Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), écrivain d’origine irlandaise, a écrit et (auto-)traduit ses textes principalement en deux langues, anglais et français. Bien que son activité bilingue ait suscité l’intérêt des chercheurs, la manière dont il a conçu ses œuvres bilingues reste insuffisamment explorée.

Ma thèse examine la poétique de l’auto-traduction chez Beckett à travers une analyse intra-intertextuelle de Company/Compagnie (1980), l’une de ses œuvres les plus autobiographiques. L’auto-traduction y est envisagée à la fois dans son acception stricte et métaphorique.

L’étude s’organise autour de trois axes principaux :

1. L’auto-traduction linguistique, analysée dans les versions anglaises et françaises de Company/Compagnie (intra-intertextualité interlinguistique).

2. L’auto-traduction autobiographique, explorée au sein de Company/Compagnie comme (ré)écriture de soi (intratextualité).

3. L’auto-traduction intersémiotique, examinant les correspondances entre Company/Compagnie et d’autres textes contemporains de Beckett (intertextualité ou auto-textualité).

Cette recherche repense l’auto(-)traduction comme un principe créateur fondamental structurant l’univers artistique bilingue de Beckett. Elle ouvre de nouvelles perspectives interdisciplinaires, touchant aux études beckettiennes, à la traductologie, et à la création littéraire et artistique.

This study explores how women writers in modern Korea and Türkiye utilized writing as a strategy of resistance against male-dominated literary circles, drawing on Elaine Showalter's Gynocriticism and Thierry Laurent's concept of Autofiction. By combining these two theories, this study analyzes how women's writing functions beyond self-expression to serve as social and political resistance.

The research focuses on two texts: Tan-sil and Joo-young (1924) by Myeong-sun Kim (1896-1951), Korea's first modern woman writer, and Göç Temizliği (1985) by Adalet Ağaoğlu (1929-2020), an established canonical writer in Turkish literature. Despite their temporal and spatial differences, both works represent significant examples of resistance through autofictional writing within male-dominated literary worlds.

Tan-sil and Joo-young employs an omniscient third-person narrator who describes external events and internal psychology through a frame narrative. Beginning in 1920s Gyeongseong, the narrative explores Tan-sil's life trajectory from late 19th century Pyongyang. The protagonist parallels Kim's life experiences, reflecting her resistance against patriarchal society's oppression as a New Woman. Through detailed descriptions of Tan-sil's inner world, Kim presents a female-centric worldview that challenges male-dominated perspectives. By borrowing the voice of Tan-sil's half-brother Jeong-taek to reveal social prejudice against women, she challenges male authority.

Ağaoğlu's Göç Temizliği is a memoir-novel where the author appears as both narrator and protagonist, reflecting on thirty years of literary life through personal documents discovered while relocating from Ankara to Istanbul in 1983. Ağaoğlu interweaves her professional trajectory with personal relationships, particularly focusing on interactions with her patriarchal father and male literary critics. She deliberately blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, asserting personal truths through autobiographical narration and literary reconstruction.

Comparative analysis reveals both similarities and differences in the authors' resistance writing strategies. Both writers utilize autofictional elements to narrate their experiences and oppressive social structures, strategically blending fact and fiction. Through fictional narratives based on lived experiences, they reinterpret their experiences and challenge male-centric literary discourse, emphasizing how autofictional writing can serve as a powerful tool for establishing their presence within literary boundaries. However, while Kim emphasizes fictionality to convey her voice indirectly, Ağaoğlu foregrounds autobiographical truth for direct expression, reflecting their different historical contexts.

This study demonstrates how women's autofictional writing functioned as social and political resistance while revealing universal and specific aspects of women's literature across cultures. Kim and Ağaoğlu not only developed women's literary traditions in their countries — Kim by creating new pathways for women's writing and Ağaoğlu by achieving canonical status — but also pioneered narrative strategies that continue to inspire contemporary writers. Through the methodological integration of Gynocriticism and Autofiction theories, this research advances methodological approaches in comparative literature studies while expanding the scope of research between Korean and Turkish literature.

Drawing on Rivera Garza's conceptualization of disappropriation in Los muertos indóciles, this paper traces the technological evolution of documentary practices from Nadie me verá llorar to her more recent works, particularly Autobiografía del algodón and El invencible verano de Liliana. While Nadie me verá llorar relied primarily on traditional archival research, her subsequent works dramatically expand technological mediation, using digital mapping, database technologies, and online communication platforms to further decentralize authorial control and enact disappropriation.

In Nadie me verá llorar, Rivera Garza's archival research suggested an initial proto-technological approach to documentation, meticulously reconstructing historical narratives through careful technological mediation of historical sources. However, in Autobiografía del algodón and El invencible verano de Liliana, technological intervention becomes more radical, transforming from a documentary method to the narrative infrastructure itself.

Digital mapping and database technologies in these works become fundamental mechanisms of disappropriation, decentralizing traditional narrative structures and creating multi-layered documentary practices that fragment singular authorial perspectives. These technological tools actively redistribute narrative agency, transforming how spatial and temporal experiences are documented and understood. Digital communications emerge as both source material and infrastructural mechanism of disappropriation. In this context, technology is not merely an external tool, but an intrinsic process of deconstructing the ownership of memory, fundamentally altering how personal and collective experiences are constructed and transmitted.

By analyzing these technological transformations, this study reveals how digital tools facilitate disappropriation, radically reimagining literary creation by challenging established concepts of authorship, documentation, and narrative formation in Rivera Garza's works. This technological approach not only disrupts traditional literary practices but also opens a space for rethinking how disappropriation can contribute to the democratization of narrative, in line with global demands for greater justice, equity, and inclusivity. In this sense, Rivera Garza's works suggest that technological mediation—through its deconstruction of established power structures—can serve as a mechanism for reshaping authorial practice, enabling a more inclusive, equitable, and participatory literary landscape.

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.

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

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

Focusing on the research paradigm of aeromobility, this article aims to sort out the narrative and imagination of aerospace in Chinese and Western literary creation since the 20th century, and explore people's complex attitudes towards time and space compression, scientific and technological progress, and different assumptions about the unknown world in different cultural backgrounds, so as to provide reference for mutual learning and cultural exchanges between Chinese and Western civilizations.

Although India and China have disparate historical backgrounds, the two countries share the Oriental cultural root. Natyasatra, as the masterpiece of Bharata, has long attracted the attention of international scholars contributing the cultural, religious and theatrical studies, including West scholars who parallel this classic with Aristotle’s Poetics and Chinese scholars who compare this Indian canon with Chinese ancient treatises, i.e. Wen Xin Diao Long, or The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

However, Chinese theatrical theories were epitomized in Ming and Qing Dynasty, during which Xian Qing Ou Ji, or Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling by Li Yu, is a systematical theatrical encyclopedia that could rival Natyasastra in scope and comprehensiveness but has long been ignored. Taking the theatrical theories as a microsome, I would explore the differentiation in various cultures and prospective mutual learning in Oriental civilizations, which is the central aim of thematology in comparative literature. In particular, regarding the ontology of drama, the principles in theatrical composition and performance, the style of drama as well as the functions of drama are all discussed in detail in both of books, yet the religion and philosophical ideas largely shaped the ideas into diverse directions.

Through the comparative lens, the study into the similarities and differences of the theatrical theories in Natyasastra and Xian Qing Ou Ji would not only commit to the inheritance of national classic poetics and contribute to the understanding of the general Oriental aesthetics, distinguishing the East from the West represented by ancient Greek, furthermore embodying the multicultural dimensions in world literature, but also experiment a new avenue of inquiry of literary theories, shifting from pursuing homogeneity in comparative literature to the mutual learning of disparate civilizations in world literature.

In the early 1960s, young Bob Dylan entered the scene and core of the New York counterculture movement, perceiving the popularity of the distinctive ideas from the Chinese classic "I Ching" among the youth represented by the hippies, which were quite different from Western traditions. Through reading, communication, and in-depth contemplation, Bob Dylan artistically transformed the philosophies in the "I Ching", such as the simplicity of the great way, change and constancy, and the interdependence of opposites. He successively created songs like "Blowin' in the Wind", "The Times They Are a-Changin'", and "Like a Rolling Stone", which reflected the contemporary value of ancient Chinese I Ching thought in terms of form, content, and philosophical connotations. The "I Ching" also had significant enlightening significance for Dylan's artistic creation that had a global impact. Dylan's reception of the "I Ching" is an important case of Chinese culture being introduced into the United States and having a profound influence, which deserves the attention of the academic community.

The final and most destructive act of the British Empire on India relies on a simple yet decisive action: the tracing of a line. Partition. The entire subcontinent brutally fractured, lastingly divided. From the onset of colonization, lines have been used as a spatial conquest tool to control, contain and domesticate the Other. Colonial India is a striking example of the imperial use of lines, and their representations in novels of the late 19th century, British and Indians, testify to their omnipresence. Whether through invisible social lines or visible architectural ones, the Other’s place is assigned, defined, and relegated to the margin – behind the line traced by the imperial power. Yet although these lines are represented at times as immutable, each limit calls for its crossing. The liminal characters, or line-crossers, keep evolving in the margin of imperial lines and crossing them.

This paper demonstrates the crucial role of lines in geocritical analysis, by rethinking lines as not only a narrative device, but as an essential conceptual device in spatialities. The line creates the place. The delineation of a line onto space divides it, thereby circumscribing a specific fragment of space possessing boundaries, effectively turning it into a place. The line enshrines its power through the cristallization of the code’s – or doxa’s – principles and ideology. Infusing the place with meaning, symbolism, and power, this foundational act is nonetheless constantly challenged and questioned by the literary representations of the crossings. Indeed, based on Westphal’s premise that space possesses its own transgressivity and fluidity, and drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic conception of space, this paper argues that the space of the line is a thick one, endowed with space’s caracteristics – infinite, fluid, labile. By entering this thirdspace or in-between, the line-crossers access agency through lines of flight, their reterritorialization pending.

Whether an act of subversion, transgression or resistance, each crossing shatters the established apparatus of power. The conceptualization of the space of the line, along with literary analysis of line-crossings shed light on underground sites of resistance, laying hidden in the margins. The line’s polymorphic nature displays fascinating aspects of ambivalence and subversion through its oscillations. Within the folds of the space of the line, emerge the possibilities of connection, the actualization of potentials, and the glimpse of another world, a plausible world, within which the encounter between the Self and the Other might, finally, be possible.

Female wanderlust, often depicted as a figure of agency and autonomy, remains largely constrained in film narratives. However, advancements in film techniques, particularly location shooting, have brought paradigmatic changes in storytelling. A polyphony of geographical spaces reshapes and fills prior vacuum space in female subjectivity, generating new imaginations for spatial autonomy, memory, and selfhood in cinematic journeys.

The meaning of wandering could be reconsidered through Baudelaire’s notion of flânerie, introduced in The Painter of Modern Life, which captures the rhythmic acts of strolling through city streets without a set purpose or destination. Benjamin deepens this concept in The Arcades Project, where he frames wandering as a bodily revolution, to resist capitalist modes of production. This perspective is later expanded by Rebecca Solnit, who explored the gendered history of walking, highlighting its social messages in the reclamation of feminist autonomy and resistance. Viewing wandering as an agentic move within intersubjective space, I apply this analysis to the filmic space, which, I consider, shares some essential features with real urban environments.

Thus, I argue that, through a close analysis of two Alain Resnais films, the female protagonists map their space as emotional cartographies shaped by their wandering. These spaces, in turn, become sites of embodied and affective elements, deeply intertwined with personal memory.

Alain Resnais is renowned for his nonlinear narratives and space-time distortions, with mise-en-scène of memory flashbacks frequently interwoven with urban landscapes. Through a comparative analysis of Last Year at Marienbad, and Hiroshima Mon Amour, this paper examines how spatial cartographies engage with filmic narratives, and, ultimately, evoke feminist agency. I draw on the methodologies of psychogeography discussed by Giuliana Bruno, and urban theory from Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord, alongside analysis of filmic segments of wandering. In particular, I explore the closure scene in Hiroshima Mon Amour, where Elle (starring Emmanuelle Riva) walks through empty nighttime streets in Hiroshima, sometimes encountering Hui (starring Eiji Okada) and sometimes not, culminating in a psychological climax. Similarly, I examine the retrospective gardening scene in Last Year at Marienbad, where Delphine Seyrig’s footprints create continuity through geometricity, impossible parallels, and memory.

By focusing on representations of filmic space, this research contributes to understanding how space acquires narrative significance through its virtuality, shaped by its technically mediated nature. The interdisciplinary perspectives I apply—from psychogeography to urban and media theory— enrich its contextual discourses. In conclusion, this paper reimagines female wanderlust through the lens of spatial theory, showcasing how film reinvents narrative autonomy for women as shown in Alain Resnais’ films.

Edouard Glissant introduced and developed a new critical approach to Caribbean identity throughout two of his major works, Caribbean Discourse (1981) and Poetics of Relation (1990). Glissant, while recognizing that all cultures are to some degree “composite cultures,” clarifies the historical, cultural, and geographical conditions that primed the Caribbean for a creolized orientation. This presentation is a comparative literary investigation into societal attitudes towards creolization in nineteenth-century Philippines, Spain, and Louisiana. Following the geo-cultural theories of Glissant and Michael Wiedorn, I develop a framework for comparing peninsular and archipelagic thought. In the application of creolist theories to these geographies, this presentation probes the extensibility of Glissant’s archipelagic and island studies theories beyond the Caribbean context as well as provides a new mode of thinking through cultural connectivity in the nineteenth century. In analyzing works by José Rizal, Benito Pérez Galdós, Kate Chopin, and Lafcadio Hearn, I illuminate a connection between geographical thought and creolist attitudes across literary traditions.

This paper argues the question of translatability in presenting metropolis through digital and literary outlines of travel. As a complex space to translate due to its diversity and alterity, metropolis will be examined here after the ways of expression used in YouTube travel videos presenting Istanbul from the point of view of Korean vloggers. The objective of this paper is to discuss the variety of digital elements in compounding the narrativity of the experience of travel by the agency of small narratives and thus expanding the scope of interpreting the metropolitan city and its diversity as a contemporary world phenomenon and as a matter of consideration for comparative literature.

Abstract：

Marshall McLuhan said that media are the extensions of human senses. In the era of electronic media, media technology not only extends human senses and magnifies sensory perception, but also shapes the natural environment into a sensualized aesthetic environment. The extension of the senses and the sensualization of the environment become the prerequisites for the aesthetic turn in the field of literature.

Sensory aesthetics in the stage of electronic media is different from the linear narrative in the stage of print media, which focuses on the growth of characters and the processes of event and thus has a mode of meaning generation that emphasizes the goal of an ending as well as a central idea. Language centers around reason, and the aesthetics of literature functions towards society, forming the integration mode of truth, goodness, and beauty; what is good and true is beautiful, and the aesthetics must go through the transformation mechanism of social significance.

However, the sensory aesthetics developed in the stage of electronic media is direct, intuition-based aesthetics, highlighting the intuitive image while diluting ideological significance. The sensualization of electronic media arouses the aesthetics of intuitive image in the following three dimensions:

Firstly, it directly shapes the spatial dimension of sensory perception, which departs from the linear overall diachronic continuity narrative, manifesting itself as a non-centralized, non-logical or non-rational language, forming a discontinuous spatial narrative.

Secondly, technology and electronic media directly fuse out the urban landscape environment, which directly become aesthetic objects in literature, as well as the medium that triggers the presentation of people and objects in memory, which, as a result, becomes a concomitant form of sensory images aroused by the electronic media.

Thirdly, electronic media bring in the world of objects and the world of the ordinary life, and creates a perspective of “seeing”. Marshall McLuhan pointed out, satellites provide a perspective of “seeing” from outside the Earth, the world is transformed into a stage, and “seeing” is prominently portrayed. Furthermore, electronic media magnify visual sense and make “seeing” a way of giving form to space, to objects and to daily life. Under the lens of technology, under the basic sensory perception in the sight of “seeing”, objects and daily life, which used to be excluded from literature, has now become the content of literature.

Electronic media technology has not only shaped the threshold and new forms of literature, but also fundamentally shifted the paradigm of literature from being close to philosophy and history in the past linguistic era to being close to art and aesthetics.

In the twentieth century, the rise of the Mandarin movement and the evolution of modern Chinese literature unfolded within the dual context of the interplay between Eastern and Western cultures and the broader transformation of China's modernization. Based on an analysis of various newspaper and magazine texts documenting gramophones and gramophone records during the Republican period (1911–1927), this article seeks to reconstruct the field and boundaries of the integration between media technology and linguistic transformation within the context of the Mandarin movement, drawing on the methodological framework of media archaeology. It explores how the gramophone sparked curiosity and imagination, generated sensory experiences of modernity, and was eventually co-opted by official powers for its capacity to reproduce “real” sounds. This transition saw the gramophone move from private spaces to public domains, where it became intertwined with the dissemination of the national language and the promotion of new literature. The article examines how media technology, through its interaction with statism and nationalism, facilitated the adaptation of modern knowledge production and established a new type of discourse network. At the same time, it exposes the challenges posed by the homogenization of knowledge production, the erosion of subjectivity, and the intricate cultural and political implications embedded within this evolving discourse network.

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

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

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

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

Comparative literature has traditionally critiqued power structures within nation-states and cultural hegemonies, such as the Global North-South divide. However, the rise of multinational corporations (MNCs) as dominant global actors have shifted power away from state-centric frameworks, necessitating new approaches in literary analysis. This study investigates how MNCs influence technology, environmental policies, and sociocultural identities, arguing that they have become central to contemporary critiques of power in literature.

Through close textual analysis of William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’, Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ and Kazi Anis Ahmed’s ‘The World in My Hands’ this research explores how corporate power disrupts traditional notions of national autonomy, ecological balance, and cultural narratives. These texts reveal the pervasive role of corporations in shaping planetary health, commodifying cultural identities, and redefining global systems in the Anthropocene. Central themes—such as environmental degradation, cultural commodification, and the erosion of state power—illustrate the ways literature critiques corporate hegemony.

By integrating interdisciplinary perspectives, including planetary health and cultural studies, this research demonstrates how comparative literature can reposition MNCs as pivotal actors in global power dynamics. Ultimately, this study broadens the field by addressing the ecological, sociopolitical, and cultural transformations driven by corporate dominance in contemporary literature.

The flourishing of Buddhism originated from the Western Regions. It wasn't until the Eastern Han Dynasty that it spread to China. The dissemination and practice of Buddhism can be regarded as an excellent paradigm for general interpretation and practice. Starting from the textual analysis of the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters, the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, and the Diamond Sutra, this article explores the interpretive logic and techniques of the Buddha in clarifying Buddhist doctrines and promoting Buddhism, and seeks aspects that can be learned from the successful practice of Buddhist interpretation, thereby enriching the discourse resources of contemporary hermeneutics and promoting public interpretive practice.

The French scholar Pierre Bourdieu put forward the field theory. For Buddhism, the interpretive field is equally important. In Buddhist discourse, the speech itself, the recorder, time, the interpreter, space, and the object of interpretation are manifested as the "Five Evidences of Faith" or the "Six Conditions of Completion." The Five Evidences of Faith of Buddhist scriptures are five elements that prove the authenticity of Buddhist scriptures: "Thus" (the accomplishment of faith), meaning that the content of the Buddhist scriptures is true and trustworthy; "I heard" (the accomplishment of hearing), indicating that disciples such as Ananda heard the Buddha's words with their own ears; "At one time" (the accomplishment of time), which is the time when the Dharma was expounded; "The Buddha" (the accomplishment of the master), highlighting that the subject of the Dharma expounding is the Buddha; "In a certain place" (the accomplishment of place), clarifying the location where the Dharma was expounded. The Five Evidences of Faith can inspire confidence in the listeners or readers of Buddhist scriptures, pointing out the importance of the interpretive field and interpretive form for the interpretive content. Similarly, the "Six Conditions of Completion" mentioned in the general preface explanation of the Sutra of Forty-two Chapters is the same. Compared with the "Five Evidences of Faith," it adds "the assembly" (i.e., the audience present at the Dharma assembly).

The Buddhist scripture texts record the stories of the Buddha's oral teachings and public interpretations to the public. If we borrow the oral formula theory of Parry-Lord and Richard Bauman's performance theory in the field of folklore to shift from the study of the meaning of Buddhist scriptures themselves to the study of oral formulas and interpretive contexts in interpretive practice, it may be a new train of thought.

This research aims to carry out a comparative study between Brazilian Literature, the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão segundo G.H.) by Clarice Lispector, and Korean Literature, the novel Mother's Stake I (엄마의 말뚝 I/ Eommaui Malttuk I) by Park Wan Seo. The study investigates the relation of space/body in the narratives by contemporary women writers to propose a new conception of world literature by having as a starting point "Other" Literatures, as designated national literature works originated from the Global South. Thus, to conduct the research it was considered the following elements in the comparative reading: space/body, symbolic-imagetic bodies, cultural convergences, and cultural differences between the literary works by Clarice Lispector and Park Wan Seo. The main concept in discussion in this study is the concept of world literature presented on two axes: the concept of world literature, an overview of the notion, and re-readings of world literature—decentering. Therefore, this study proposes a re-reading of the concept of world literature based on the concept of planetarity by Gayatri Spivak (2003), departing from the practice of reading works from Global South Literature, in other words, Latin American Literature and Korean Literature, respectively, Brazilian Literature and Korean Literature.

Magical Realism is perhaps the prominent literary movement that embodied the timeless conflict between cultural particularity (postcolonialism) and universality (world literature). Although initially conceptualized within Europe, it was subsequently inextricably linked to Latin America and eventually constituted a universal genre of post-colonial literature. Today, its dominant articulation concerns a symmetrical juxtaposition and coevalness (Fabian) of two different temporal and cultural experiences and perspectives (Western and non-Western).

In this presentation, I will turn to two emblematic texts by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: On the Marvelous Real in America (1949) and The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1975). These texts had a catalytic effect on the conceptualization of magical realism and encompass all the aforementioned contradictions. In the first text, where he synthesizes the concept of the Marvelous Real, Carpentier initially admits the impossibility of achieving a universal literary-cultural perspective. On the other hand, however, through a dialectic of similarities and differences between Europe and Latin America, he will argue that Magical Realism, for historical-cultural reasons, is more suitable to develop in Latin America. In his later text, he returns to the concept of the Marvelous Real. This time, however, he tries to give it a universal connotation by partially disconnecting it from the reality of Latin America. To achieve this, he will resort to the European concept of Baroque, which claims that it is not an aesthetic movement but a transhistorical ontological relationship with the world, which, however, manifests itself within history with different intensities each time. Although Latin America is still the privileged place of the Baroque (and Marvelous Real), Carpentier also identifies moments and manifestations of the Baroque worldview within and outside European (and Latin American) aesthetic production.

At this point, I will try to connect the baroque universality proposed by Carpentier with the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose European philosophy of history seems incompatible with preserving non-Western cultural particularities. Bloch, in The Philosophy of the Future, however, argues that a «postulated multiplicity of voices is possible: a methodic profusion, an interweaving of time and epochs, and therefore a spaciousness in the flow of history, which would in no way necessitate any recourse to geographism.» I will argue that this spatial expansion that mediates spatial distance and temporal homogenization is supported by the concept of Baroque proposed by Carpentier and which constitutes a necessary complement to the corresponding idea of the Marvelous Real and consequently to the relationship of Magical Realism with World Literature.

In a conference themed “Comparative Literature: Perspectives, Practices, Positions” organized in March 2024, in which the author was one of the organizers, Harish Trivedi in his lecture cited the example of the volume titled Literatures of the World and the Future of Comparative Literature which had papers compiled out of the proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association edited by Péter Hajdu and Xiaohong Zhang. Trivedi drew attention to how the volume was divided into four parts: 1. Comparative Literature, 2. National Literatures and Diaspora Literature, 3. Translation Studies, and 4. World Literature. His point was that the space of comparative literature(CL) was being taken up by other ‘disciplines’ and it reflected even in the publications of the official international body of CL. Taking this as the point of departure, this paper examines select edited volumes on CL published in the 21st century from India in terms of the composition of their papers. The idea here is to understand the politics of disciplinarity, questions of ‘objects’ of study, and problems of methodology in research and pedagogy vis-à-vis publishing. India is taken as the location of this study because of two reasons: (i) its plurilingual and pluricultural situation which necessitates a comparative practice and (ii) it being a non-Euro-American and ‘postcolonial’ nation.

How does CL conceive its practice as different in relation to other disciplines like the ones listed above? Is there a gradual erosion of its space in published works? How do these volumes contribute to theorization, canon formation, pedagogy and research? What is their role in the institutional visibility and viability of CL? What do the current trends in publishing imply for CL and its practitioners, especially in India? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks to engage with.

Some of the volumes that will be examined for this paper, arranged chronologically, include:

1. 2007: James, Jancy, Chandra Mohan, Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta, and Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, eds. Studies in Comparative Literature: Theory, Culture and Space. Delhi: Creative Books

2. 2012: Raj, Rizio Yohannan, ed. Quest of a Discipline: New Academic Directions for Comparative Literature. New Delhi: Cambridge UP India

3. 2013: Ramakrishnan, E. V., Harish Trivedi and Chandra Mohan, eds. Interdisciplinary Alter-natives in Comparative Literature. New Delhi: Sage

4. 2013: Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven, and Tutun Mukherjee, eds. Companion to Comparative Literature, World Literatures, and Comparative Cultural Studies. New Delhi: Cambridge UP India

5. 2017: Figueira, Dorothy and Chandra Mohan, eds. Literary Culture and Translation: New Aspects of Comparative Literature. Delhi: Primus Books

Indigenous life and culture are comparatively less depicted in Bengali literature, mainly due to the indigenous communities' residence in border regions and their limited interaction with Bengali society. Indigenous people are generally classified into two categories: plains and hill tribes, but there is much debate in Bangladesh’s institutional framework regarding the term 'indigenous.' However, analyzing the lives and culture of indigenous communities from a literary perspective is highly significant. This paper reviews the depiction of indigenous life and culture in Shaukat Ali's কপিল দাস মুর্মুর শেষ কাজ (Kapil Das Murmur's Last Task; 1968) and Alaudddin Al Azad's কর্ণফুলী (Karnaphuli; 1962). In Shaukat Ali's story, the Santal indigenous elder Kapil Das rebels against the moneylender, reflecting the age-old conflict between rulers and the oppressed. On the other hand, Alaudddin Al Azad’s novel Karnaphuli focuses on the struggle for survival of the Chakma community, illustrating the profound impact of the damming of the Karnaphuli River on their life and culture. Akhtaruzzaman Elias, in his essay চাকমা উপন্যাস চাই (Chakma Novel Needed), highlights the importance of writing novels in the Chakma language. He mentions that if the rich folklore, myths, and songs of the Chakma community are incorporated into novels, it would add a new dimension. According to him, even though a novel may not directly solve a problem, it provides direction towards human possibilities. Elias believed that Chakma novels, by reflecting the crises and struggles of the marginalized, oppressed, and downtrodden indigenous people, could help organize their worldview. However, his views later sparked mixed reactions among other indigenous groups in the hill regions. This paper analyzes the reflection of indigenous life and culture from a post-colonial perspective, highlighting the tension between their struggles for survival and cultural identity, which is largely overlooked in Bengali literature.

Online platforms like Webnovel greatly accelerate the spread of Chinese online literature to the English world, enthralling English readers to encounter Chinese cultures, such as martial arts, fantasies and history. Judging from the ethnographic perspective, these online platforms are online communities where readers of literary translation acquire knowledge about the other, i.e., the Chinese culture. Thus, Webnovel could be viewed as the field to conduct digital ethnographic research. With the aim to clarify the initiatives and effects relating to soft power building, this essay mainly focuses on the soft power building of the online platform Webnovel’s literary translation. Being a piece of digital ethnography, this essay demonstrates the initiatives and effects of Webnovel’s literary translation by interviewing the online platform’s users and runners, analyzing the content, comments and browsing data of Webnovel and so on. Basically, there are disparities between the values spread by online platform Webnovel’s literary translation and China’s official initiative relating to soft power in the 21st Century. The official initiative of soft power building mainly focus on the cultural influences of China, including attracting more people to be interested in Chinese culture, enhancing the overall comprehensive strength of China globally and so on. However, in terms of the goals of the online platforms like Webnovel, it is the profits and subscriber numbers that are aimed at. As for the members belonging to the online community Webnovel, it is usually the pleasure and interesting or unique plot that drive them to be the fans of Chinese online literary translation, instead of the parts of the Chinese culture that the official institutions hope to spread and build its own soft power. Nonetheless, there remains a possibility that online platforms like Webnovel could adjust its choice of literary works and writing guidance for the online writers, so that a balance might be reached between the official initiative of soft power building and the platform’s economic or developmental motivations.

Accompanied by government intervention to curb panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic, tunhuo 囤货 (hoarding behavior) has transitioned from real space to cyberspace, prevailing as a trope in Chinese women’s survival-themed web novels on Jinjiang Literature City 晋江文学城 (hereinafter referred to as Jinjiang), a major Chinese female-oriented online platform for producing and consuming web novels. In a typical tunhuo novel, the heroine predicts doomsday events and hoards all kinds of survival supplies to navigate through diverse crises such as extreme weather and zombie outbreaks, establishing an orderly life in the disordered (post-) apocalypse. While most tunhuo novels are categorized under the romance genre on Jinjiang, the focus on negative affects–particularly anxiety–overweights romantic love within this trope. These novels intricately detail the list of survival supplies, even including specific weights and quantities, drawing inspiration from survival guides in prepper culture and survivalism. This specificity mitigates the affective milieu with heightened uncertainty in and beyond the fictional world amidst the pandemic.

This study posits that Chinese women’s production and consumption of tunhuo novels showcase Chinese women’s affective labor in contemporary online writing platforms during the pandemic crisis. Drawing on text and discourse analysis of several most representative tunhuo novels on Jinjiang and reader-reader/author-reader communication in the comment section attached to those novels, this study explores the dynamic and multifaceted relationship between literature and technology. On the one hand, authors exert sensitivity and creativity to stitch their quotidian affects into the fabric of survival fantasy, while readers expand the discussion of plots to their everyday hoarding experiences that provoke emotional resonance in the attached comment section. In this sense, online writing platforms provide Chinese women with a virtual community to resist the physically isolated pandemic life. On the other hand, whether affects embedded in the novels or expressed as fan labor in the forms of rating, commenting, and reviewing, are all commodified as cultural products on Jinjiang. Also, Jinjiang can easily exploit the prevailing negative affects of the pandemic for better social traffic by increasing the visibility and discoverability of tunhuo novels via algorithms. Overall, along with Chinese women’s affective labor around tunhuo novels, this study reveals how affects are circulated and manipulated with the contemporary convergence of literature and technology. It examines to what extent affects in literature can gather the momentum that helps transcend the current and future crises in the post-digital age. Besides, given that the previous studies on Chinese internet literature have explored romantic affects and desires, this study expands existing research by illuminating the non-romantic affects in Chinese internet literature.

The trope of the "docile husband" (娇夫文学) has emerged as a new form of soft masculinity, wherein men adopt submissive and vulnerable roles in their relationships with dominant partners. While this trope contrasts with the hegemonic ideal of masculinity, it has not received as much criticism as other forms of gender nonconformity, partly because it is perceived as a form of masculinity that reflects a progressive societal stance on gender equality. It not only reflects a shift in gender roles but also represents a form of resistance to hegemonic expectations.

The docile husband trope is prevalent in Chinese digital culture, such as web novels, TV dramas, and social media. This trope also appears across Asian cultural contexts, with examples such as the Korean film My Sassy Girl (2001) and the 2024 television drama Queen of Tears. However, the recent discussion on the docile husband trope in Chinese media is shaped by the unique intersections between streaming platform, social media, reality television, and fan-driven online culture. Building on Song Geng’s influential framework of Chinese masculinity, this paper explores how such male representations are not only a response to traditional gender norms but also a way of reimagining masculinity in the context of China. In particular, this study asks the question of how media formats like reality television and social media converge and contribute to the portrayal of vulnerability and docility in men, and what this reveals about the extent of fluidity of masculinity in contemporary Chinese culture.

Using Liu Shuang, a popular figure from the reality TV show See You Again Season 4 (2024-2025), and his curated "docile husband" persona on Weibo as a case study, this research examines the ways in which the "docile husband" trope is constructed, performed, and received in today’s Chinese digital culture through critical discourse analysis. Henry Jenkins’ idea of media convergence is integral to understanding how soft masculinity is articulated in digital spaces. Online audiences actively engage with media texts, creating a participatory culture where fans actively negotiate and reshape representations of Chinese masculinity.

By examining Liu’s online persona and audience interpretations of the docile husband on platforms like Weibo and Douban, this paper situates this form of soft masculinity within a broader cultural framework that draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, in understanding how the "docile husband" trope functions as a deliberate performance of masculinity, one that both resists and perpetuates the traditional ideals of masculinity. Through this analysis, the study illustrates how reality TV and social media have become sites of active negotiation and transformation of gender politics within the digital media landscape in China.

This presentation explores the Japanese isekai genre through the lens of Rhetorical Genre Studies, emphasizing its role as a form of social commentary and means of self-actualization for both writers and readers. Isekai narratives clearly reflect societal critiques, as evidenced by the dichotomy between the protagonists’ inability to self-actualize in contemporary Japan and their success in doing so within isekai worlds. This function of the genre was initially supported by an online participatory culture through web novel submission sites and their communities, which were free from the constraints of the traditional publishing industry. This study explores how the creation and consumption of isekai, facilitated by online participatory culture, aid in the self-actualization of both writers and their audience, a function made possible by the "age of fiction/age of the self," as developped by Mita Munesuke and Miyadai Shinji, where fictional content and real-life events are given equal value in fostering psychological balance and self-actualization.

The poem “The Machine of the World” (A Máquina do Mundo, 1949) by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), written shortly after World War II, was chosen, in 2000, as the best Brazilian poem of all time, by a group of writers and literary critics at request of Caderno Mais of Folha de São Paulo newspaper. It is an enigmatic and dense text that requires a spiritual breath and at the same time a syntactic breath (Wisnik, 2022) in the course of its interpretation. The ancestral theme of the machine of the world, the one that the poet finds halfway through his journey, is formulated in this poem in a contemporary way: it is a machine that no longer offers itself to the modern and fragmented world as being capable of encompassing and giving visuality to the whole. The purpose of this presentation is to read the allegory of the machine of the world in Drummond's poem, as a compact or porous stone in the middle of the road, in dialogue with other poems and other times, from the 21st to the 13th century, and vice versa, from André Vallias (and his QR-coded diagram of Divine Comedy) to Dante Alighieri, from Dante to Camões, from Camões to Drummond, from Drummond to Haroldo de Campos, from Haroldo to Adriana Lisboa. In this hermeneutic path and not necessarily chronological, and based on the studies of Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading, the implied reader, and the meaning as a dynamic happening), I invite the audience to reflect on the issue of acts of literary reading in the contemporary world, the relevance of poetic and literary reading in the current context of the digital media and social networks, the poetry as the great machine of the world, passing through social, political, ecological, racial articulations, among others, inherent in the Portuguese-speaking world.

The growing realization that AI is not that intelligent after all has done little to dim the popular enthusiasm for and corporate promotion of its use. A desire for expediency fuels the former, whereas fantasies of workerless labor inform the latter. Both rely on assumptions about what constitutes sufficient quality output: the good enough. Whether the users of LLM-based text generators are able evaluators of the good enough depends on their standard of evaluation. Simple completion of a writing task could be enough. Evaluating the quality or efficacy of AI-generated prose does not lend itself to rapid, automatic assessment, defeating the purpose of employing AI in the first place. Although the mathematics of LLMs offer novel opportunities for machine translation and quantitative linguistics, their quotidian uses produce volumes of underread text for purposes that appear to be little beyond professional or academic obligations.

This paper investigates the ontological status of both the LLM as a creative agent and the generated text when employed to satisfy an uncritical standard of the good enough. Drawing on Anthropic’s work on interpretable AI, the paper argues that the strengths of LLMs are not aligned with the tasks to which users regularly put them. Though they can reveal, quantitatively, literary structures, they instead churn out fluent but often vapid prose suited to little purpose other than existing. Moreover, that existence is predicated on teleologies of writing that do not necessarily take communication as a goal—the good enough AI-generated text is accepted rather than read.

Recently digital technologies have entered into the fields of not only natural sciences but also humanities. Its literary evaluation apart, ChatGPT can write decent poems. With the help of a 3D printer, an AI program can create fine pieces of sculpture. Music that we casually listen to is now mostly done by DTM (desk top music). And we have song-writing AI programs, too. All this sounds extremely promising.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the achievements of the computer technologies in the spheres of poetry and music and delve into their socio-cultural significances. The reason that, out of many branches of humanistic activities, verse and music are specifically selected for discussion here is that these two genres of art are, I argue, closely connected both historically and formally.

The obvious Pro of the AI technologies in the humanistic creation is its ostensible high quality. The AI verses read beautifully. The AI songs sound pleasantly.

Here, however, immediately lies the pitfall of AI-generated pieces of art. They must depend on the existing conventions of art and the protocols of interpreting them shared by the receivers (that AI can detect and learn by scrutinizing the digital data on the net). Joyce first offended readers. Stravinsky at the premiere of Rites of Spring shocked and repelled audience. That is the fate of truly original art. AI technology can never scandalize the audience and, thus, create something truly original.

Secondly, the problem of AI’s incompatibility with semiotic ambiguity has to be pointed out. Essentially, AI technology is bound by the transparent signification as that is the feature of “normal” non-literary discourse which almost exclusively constitute the mega-data in the cyber space that AI relies on. AI cannot speak metaphorically, which is a significant setback of AI poetry.

This leads to the third problematic of AI technology: its logocentricity. Signification in AI-woven discourse cannot be but determinant. To use Bakhtinean terminology, the production of AI technology is always “finalized.”

These three problems seriously restrict the scope of AI-produced “literary” output. AI technology, however, in the reverse way, allows us to see the true essence of human cultural activity. In my paper I shall try to demonstrate the above stated points by analyzing, by way of an example, a poem by Maria Tsvetaeva and its song version in comparison with AI-produced verses and songs.

This paper proposes the study of the campus novel as a global genre, exploring the global reach and emergence of the genre in different literary traditions. The campus novel has historically been seen as a static and exclusive literary genre, resistant to change and prominent only in the British and North American literary tradition. Constant critical evaluation of only the Anglo-American tradition of the genre has then led to its impending demise, due to the lack of critical and mainstream attention towards a seemingly obsolete genre. As a result, scholars have continuously considered ways of revitalising the genre, initially by calling for diversity in campus novels, particularly following the success of Brandon Taylor’s Booker-shortlisted novel Real Life (2020). My research proposes the study of the campus novel as a global genre, exploring the different ways in which the genre can be found in literary traditions around the world. My study has found examples of the genre emerging in different cultures, through examples of the campus novel in cultures and locations as diverse as Germany, Norway, South Africa, and Indonesia, to name a few. There is also evidence of campus novel traditions that have emerged independent of the influence of the Anglo-American tradition, and existing under names of their own, such as the overseas student literature tradition in Taiwanese literature. These examples are in addition to campus novel traditions that have been acknowledged in studies of the genre but which continue to be deemed secondary to the Anglo-American tradition, as is the case of the campus novel in India and Egypt. In recent years, we have also seen resurgence of the genre through publication of acclaimed novels such as R.F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) and Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation (2022). The genre has also recently found new life through the contemporary popularity of various online phenomena, such as renewed interest in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) following the online rise of the aesthetic concept of dark academia. This paper thus promotes the campus novel genre as having the capacity to morph and evolve, evident in its emergence in various literary traditions and cultures around the world. This further challenges existing debates pronouncing the death of the genre, and considers the genre as contributing to existing studies of circulation of genres and literary globalisation. In addition, this paper also considers the state of higher education today, considering current trends and concerns, and how these may have led to contemporary interest in the literary genre.

The past two decades have seen a surge in so-called erasure, blackout, and other materially pronounced forms of poetry, with many writers cutting out, blackening, painting or stitching over existing texts as a way of engaging with them to tell other stories: stories that could not have been told or surged otherwise. These rewritings and overwritings can be seen as a form of cultural memory: they are practices that change the past as it is reassembled and shared in the present. Using different erasure technologies, the poems enable new experiences and forms of subjectivity, while highlighting the materiality of writing and re-writing. We propose to call such technologies ‘palimpsesting.’

In this paper, we discuss a number of recent texts that employ various erasure technologies, including Zong! and Nets as well as Insta poetries, exploring how meaning and materiality are entwined and what the agency of poetry is as reworked materiality.

Bernadine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other stands out for its specific socio-cultural context and its thematic focus. In the book, themes such as racism, feminism, gender and social inequality are discussed against the background of African migration to the UK. Born in South-East London in 1959, the author is the daughter of an English mother and a Nigerian father who migrated to the UK in 1949. In 2019, Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize alongside with Margarete Adwood’s The Testaments, making Evaristo the first black woman to win the prize. The novel follows the lives of 12 primarily black women in the UK over the course of several decades. Stemming from different social classes, they come from mixed cultural backgrounds and have different sexual orientations. A number of them are lesbian, bisexual or consider themselves to be non-binary. The stories of the characters are intertwined in numerous ways, the women being either friends, relatives or chance acquaintances.

The specific vocabulary linked to gender issues as well the references to British culture in general, and the gay community in particular, are a challenge for the book’s translators. In addition to its idiosyncratic language, the novel is mostly written without punctuation with the exception of the occasional comma or question mark. Apart from that, the specific layout of the text gives the impression of the novel being written in free verse. Thus, Girl, Woman, Other receives an almost poetic dimension. Evaristo herself refers to her style of writing as “fusion fiction”. In 2021, the novel was translated into French by Francoise Adelstain with the title Fille, femme, autre. The German translation by Tanja Handels, entitled Mädchen, Frau, etc., appeared one year later.

In this paper, I shall explore the French and German translation of Evaristo’s novel and analyse the different choices made by the translators. The task of translating references to a particular cultural environment is especially demanding when the latter does not exist in the same way in the culture of the target text. For this reason, Evaristo’s translators literally turn into cultural mediators in order to communicate the hybrid culture of Black British women, living on the margins of society, to a Francophone and German-speaking readership.

Literary translation, being a subjective activity, is limited by the translator's subjectivity. Zha Mingjian and Tian Yu define translator’s subjectivity as a subjective initiative in the translation process, with "its basic characteristics being the translator's conscious cultural awareness, humanistic qualities, and cultural and aesthetic creativity." Tu Guoyuan and Zhu Xianlong also emphasize that the translator should play a major role in the complete translation process (including the original author, translator, reader, and the receptional environment), as "it runs through the entire translation process, the subjectivity of other factors is only reflected in specific stages of the translation." In the conventional view of translation, translators frequently find themselves "serving two masters." They must serve the author by keeping to the criterion of "faithfulness" to the original work, while also taking into account the readers and striving for the effects of "expressiveness" and "elegance" in translation. These two features appear to be in paradoxical opposition.

In contrast to Chinese scholars who equate the translator's subjectivity, inventiveness, and centrality, Western writers and translators see translation as a subjective practice. Goethe once described translators as "busy professional matchmakers" (Übersetzer sind als geschäftige Kuppler anzusehen). "They praise a half-concealed beauty to the utmost, making us unable to resist our interest in the original work." Because of the translator's subjectivity, the original appearance of the work is partially veiled, preventing target language readers from having the most direct and true experience with the original. Lawrence Venuti, an American translation scholar, proposed the concept of "translator's invisibility," which describes the translator's identity as that of an invisible person hiding behind the author. He stated, "The smoother the translation, the more invisible the translator's identity becomes, and the more prominent the author's or the foreign text's meaning will be." According to Peter Bush, literary translation is "an original subjective activity situated at the center of a complex network of social and cultural practices." All of those underline the translator and author's complicated and subtle relationship, as well as the translator's subjective initiative.

Literary translation exemplifies the translator's subjectivity, notably in 20th-century Western modernist novels with variegated vocabulary and complicated styles. Ulysses (1922), considered a representative work of 20th-century stream-of-consciousness novels, uses the narrative framework of a single day in the lives of three ordinary Dubliners to reflect the intertwined relationships between the individual, family, marriage, religion, identity, and national survival. It follows the protagonist Bloom's journey from "wandering" to "return." To date, the novel has been entirely translated into over 20 languages. Since 1994, our country has progressively released three relatively competent and accepted complete Chinese translations: the 1994 and 1996 Jin Di editions of Ulysses (hereafter referred to as the "Jin edition") and the 1994 Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo edition of Ulysses (hereinafter referred to as the "Xiao edition") and the 2021 Liu Xiangyu edition of Ulysses (hereinafter referred to as the "Liu edition"). This has shattered people's imagination of this untranslatable tome, providing new inspiration for exploring the deeper meanings of the text and related modernist thoughts.

Faced with experimental novels like Ulysses, which present translation challenges, translators must not only fully understand the original text, including its typography, style, and syntactic transformations, but also consider the methods of language conversion when translating into the target language. Due to phenomena such as language overlay, the mixing of words and symbols, and the blending of styles, translations may sometimes eliminate the coexistence of different languages present in the original text. Translators also need the courage to make attempts and breakthroughs in their translations, finding the best way to balance the source language and the target language. Therefore, to better understand and interpret the Chinese translations of Joyce's novels, it is first necessary to explore the different identities, research experiences, and translation motivations of the four translators. These not only reflect the translators' personal translation styles but also represent the translation choices of different eras.

As a translator of modern Chinese literature, Jin Di (1921-2008) translated and published Shen Congwen's short story collection The Chinese Earth (1947) under his own name during his university years. He served as an English teacher at the Department of Foreign Languages at Nankai University in 1957 and at Tianjin Foreign Languages Institute in 1976, while also holding positions as a council member of the Translators Association of China and an advisor to the Tianjin Translators Association. Jin Di first began translating Ulysses with selected passages. Driven by a love for literature, Jin Di embarked on a career in literary translation. He firmly believes that literary translation should prioritize effect, which means that "the reader's experience of the translation should be as close as possible to the reader's experience of the original text."

Xiao Qian (1910-1999) held multiple roles. He was a writer, journalist, translator, and also served as the editor-in-chief of literary magazines. In the fall of 1929, Xiao Qian entered the Chinese Language Program at Yenching University, where he attended guest lectures on modern literature by Professor Yang Zhensheng and a course on modern British novels by American professor Paul Guise, learning about James Joyce and Ulysses. His wife, Wen Jieruo (1927- ), is a distinguished linguist proficient in Chinese, Japanese, and English, working as an editor and literary translator. She graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Tsinghua University. During the translation of Ulysses, Wen Jieruo read a large amount of related Japanese literature, including Japanese translations and research papers, providing broader and more reliable reference value for the Chinese translation of the novel.

Liu Xiangyu (1942- ) is a renowned scholar and translator specializing in Western modernism and postmodernism theory. He graduated from the Foreign Languages Department of Shanxi University in 1967 and from the Department of Foreign Literature at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1981, possessing a solid foundation in foreign languages and literary knowledge. He once went to the University of London to study 20th-century British and American literature and Western Marxist literary theory, and then to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to research modernist and postmodernist literature in Europe and America (his co-advisor was Ihab Hassan, who is regarded as the "father of postmodernism"), including studies on Joyce. Since the 1980s, he has begun to focus on and translate Joyce, translating excerpts of the poem Chamber Music, the short story The Dead, and ten chapters of Ulysses, among others.

Gérard Genette, a French narratologist, established the notion of "paratext" (or "derivative text" in the 1980s, which refers to "all verbal and non-verbal materials used to present a work that play a coordinating role between the primary text and the reader." Internal paratext (titles, translator's prefaces and postfaces, appendices, illustrations, etc.) and external paratext (book reviews, translator interviews, etc.) are subsets of paratexts. The translator's notes or footnotes in a translated work are common internal paratexts that serve as "primary sources" for understanding the translator's methodology or perspectives. Chinese annotations are clearly necessary for Ulysses, the large and comprehensive modernist novel. It not only conveys the translator's personal understanding and interpretation but also, to some extent, condenses the pertinent perspectives and theories.

Take Episode Four and Episode Fourteen as two examples. In Episode Four, Molly asked Bloom the meaning of “metempsychosis”, which is one of the core themes of Ulysses. To simply put it, the Jin version uses metaphorical language directly in the translation. Despite being plain and unambiguous, it lacks the original text's literary appeal. The Xiao version keeps the original terms while providing a brief explanation of their implications. The Liu version, on the other hand, conducts textual research on the material and incorporates it into the original context, providing readers with a logical interpretation and explanation. The translation of Ulysses necessitates not just consideration of important word connotations and metaphors, but also of the text's stylistic correspondence and appropriateness. For example, when it comes to changing registers in Ulysses, the key to translation is retaining the distinctions inside the same language.

In Episode 14, Joyce utilizes a range of languages, including Old Irish, Latin, old English, and modern colloquial speech, to mock numerous concerns, parodying many issues in the history of the evolution of British prose from antiquity to the present, and representing the complete process of a baby from embryo to birth. According to Liu's research, the original text uses a mixture of Old Gaelic (Deshil) and Old Latin (Eamus) in the first paragraph, Old English in the second paragraph, and modern colloquial language in the last paragraph. Therefore, in the translation, Liu's version uses oracle bone script, classical Chinese, and colloquial Chinese to correspond to these styles. Aside from stylistic considerations, because the first paragraph depicts the mixed form that existed prior to the birth of English during the Anglo-Saxon period, the translation employs three types of scripts—bronze script, small seal script, and clerical script—to simulate the mixed evolution of style. This translation not only exhibits the translator's smart vision, but it also demonstrates the compatibility and resemblance of the histories of Chinese and English script development. Compared to the Jin version, which likewise corresponded to the history of Chinese characters, lacking any literariness.

Generally speaking, the annotations and footnotes as paratexts can help readers better understand the connotations and implications of the original text, especially the unique linguistic techniques, formal experiments, and cultural allusions found in Joyce's novels. By comparing the annotations of three Chinese translations of Ulysses, it can be observed that due to differences in translation time and strategies, the four translators place varying degrees of emphasis on the annotations. The Jin version has fewer annotations and less in-depth content compared to the latter two translations, while the Liu version, as a retranslation, has conducted new research and interpretation of the original text based on the first two translations. From a single word to the entire text structure, it contains the author's understanding and reflection on human history, which is also what the translator hopes to present and convey to the target language readers during the translation process.

In traditional views of translation, the importance of the translator's role is often overlooked and undervalued. Nowadays, more and more experts and scholars are beginning to pay attention to the status of translators, exploring and studying their influence and value on the translated work and even the entire translation activity. Among these, the focus on the subjectivity of the translator reflects the degree of emphasis on the relative independence of the translator's identity and behavior. Due to the influence of educational background, social environment, cultural context, and ideology, there are certain differences in the translator's translation style and strategies. Understanding the translator's identity also helps to reveal their main translation thoughts, concepts, and the translator's mental world. At the same time, as an important internal subtext, the annotations in the translation text analysis reflect the translator's thoughts and interpretations of the original text. These annotations not only greatly aid the target language, but also provide important reference value for the translators studies.

For Chinese translators, translating Ulysses not only involves the complex language system but also the challenge of arbitrary switching between different stylistic and syntactic forms. In the case of Joyce's later two novels, the greatest challenge for translators lies not only in achieving the basic translation standards of "faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance" but also in guiding readers to understand Joyce and the unique modernist texts he represents, including various textual transformations, stylistic changes, and profound themes of human history. At the same time, it is worth noting that the translator's subjectivity is not entirely free and arbitrary, "but rather has verifiable subjective and objective factors." For example, the richness and accessibility of reference materials are important objective factors that limit the translator's subjectivity, as they are situated in different historical periods.

Therefore, we need to be tolerant of the inevitable cultural misinterpretations and omissions that occur during the translation process, and encourage more knowledgeable scholars and readers to actively point out translation errors, promoting the revision and improvement of new translations. Only by truly recognizing and understanding the translator's experiences and the social context in which they operate, and accepting the unavoidable shortcomings of translation, can we more deeply and thoroughly understand the relationship between the original text and the translation, and appreciate the literary value and cultural connotations.

“The Only Moving thing; Was the eye of the blackbird”. As the poet Wallace Stevens said in his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird that it is always the eyes which will be moving. It is always the perspective of a human being which seems to be differing and being in a constant change. We, as human beings, tend to often forget that it is not just the ‘I’ which seems to have this eye movement, but rather it is the whole human breed who possess the eye. The concept of plurality is not something which we invented, rather it is a present which we should discover with our own thinking. It is not fair for a particular set of people to be given the privilege of all types of “eye movement” they want while others are on blindfolds. This paper will in detail talk about the idea of plurality discussed mainly by Hannah Arendt and try to connect it with the way we look at gender in literature. Now putting this idea of differences which comparative literature tries to put into practice. As we noticed while studying the schools of Comparative literature, which basically showed an historical background of how people dealt with the concept of differences itself. We saw how concept of plurality was singularized in French school which later goes through different stages to come to this point we are standing.

The whole idea behind this paper is to connect my recent understanding of the practices of comparative literature to the way we see gender in Gender studies. The words “Queer” comes from the concept of “Odd” or “Strange” or “peculiar”. Thus, the whole idea of differences which is shown in comparative literature can be brought into play. As we understand comparative literature, it is more of a practice rather than a theory which talks about acknowledging the presence of differences. Thus, when we put the idea of acceptance of the differences in queer theory, the otherness shown within the queer theory gets demolished. Queer theory plays a big role in breaking the discourse of heteronormativity which tries to bring forth the plural nature of gender and sexuality. The binaries or heteronormativity was so much engraved in our society that people after a certain point thought that something different is either disease or crime.

I will be connecting this while concept to Katie O'Neil's children's graphic novels. One of the ways in which she tries to deconstruct the heteronormativity is through her children's graphic novels. However, it is quite evident how she falls prey to the lack of plurality in her perspective while representing the again lack of plurality and different perspectives. I will be dealing with two Graphic novels 'Princess Princess Ever After' and 'The Tea Dragon Society'. One of the best things about graphic is you can visually (through images) understand the text and otherness or alterities that is portrayed. Thus, my choice of selection to understand the intersectionality in it.

This study examines the complex dynamics of translating culturally-specific rhetorical devices through a comparative analysis of thirteen English and French translations of a pleonastic verse from Ṭarafa's pre-Islamic Mu'allaqa. While pleonasm serves as a standard rhetorical device in classical Arabic poetry, carrying specific aesthetic and functional purposes, it is generally avoided in Western poetic traditions. The research demonstrates how translators navigating between these different literary systems must reconcile competing demands: preserving the source text's literary features while adhering to target language poetics. Through close comparative reading of translations spanning from 1782 to 2000, the study reveals that successful literary translation depends not merely on linguistic equivalence, but on the translator's ability to recreate the functional aesthetics of the original within the literary conventions of the target culture. The findings contribute to comparative literature discourse by illuminating how translators' choices reflect their cultural and disciplinary traditions, personal interpretative frameworks, and understanding of both source and target poetic systems. This research advances our understanding of cross-cultural literary transmission and the role of translation in shaping comparative literary studies, particularly in bridging Classical Arabic and Western poetic traditions.

This critical presentation examines A donde tú vayas, iré (2016), a novel by Jewish-Mexican writer Victoria Dana. Dana, a Mexican of Syrian descent who honed her craft in the literary workshop of Miguel Cossío Woodward, has published two novels: Las Palabras Perdidas (2012) and A donde tú vayas, iré. In her second novel, the protagonist and narrator, Latife, embarks on a journey to uncover the story of her parents' migration from Syria.

The novel focuses on the perpetuation of patriarchal discourse through its female characters. This analysis, conducted from an intersectional and feminist theoretical perspective, explores how the narrative illustrates the continuation of patriarchal norms within the family sphere.

The story is narrated from the perspective a young girl Latife, a Jewish woman who, with her family along with her family, escapes from Damascus to immigrate to Mexico in the aftermath of the revolution period. While Mexico initially promises change, offering a contrast to the violence of the war in her homeland after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the anticipated transformations do not significantly alter the status of women in the novel.

Skillfully, the author establishes a dialogue between the past and the present, revealing the persistence of patriarchal practices embodied by women, despite the passage of time and changes in geography. This analysis highlights the novel’s exploration of the complex interplay between historical context, migration, and gender dynamics.

Through its characters, particularly the female ones, Dana underscores how societal expectations and traditional gender roles endure, even in the face of significant social and geopolitical changes. By exposing the continuity of patriarchal structures across time and space, the novel invites readers to reflect on how deeply entrenched power dynamics shape the lives and experiences of women.

Though very first institutional engagement with comparative literature in South Asia emerged from the perspective of Bengali literature, but it took long time in Bangladesh to begin. The institutional introduction of comparative literature as a full-fledged program occurred in 2015 at Jahangirnagar University. Apart from this, some universities used to offer a singular course or academic discussion on this literary discipline. And numerous writings in the field of comparative literature have emerged outside the formal institutional practices, primarily driven by individual initiatives. A prominent figure in this domain is Professor and playwright Munier Chowdhury. In 1969, he authored a significant work based on comparative literature, entitled 'Tulanamulak Samalochana'. Additionally, Munier Chowdhury expressed a desire to establish a dedicated department for this discipline at Dhaka University. At present, Prof. Azfar Hossain, Dr. Shamim Reza, Dr. Suman Sazzad, Musfikur Rahman are working for the development of comparative literature in Bangladesh. This scattered intervention creates difficulties to the new researcher of the field.

This paper aims to analyze the current scenario, development, and future of comparative literature in Bangladesh. Since it has a become sovereign country with its own national literature corpus, it demands a new critical examination of the trends and developments of comparative literature in Bangladesh. It also seeks to map how literary history and trends have shaped Bangladeshi literature and how Comparative Literature should evolve in this context. This study will explore a few developments in this regard.

The type of unrequited which I will be taking is depicted through a relationship which is not fulfilled because of different reasons. The image which will be the identifying marker for Unrequited love as a state of being is the waiting of a lover for his/her beloved. The beloved waiting for love for a very long time which will further continue till forever is what makes the basic image for unrequited love for this assignment.

In the Bengali poetic system, the image of unrequited love is a very common theme which comes up again and again throughout different narratives. While working on Sufism and its emergence in the Bengali language. The idea of unrequited love is shown as a dominant image which shows the state of the devotee as well as lovers. I will be focusing on the image of one (lover or devotee) waiting for their beloved (can also be divine). I will start with an introduction to the image which I will be focusing upon. Then moving on, will try to show this in the poetic system of other Indian languages. I have worked with Baul Geet previously, which gave me the starting image due to dominance in the Sufi.

As we focus on the image of unrequited love, we see the same across poetic systems of various language’s cultures as well. It shows the same image i.e. the state of being. The image which I will be focusing upon is the waiting of the lover for his or her beloved. For lyric mode in Bengali, I will be taking a poem by Tagore. The lovers in these poems are the people expressing their love, while on the other hand, beloveds are the people who do not reciprocate or are not able to accept that love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

The authors are not original, and they do not create anything from original minds but compile from existing texts. Text is not a unilinear entity but a heterogeneous combination of texts. Any text is at once literary and social, creative and cultural. M. Bakhtin finds in a Socratic dialogue the earliest form of novel, heteroglossia, and dialogism, which in the late 1960s J. Kristeva calls as intertextuality to describe the phenomenon of a continual exchange and relationship building between texts. Intertextuality is the means of communication between “several writers and a reader” within one literary text based on several texts. As for the theory of Intertextuality, the suggested presentation is intended to analyze Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel “Gravel Heart” compared with William Shakespeare’s drama “Measure for Measure”. This Renaissance drama is deeply influential from the novel’s title (“Unfit to live or die. O gravel heart!”) till its conclusion. Gurnah’s composition reveals the characteristics of novatory in traditional literature. The methodology of the research will focus on comparing both works in three aspects: personages; composition; time and space correlation. At the end of the presentation, I will share the new research topics for “Gravel Heart,” which will demonstrate the further steps in the new discussions.

References:

1. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: four essays by M. M. Bakhtin.

2. Word, dialogue, and the novel. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader. New York: Columbia University Press. LeFevre, K. B. (1987)

3. Gurnah, A. (2017). Gravel Heart. Bloomsbury: London, UK.

4. Shakespeare, W. 1564-1616. (2003). William Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure”. Auburn, CA :Audio Partners.

This theme delves into how literature navigates the crossroads of heritage and innovation in an ever-evolving world. At the intersection of cultural traditions and technological advancements, it examines how ancient narratives are reinvented to remain relevant and how new media (webtoons, AI, metaverse) are reshaping literary forms and practices. By combining global and local perspectives, it highlights intercultural dialogues, creative hybridizations, and the challenges of literary creation in an age of global connectivity. An invitation to reimagine literature as a bridge between the past and the future!

Thomas Aquinas is an important theologist and philosopher in the Middle Ages in Europe. His theory of love is rich in content and has important research value. Aquinas’ classification and meaning of love constitute his view of love, and his view of love has a perfect form of love. Aquinas divides love into affection, friendship and charity. Behind it is the emotional care of the holy love, which is the true feeling of Aquinas knowing love and belongs to companion’s love in psychology of love. As a devout Christian religious believer, Aquinas’ love is deeply influenced by Christian doctrine, which reflects that religion has a certain relationship with love. Religious ideas can affect love and love can also affect religious concepts, both of which have certain social and cultural attributes.

Sino-British gay pornstar Tyler Wu’s online persona and branding are strongly built upon the premise that one is being provided a glimpse into his intimate sexual encounters. His self-produced adult videos are often accompanied by tone-setting idyllic, private, and erotic narrative textual pieces and monologues. These showcase a gamut of characteristics found as motifs and themes present in tongzhi wenxue 同志文学 stories, themselves deeply steeped in the homosexual traditional in Chinese Literature.

Despite Wu’s rise to Pornhub’s 2nd most-viewed gay pornstar in 2024 – where he stands as the sole Eastern Asian male – no literature has been produced on either the peculiarities of his work or his feats in the field of pornography. I believe his unique brand of adult content beckons further research.

As such, through an intermedial analysis and comparison, I posit that Wu’s body of work can be linked to the lurid erotic tales present in the online-circulated tongzhi wenxue and Boys’ Love narratives. I pinpoint the actor’s homages to these genres, showcasing his willingness to fuse these realms. Interviews and conversations with the actor and producer have also provided more profound insight into this intermedial connection.

The character dynamics, enacted narrative and plots, language and romanticised settings of Tyler Wu’s pornographic content are highly evocative of those found in these online genres. A lure into a world where the sexual content is colored with allusions to long-lasting friendships, timeless bonds, and fated encounters. The insisted-upon link between a story-telling approach to pornography that provides the viewer with a fantasy of sexual intimacy, which is akin to the premise of those online novels, sets Wu’s work apart in a domain characterised by an emphasis on the sexual act rather than the setting in which the sexual act takes place. These dimensions are also absent in Wu’s collaborations with other pornstars, where the actor does not hold creative control.

Establishing this link involves tracing the evolution and transformation of the tongzhi wenxue genre over time. Wu’s current artistic endeavours are, in my view, the most recent iteration of this form of pornographic literature - one that has now transcended its illicit and censored online existence to achieve marketability and reach a broader audience. Tyler Wu’s work and artistic direction are now invaluable when discussing East Asian homosexual representation in adult media, offering pertinent insights into issues of non-hegemonic masculinity as well as the representation and visibility of Chinese queerness.