stuffed genius?” from Lee Sang’s 1936 work “Wings” is a phrase that Koreans often quote when writing something. In addition to Lee Sang, there are other literary figures whose works have been quoted and made known to the public. For example, Han Yong-un's "You are gone", Kim So-wol's "When you go away because you find it disgusting to see me", and Seo Jeong-ju's "For twenty-three years, it was the wind that raised me" in his self-portrait. Such sentences are also often used in advertising copy. In 2019, Go Min-jeong, Go Jeong-seon, Kim Ho-young, Moon Jin-hwa, Won Ria, and Jeon Yo-han published a book with the phrase "It was the wind that raised me" as the title. "The small ball shot by a dwarf" written by Jo Se-hee in 1978 is also often parodied. Titles that condense the content of a work are effective in arousing the public's emotions. This shows that these works have a great influence on Korean society. Among them, poet Lee Sang's works are enough to arouse readers' curiosity or express wonder at the writer's spirituality, and as a result, there are still those who are inspired by him and continue to create works. In 1975, the Lee Sang Literary Award was established. Let's find out why the Lee Sang brand is still alive and what is the source of this vitality of the Lee Sang brand.

Lee Sang has advanced Korean literature by more than half a century. Lee Sang's attempts are on the same intellectual and emotional level as those attempted in France, England, Spain, and Germany at the time. In the past, poets thought that poetry was about describing objects in a sensual and beautiful language, but Lee Sang just simplified it. This means abstraction. And what is difficult to express in words is shown in diagrams or pictures in his poem. The poetry of seeing conveys meaning through images. Lee Sang is a very progressive, experimental, and forward-thinking figure. Almost all literary researchers in our country rush to study Lee Sang. Lee Sang is a polyhedron in which new aspects are discovered. Lee Sang researchers are currently conducting many critiques and discussions that transcend texts, but this is the reason why Lee Sang's literature continues to be obscure. This paper raises a discussion about this.

Modernist authors repeatedly created fictions that showed the deleterious effects of poor reading practices. This talk shows the dangerous or deadly effects of uncritical reading in works of Conrad, Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield and goes on to discuss the ways in which the characters’ interpretive dilemmas are re-staged within the text for the reader to experience. This often results in the creation of a text designed for two implied readers, one of which is aware of the limitations of the other. Thus, characters in Conrad’s early text, “An Outpost of Progress” (1899). The men, who manage a trading station in Africa, find some torn books left behind by their predecessor. For the first time, they read imaginative literature, greedily consuming fiction by Dumas, Fenimore Cooper, and Balzac. In the same paragraph, they are depicted reading imperial propaganda in an old newspaper; here too, they have a naive and credulous response to the material, their emotions are readily manipulated by the author, and they are entirely unable to read either text critically. Enjoying the way they had been cast as significant agents in this impressive narrative of imperial enlightenment, “Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves” (94-95). Somewhat later they find themselves involved in the more brutal aspects of colonialism and soon they become implicated in slave trading. Implicit in Conrad’s tale is a sustained critique of any simplistically mimetic approach to reading, a keen awareness of the fabricated nature of all writings, the motives behind their production and the methods by which they attain their emotional effects, as well as a more general suspicion toward widely held or officially sanctioned worldviews. The characters’ inability to read either kind of text critically—to see through the two related kinds of fabrication—contributes to their deaths. Their ignorance and helplessness are vividly contrasted to the knowledge and pragmatism of the African bookkeeper, Makola. Elsewhere in modernist fiction, we see that uncritical reading is associated with delusion, failure, and death. This narrative strategy is then juxtaposed to African American authors’ works directed to two different and at times opposed readerships, white and Black, as the concept of the dual implied reader is further developed and extended. Numerous works employ this division, including the stories of Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison's *Invisible Man,* and Ishmael Reed's *Flight to Canada.* Ellison discloses the material effects of reading and being (mis)read, laying particular stress on the writing of history and the documentation of those who are usually written out of its pages. Reed discloses the unexpected virtues and dangers of reading in his novel, as when his protagonist publishes a poem which brings him fame, but it “also tracked him down. It pointed to where he were hiding. It was their bloodhound” (13). I theorize this practice, too.

While self-reflexivity has been a part of comics almost since the art form's inception, it is mainly since the end of the 20th century that metacomics has diversified to include a look at the now long history of what French specialists call the "ninth art" itself. This gesture, which aims in particular to claim for comics the status of a recognized art form, also takes into account the tradition of comic-book bashing: in an often humorous way, comics take up the criticism of comics, which have long been seen as unserious, as a low art form, as reserved for a children’s audience to whom it might even be harmful. Yet this self-reflexive questioning of comics is often accompanied by the depiction of a vertiginous fictional immersion that risks engulfing real readers and fictional characters alike.

Does this fear of comics also reflect a fear of fiction in general? Or of some type of popular fiction that is perceived as particularly dangerous?

Focusing on a selection of European and North American comics, I will discuss the link between metafiction and fear of fiction in the specific context of an art combining text and image.

My talk will consider direct criticisms of comics, as in "Ex Libris" (2021) by US artist Matt Madden, for example, when one of the many volumes of comics read by the character (and the reader through his eyes) opens on a page where a librarian warns against comics, “seduction of the innocent” – an obvious reference to Fredric Wertham’s infamous 1954 pamphlet. In other works, classic criticism is taken up by the characters themselves, by an unsympathetic grumpy old man in Quebec writer Jean-Paul Eid’s "Le Fond du trou" (2011), or on the contrary in a touching way in German artist Flix’s rewriting of "Don Quixote" (2012): Alonso Quijano, the new Don Quixote, writes to a local newspaper to complain about comics that, in his view, “have nothing to do with reality”. Other works evoke the fear of comics in more subtle ways, such as Schuiten and Peeters’ archivist character, relegated to the “myths and legends subsection” - or, more symbolically, the “great void” that threatens to swallow up Imbattable, the very special superhero by French author Pascal Jousselin, or the ground that slips away from Julius Corentin Acquefacques, Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s famous hero. Finally, two works that are no longer strictly speaking comics, "L’Archiviste" by Schuiten and Peeters (1984) and "Le livre des livres" by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (2017), offer collections of vertiginous possible comic worlds. For these incomplete, undeveloped worlds, fictional immersion is only suggested - the reader may be frustrated or relieved to escape the danger of fiction.

En vertu de différences concernant la conception de la nature de la fiction et de ses éléments constitutfs on rencontre une acceptation plus ou moins développée ou au contraire un rejet de la fiction narrative et de son ontologie. Le cas semble très différent lorsqu'il s'agit de fictions dites juridiquest ou plus largement normatives. Cette différence est toutefois trompeuse. Les fiction normatives sont généralement mal analysées et utilisées ensuite sous d'autres appellation comme cela peut se voir actuellement avec l'attribution de personnalité à des entité "naturelles" comme des rivières ou des montagnes. On montrera que la peur ou le rejet de la ficiton plus exactement identifiée se retrouve dans les domaines les plus divers.

Parmi les ouvrages littéraires critiques écrits sur le roman entre le 17ième et le 18ième siècle, le livre de l’Abbé Jacquin, Entretiens sur les Romans, publié en 1755, adopte sans doute l’une des positions les plus réactionnaires à l’encontre du genre romanesque. S’inscrivant dans la droite lignée du père Porée dont le réquisitoire prononcé en latin puis traduit en français a rempli un rôle majeur dans l’ordre de proscription des romans décrété en 1737, Jacquin rédige un non moins virulent procès long de 396 pages. Le livre développe comme on le verra un long argumentaire qui mène à une condamnation irrévocable du genre romanesque. Les raisons qui motivent le rejet du roman ont déjà été maintes fois invoquées dans d’autres ouvrages de critique littéraire, notamment l’ « Avis au lecteur » de l’Histoire indienne d’Anaxandre et d’Orazie de François de Boisrobert (1629) dont les échos se répercutent jusque dans les Délassements de l’homme sensible de Baculard d’Arnaud (1789), les multiples comptes-rendus le plus souvent hostiles à l’encontre de genre romanesque présentés dans les Mémoires de Trévoux, ou encore le Voyage merveilleux du Prince Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie de Hyacinthe Bougeant (1735). Le Financier de Mouhy publié la même année que Les Entretiens de Jacquin, en 1755, se présente comme une réponse aux attaques du théoricien rétrograde. Mouhy s’adresse directement à Jacquin dans la préface du roman intitulée : Essai pour servir de Réponse à un Ouvrage, intitulé Entretiens sur les Romans, par M. l’Abbé J., in-12, 396 pages. Ce n’est pas en théoricien que Mouhy réagit au procès intenté contre le genre romanesque comme on pourrait le croire à une première lecture de la préface. Celle-ci sert de présentation à un « roman à la carte » qui répond à la charte moraliste du pouvoir ecclésiastique. Or, en suivant les règles prescrites par le porte-parole de l’institution religieuse, Mouhy montre l’impossibilité d’être d’un tel roman. De fait, la préface permet à Mouhy d’annoncer l’enjeu argumentatif de son propre roman : Le Financier fonctionne comme une réfutation à l’envers qui exhibe en les appliquant sérieusement l’ineptie des critères imposés par Jacquin et l’absurdité du principe d’imitation appliqué indifféremment.

Je propose de présenter ces deux textes peu connus afin de mettre en lumière la position extrême de Jacquin qui s’exprime à un stade tardif de la querelle du roman. En récupérant les arguments déjà maintes fois présentés par ses prédécesseurs, en ignorant les avancées littéraires de son temps et en se référant majoritairement aux romans héroïques du grand siècle plutôt qu’aux œuvres fictionnelles innovatrices des années trente, Jacquin adopte une posture qui exprime la peur des enjeux démocratiques inscrits en creux dans l’écriture romanesque en général et sur les potentialités subversives propres aux Lumières en particulier. Ce que Mouhy le romancier entend défendre.

Between World War II and the fall of the communist regime, censorship in Romania took various forms, shaped by shifting historical and ideological developments. The Central Military Censorship, which was in charge of book control and suppression, was established as early as 1945. Officially, its mission was the "defascization" of Romanian culture; unofficially, its aim was sovietization. From 1948 onward, the state maintained a strict monopoly over publishing and book distribution, continuously adapting censorship policies — both overt and covert — to align with evolving propaganda needs.

While the censorship of non-fiction was typically straightforward, fiction posed a more complex challenge. Certain themes were explicitly banned: eroticism, sentimentality, mysticism, “demoralizing” narratives, or works sympathetic to capitalist countries all ran counter to the regime’s ideological goals. However, beyond these obvious no-go areas, censors viewed fiction with deep suspicion. All along the different phases of the totalitarian regime, literary escapism was prohibited and any critical allusions — real or imagined — to contemporary realities triggered repression on the grounds that they had the potential to document the failures of the regime. This resulted in the boundary between fact and fiction shifting constantly as well as in an ongoing redefinition of the concept of fiction itself.

Our paper will explore some of the implications of those shifts in the practice of writing and reading. To that end we will draw on archival records of censorship practices and literary comments and interpretations to be found in Securitate surveillance files, with the discourse of literary criticism as a counterpoint.

Le Mouvement d’avant-garde des années 1980 peut être perçu à la fois comme une reproduction de la Révolution littéraire du 4 mai 1919 et une rébellion contre celui-ci. En ce qui concerne le Roman d’avant-garde, d’un côté, il puise dans la littérature occidentale pour repousser les limites des conventions traditionnelles littéraires. D’un autre côté, il se distingue par ce que les critiques des années 1990 qualifient de « mauvais genre », tels que le manque de critique sociale, la description de la violence et du sexe. Il manifeste ainsi un rejet, voire un certain dédain, à l’égard de la forme de roman du 4 mai.

Cependant, après une effervescence initiale, le Roman d’avant-garde connaît un déclin rapide dans les années 90. Après les manifestations du 4 juin 1989, L’atmosphère littéraire, autrefois dynamique, se redéfinit dans une direction plus conservatrice. Les écrivains d’avant-garde abandonnent leur posture révolutionnaire pour se retourner vers le réalisme. Quant à l’attitude des critiques, les commentaires dans les revues restent mesurés, mais les attaques sur Internet se font de plus en plus virulentes. Ainsi, le Roman d’avant-garde, qui était autrefois l’attaquant, est devenu, en fin de compte, la cible de ces attaques.

Afin d’analyser la position spéciale du Roman d’avant-garde dans l’histoire de la littérature chinoise, cet article propose une analyse de l’hostilité envers la fiction, à partir de l’espace poétique dans la nouvelle de GE Fei, La Nuée d’oiseaux bruns. Dans cette nouvelle, d’une certaine perspective, rien n’aura lieu que le lieu. En réalité, ce récit met en scène une cartographie littéraire des « hétérotopies », concept que Michel Foucault forge pour désigner des « espaces absolument autres ». À travers la description des paysages à la fois clos et ouverts, tels que bateaux échoués, ponts brisés, GE Fei invente des espaces concrets qui invitent à héberger l’imaginaire. En même temps, grâce à la structure de la mise en abyme, ce récit permet à l’espace fictionnel de refléter et contester l’espace réel où vit l’auteur, à savoir l’École Normale Supérieure de l’Est — foyer du Roman d’avant-garde. Néanmoins, ces hétérotopies dans La Nuée d’oiseaux bruns peuvent-elles s’immerger dans l’espace du discours d’aujourd’hui ? Ou bien, dans une certaine mesure, ces hétérotopies se réduisent en utopie : un monde clos, figé, uniforme, qui refuse les possibilités d’habiter autrement. De ce fait, plusieurs problématiques émergent : de quelle manière Ge Fei établit-il ces hétérotopies littéraires ? Comment ces hétérotopies s’inscrivent-elles dans l’espace du discours ? Et pourquoi s’effondrent-elles ?

Afin de traiter ces problématiques, cette recherche propose de réexaminer La Nuée d’oiseaux bruns avec plusieurs sources secondaires : critiques issues de différents médias, écrits autobiographiques, ainsi que mes interviews avec GE Fei et mon enquête de terrain à l’École Normale Supérieure de l’Est en 2024.

The concerns raised by fiction might be deeply related to (or have a lot in common with) those stirred up by AI, such as issues of reality and authenticity, creation and authorship, and ethical concerns like possible deception and manipulation. This paper explores the divergent attitudes toward fiction and imaginative literature in ancient Greek and Chinese philosophical traditions, focusing on the perspectives of Plato and Aristotle in the West and Confucius and Zhuangzi in the East. Plato on one hand regards poet highly as God’s “minister”, on the other hand criticized fiction as a dangerous imitation of reality that corrupts the soul and misleads the mind ( Republic, Book X), Aristotle in his Poetics justified for the fiction by celebrating its capacity to reveal universal truths and evoke catharsis. In contrast, Confucius emphasized the moral and didactic utility of literature, valuing historical truth over imaginative creation (“述而不作，信而好古”), while Zhuangzi embraced fiction as a creative and transformative tool for challenging conventional thinking and exploring the fluidity of meaning（eg. challenging Confucius’s ideas by re-telling his stories and refiguring his image）. These philosophical differences have profound implications for contemporary AI ethics, shaping how Western and Chinese societies approach the development, regulation, and use of artificial intelligence. Plato’s skepticism toward fiction and his emphasis on truth as an absolute ideal may influence Western societies to prioritize transparency and accuracy in AI systems. This could manifest in a strong demand for explainable AI (XAI) and rigorous validation of AI outputs to ensure they align with factual and ethical standards. Aristotle’s appreciation for fiction as a means to reveal universal truths might encourage Western societies to explore creative and imaginative uses of AI, such as in art, literature, and education, while still maintaining a focus on ethical boundaries. Confucius’s emphasis on moral utility and historical truth may lead Chinese society to prioritize AI applications that serve social harmony, ethical governance, and practical benefits over purely imaginative or speculative uses. Zhuangzi’s embrace of fluidity and creativity might inspire a more flexible approach to AI ethics in China, where the boundaries between truth and fiction are seen as less rigid, allowing for innovative applications of AI in storytelling, virtual reality, and other imaginative domains. Of course, the AI development came in a highly globalized era, therefore, the thoughts of these ancient philosophers would merge together to construct the global AI ethics. Considering this, it is definitely worthwhile to ask the question of “what would ancient philosophers say about AI?” We may seek for the answers based on their attitudes towards fiction.

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.

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.

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.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various disciplines, including literature and comparative studies. This paper explores how AI-powered tools, such as machine learning and natural language processing, are reshaping the methodologies of comparative literature. By analyzing texts across multiple languages and cultural contexts, AI enables a broader and deeper exploration of literary themes, styles, and historical narratives.

This study examines AI’s role in literary analysis, focusing on its ability to detect intertextuality, translate complex works with cultural nuance, and generate new literary forms. Using case studies from diverse global literatures, the paper highlights both the opportunities and challenges AI presents to traditional literary scholarship. While AI enhances textual analysis and accessibility, it also raises ethical concerns about authorship, originality, and the human essence of literary interpretation.

By engaging with theoretical perspectives from digital humanities and comparative literature, this paper argues that AI should not be seen as a replacement for human literary scholars but rather as an innovative tool that enhances literary discourse. Ultimately, the integration of AI into comparative literature offers new pathways for cross-cultural engagement and a redefinition of what it means to study literature in the digital age.

Artificial Intelligence Literature is a brand-new combination of literature art with new technologies, programming, and digital platforms. How does the production mechanism of AI literature actually work? What is its spiritual essence? Does it have a subjectivity of literary creation? If so, what kind of subjectivity is such a subjectivity? Is it a product of human emotional experience? Are its mechanisms capable of artistic imagination, rational reasoning, and emotional perception? Based on the game theories, how are the production mechanisms of AI literature substantially different and distinct from the relevant game mechanisms? Can it produce spiritual experiences beyond what is already in the digital information base of human experience? Can it create new and original artistic forms? Can it produce so-called literary works that are innovative beyond the programming of its mechanisms? All of these require a theoretical perspective and philosophical reflection.

topic:B3. Convergence of Literature and Technology

• Artificial Intelligence, Posthumanism/Transhumanism, and Literary Discourse

Dystopian narratives explore “negative Utopias” placed in imaginatively and seemingly distant future settings in which the dreams and ideals of great human minds not only have been realized, but have become nightmares as well, turning against the human society they once sought to improve, develop, or help avoid catastrophes. In its portrayal of utopias turned upside down, where an imagined Future mirrors a very real Present, dystopian fiction has always been one of the most powerful and revealing indexes to the anxieties of contemporary times in relation to social conditions, political systems, and the potential dangers embedded in Utopian visions that are mainly governed by technology. In Klara and the Sun by renowned Japanese British novelist Kazu Ishiguro and The Mushroom by accomplished Omani author Mohamed Al-Agami, the text invites us to consider major contemporary challenges or nightmares: artificial intelligence, gene editing, and conditioning, all of which seem “out of our control.”

In the fictional world of Klara and the Sun, AI has already upended the social order and human relationships as we have gone accustomed to for centuries. Intelligent machines have become human companions, or “Artificial Friends.” Even children having had their intelligence upgraded via genetic engineering have become another form of AI. These enhanced, or “lifted” humans create a social schism, dividing people into an elite ruling order and an underclass of the unmodified and grudgingly idle. The narrator of the novel is Klara, an “artificial friend” to an invalid girl who has been lifted. Through Klara’s narrative voice, insights, and philosophical musings, as Ishiguro himself expressed, we “start to look at each other as individuals in a slightly different way.” What is it that makes individuals unique and special? “Is there really something like a soul inside our bodies? If we have enough data, will we be able to reproduce our character and personalities?”

The Mushroom, though built around a detective plot and enveloped in mystery, is philosophical in nature. It is narrated by three “robots” or “Insalat” an acronym for human (Ins إنس) + machine (alat ألة) often in monologue form. The novel focuses on the future superiority of the machine over man, the creature over the creator. Al-Ajami raises scientific and existential questions with in-depth references to the mathematics of the Persian polymath Al-Khwarizmi, the philosophy of Frensh Gilles Deleuze, and the symbolism of the Simurgh bird in the Persian Sufi poet Farid al-Din al-Attar's Conference of the Bird (Mantiq al Tayr منطق الطير). Each of the three robot narrators has a different perspective on the murder of an elderly woman who suffered schizophrenia and was, for years, taken care of by an Artificial companion and medical assistant. Like Klara, The Mushroom explores what constitutes a human being, feelings or the body? scientific capitalism and the lack of morality for the sake of profit, and the perceived conflict when machines replace humans.

With amazing prophetic tones and details, both novels act as witnesses to the ever-endangered core of our human nature: our empowering emotional interconnectedness and infallible sense of hope. Both novelists and their artificial but intelligent narrators host readers to live the atmosphere of a scientific experiment with intense spiritual and existential dimensions.