Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), a representative of American confessional poets who is regarded as the youngest and most talented female poet, became the most influential poetess since Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. This essay is a feminine-center study, employing the “anxiety of authorship” which derives from The madwoman in the Attic, “the Bible of feminist critical theory in the twentieth century”, to explore Sylvia Plath’s writing. In The madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar put forward a feminist term -- the “anxiety of authorship”, on the basis of a patriarchal Bloomian model, the “anxiety of influence”. Both of the models illustrate writers’ creative mindset. In this essay, Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to study creative mindset of writers. Divergent from Freudian psychoanalysis which is based on biology, Lacan emphasizes the linguistic aspect. Moreover, Freud crystallizes a poet’s “anxiety of influence” over the his precursor into Oedipus complex of a “family history”, while Harold Bloom points out that it is Hamlet complex rather than Oedipus complex that represents the literary genealogy; Lacan argues that “phallus worship” could account for the influence from precursors. The absence of subjectivity is at the core of the “anxiety of authorship” of female writers, like Sylvia Plath. In this essay, the construction of female subjectivity is unfolded by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis which functions linguistically. To tackle the “anxiety of authorship”, Sylvia Plath employs four corrective strategies: explicit-implicit/dual narrative, parody, “madwoman”/substitute, and death. In the analysis of the strategy of “madwoman”/substitute, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization helps clarify this strategy; Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death is used to explain the death strategy.

Plath's revisionist strategy is accomplished through her portrayal of the female body in her literary creations. In her literary creations, Plath expresses her own life, her own existence in its original form. Unlike her literary predecessors, most of whose mothers hid the self-image of the agonized “madwoman” in the attic of their novels, Plath becomes the “madwoman” herself, both in the ironic sense of a female author playing the role of the “madwoman” in a male-centered society, and in the sense of a female author playing the role of the “madwoman” in a male-centered society. She becomes a “madwoman” herself, both in the sense of a female author playing the role of a “madwoman” in the ironic sense of a male-centered society, and in the true sense of a real-life hysteric. She expresses herself as an imaginary person, and her poetry is so dramatic that it can be understood as an elaborate set of dramatic monologues. The female bodies in Plath's work, all of which are her props, are full of dramatic performance. For example, the ceramic head of a woman is brought to life in the poem with a “brick gray face” and “eyes under fat eyelids,” as if she were an “ape full of malice but with her face. In appearance, the head is ugly, angry, and cool like the poet. The poem can be a fight to the death around the ceramic head of the lady, as well as the squid-like body in Plath's work, the more angry the more she has to undergo electroshock therapy, just like the crazy, death-loving her ...... Plath's style of work is confessional and gothic, and she often finds the equivalent of her own life in her own work, using a lot of metaphors. metaphors, and she uses a great deal of female body imagery to express her desires, showing a female writer madly subverting and indicting the male world.

This study examines how war has culturally racialized the bodies and identities of Asian women, focusing on Korea and China. Following World War II, the Korean War, and the Chinese Civil War, Asian women experienced military, economic, and social oppression, which led to specific forms of cultural racialization.

By analyzing Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), this study explores how war and migration shape women’s subjectivity at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Both novels depict women’s bodies as sites of historical memory and collective trauma, revealing how war and colonial legacies inscribe racial and gendered identities onto Asian women. The cultural racialization of women in wartime and postwar contexts differs from Western frameworks, as it is shaped by historical violence, national identity, and postcolonial conditions. War and migration further redefine gender roles and social positions, imposing constraints while also creating spaces for resistance and agency.

Drawing on cultural racialization theory, intersectionality, and historical/collective memory, this study critiques the exclusion of Asian women’s experiences from dominant Western war narratives. Through a comparative analysis of A Gesture Life and The Woman Warrior, this research offers a new theoretical approach to understanding how war and its aftermath construct Asian women’s identities in sociocultural and historical contexts.

As determined by women’s reproductive capacity, natural ethics is intrinsically linked to female identity. With the advancement of the feminist movement, women gain degendered social identities along with the associated ethical obligations. The intense mental pressure resulting from the inevitable conflicts between the natural and social ethics of women makes the ethical dimension a key factor in the analysis of female madness. By the end of the 20th century, with the development of ethical perspectives, there was an increasing number of cases of female madness resulting from ethical conflicts in American and Chinese literature, both with distinctive cultural characteristics. Based on a comparative study of Mo Yan’s Frog and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, this paper aims to explore the ethical conflicts in female madness, and their connection to multiple female identities, while discussing the role of Chinese and American cultures in the progression of female madness and the reshaping of ethical concepts. Through infanticide, Gugu and Sethe assert their rights within society and their agency in ethical decision-making, but, as a result, they suffer from the ethical burden of their actions, which ultimately drives them to madness. The physical return of dead children, as a representation of the resurgence of natural ethics and maternal identity, accelerates the process of madness. American Christian traditions, alongside Chinese ghost and spirit culture, imbue the ethical return of the dead with distinct meanings. The redemption made by Gugu and Sethe, localized according to the distinct sin and shame culture, alleviates female madness by reconciling women’s maternal function and affirming their maternal identity. In conclusion, Gugu and Sethe’s madness is a consequence of conflicts between their identities and the ethical responsibilities assigned to them by their respective era, highlighting the dilemmas women face in pursuing ethical subjectivity. Chinese and American cultures play essential roles in female madness, imparting distinct characteristics and connotations based on their different cultural traditions. In nature, the emergence and alleviation of female madness reflects the evolving reconfiguration of the ethical system, and the dynamics and balance between women’s multiple identities in the new era.

Historical narration in literature has a long tradition in the development of world literature. Using literature to tell historic stories is also the common point between William Faulkner and Jia Pingwa, whose masterpieces The Sound and the Fury and The Mountain Whisperer show distinctive historical narrative features, both of which represent history through literary fictionalization. They re-imagine, reconstruct and reflect history with family legends and village stories respectively, reflecting their unique literary and historical views. Based on the historical narrative theory of Stephen Greenblatt of the New Historicism School, this paper firstly analyses how the two novels use literary fantasy to carry out historical narratives, and compares the similarities and differences of the two novels in the narrative strategies of reconstructions of history from the perspectives of multi-perspective narration, marginal narration and fragmented narration. Secondly, it discusses the two writers reflections on the relationship between literature and history through historical narratives from three aspects: the origin of the works, the intention of writing and the involvement of myth. Both writers have made profound reflections on the relationship between literature and history, but Faulkner intended to metaphorize the disintegration of the American South and the spiritual crisis brought by the invasion of capitalism through the family stories, reflecting a profound humanistic spirit in the deep structure. And Jia Pingwa breaks through the restrictions of official grand narrative by folk stories. With the comparative study, this paper finds that both novels reconstruct history by dissolving grand narratives, but because of differences in times and cultural backgrounds, different narrative strategies are applied in the process of reconstructions. The two writers reflections on the relationship between literature and history makes the novel intertextually significant in historical memory and reflects the important role of literature in reproducing and enriching socio-historical contexts.

Adaptations were all the rage in the Shanghai theatre scene during the fallen period, and Li Jianwu's Wang Deming, adapted from Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, is one of the best. Guided by the 'Artistic Illusion Theory', Li Jianwu uses adaptation strategies of Sinicization to successfully create the characters of Wang Deming and Li Zhen, critiquing the 'chic' Chinese national character. Li Jianwu's adaptation inherit the tradition of critique of national character since the May Fourth Movement, simultaneously present the aspirations of intellectuals on the eve of and in the early years of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression to change from their predecessors and reestablish moral norms.This paper analyses Li Jianwu's adaptation practice and the cultural and social motives behind it, thereby revealing its significance in the process of Shakespeare's Sinicization and the nationalization of Chinese drama.

This paper addresses the challenge of interpreting interactive fiction, a genre that subverts traditional reading practices through hyperlinks and multimedia elements. By examining Serge Bouchardon’s 'A Web Odyssee' (2021), a digital reimagining of Homer's ancient epic, it explores how literary hermeneutics can be adapted to analyse works of electronic literature. Interactive fiction, which merges storytelling with digital tools, transforms understanding and interpretation by requiring readers to actively participate in shaping the narrative. Drawing on Peter Szondi’s literary hermeneutics, this paper highlights the limitations of traditional hermeneutics when applied to interactive fiction and proposes methodological adaptations to navigate the dynamic interplay of text, interface, and medium in digital storytelling. By addressing the interpretive complexities posed by electronic literature, the paper demonstrates how literary hermeneutics can evolve to provide a dynamic framework for analysing digital narratives.

This study examines the rise of "internet fiction" (“Int'ŏnet sosŏl”) in South Korea during the 2000s as a female-led genre, focusing on its unique contribution to working-class female culture. This largely overlooked genre, primarily consumed by teenage girls, significantly impacted Korean popular culture, influencing not only genre fiction but also television and comics. This study will analyze internet fiction’s cultural specificity through three interconnected lenses:

1. Social Space: The study will explore how internet fiction created a distinct online literary space, contrasting with the middle-class bias of the 1990s online literary landscape. It will analyze the interplay between online and offline communities (classrooms, bookstores, comic shops) in shaping the reading experiences of teenage girls.

2. Gender and Nationalism: This research will compare the representation of femininity in Korean internet fiction with Anglophone online genre fiction, highlighting the complexities and contradictions surrounding patriarchal nationalism within the genre.

3. Class Dynamics in Romance: The proposal investigates the unique portrayal of working-class romance in Korean internet fiction, specifically focusing on relationships involving “iljin” characters (ruggedly masculine working-class boys). The analysis will emphasize how class dynamics, rather than sexuality, define these relationships.

This study will contribute to the limited scholarly work on internet fiction, providing a historical perspective on its development and its emergence as a significant platform for female-centered narratives in Asia. The findings will offer valuable insights into the cultural impact of digital spaces on young women’s creative expression and identity formation.

As the landscape of literary studies continues to shift in tandem with rapid technological advances, the role of digital tools has become increasingly prominent in shaping how, why, and where we teach and study literature. This proposal aligns closely with the thematic focus of the ICLA 2025 conference—particularly the strands Performing Literary Criticism in Digital Spaces and Reworlding World Literature—by examining how artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and online platforms like Coursera offer new modes of engaging with texts, foregrounding questions of accessibility, global collaboration, and pedagogical innovation.

For my presentation, I propose a personal essay (rather than a conventional paper) that investigates two core dimensions of this technological turn in digital literary education: first, the affordances of AI, VR, and related platforms in designing online literature courses; and second, the ways these technologies enable deeper, more interactive student engagement in literary study. Throughout, I draw upon my multifaceted background as a fiction writer, literary scholar, and Learning Experience Designer at the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan (UMICH) to illustrate how best practices and pilot projects in digital literary pedagogy can address the opportunities and challenges of teaching and studying literature in an online environment. By foregrounding specific course modules, including a VR learning activity that immerses students in the historical and cultural contexts of particular novels, my presentation underscores the transformative potential of new technologies while also probing unresolved questions concerning equity, access, data ethics, and the social dimension of reading itself.

In recent years, global events—including the COVID-19 pandemic—have accelerated the move toward online and hybrid learning across higher education. The field of literary studies, traditionally associated with in-person seminars and close-knit reading groups, has not been immune to these shifts. Indeed, scholars have increasingly acknowledged the potential of digital platforms to transform engagement with texts, whether by harnessing multimedia annotation tools, digital archives, or collaborative discussion forums. The rapid development of technology like AI chatbots and VR environments has also redefined the relationship of the student of literature to their learning subject. My proposal thus aims to explore how digital tools can help shape a more inclusive, wide-reaching form of literary engagement, particularly for online learners who might not have easy access to physical resources.

One of the central arguments of my presentation is that AI can be used to streamline various aspects of online course design while personalizing the learning process for students. For example, the instructor can use AI-driven systems to generate adaptive reading guides—by analyzing a student’s discussion posts or quiz results, these tools can automatically produce real-time study guides tailored to the learner’s skill level and interpretive style; it can facilitate language support—through real-time machine translation and natural language processing, the instructor can guide students whose first language is not English in the translation process, thereby supporting a more genuinely global classroom; the instructor can also, with the help of AI, suggest research pathways like complementary secondary readings or even relevant primary sources based on a student’s stated research interests, thus fostering deeper inquiry and a personalized learning experience.

Where AI augments and personalizes textual engagement, VR amplifies the immersive dimension of literary study. Through VR headsets or browser-based 3D environments, students can encounter the physical, cultural, and historical contexts of the works they are reading. This capability aligns particularly well with the conference theme Performing Literary Criticism in Digital Spaces, since VR effectively becomes a theatrical stage for performing interpretations of a text’s atmosphere, characters, and social milieu. One practical illustration I intend to include in my presentation is a pedagogical activity I developed where students “entered” a meticulously reconstructed parlor from another historical context, complete with period-appropriate décor, soundscapes, and interactive objects (e.g., diaries, letters, newspapers). They could read short excerpts from a specific literary text while virtually experiencing the environment in which those novels were set. The objective was to foster empathy and historical sensitivity: if students can sense the claustrophobia of certain domestic spaces or the rigid formality of certain social norms, they are arguably more equipped to parse characters’ actions and the thematic textures of these literary works. One of the challenges in these kinds of activities is ensuring robust critical reflection; some learners may be so absorbed in the “wow” factor of VR that their interpretive work remains superficial. My presentation will thus argue that VR modules must be carefully scaffolded with reflective assignments—guided journals or group discussions—to ensure that immersion does not supplant critical rigor. Another challenge is that high-quality VR requires powerful computing devices and robust network infrastructure—resources often unavailable to students in economically or technologically under-resourced contexts. I will argue that, despite the optimism around VR, institutions must remain attentive to the digital divide and proactively seek solutions such as low-bandwidth versions, institutional loaner headsets, or cross-platform flexibility that supports mobile devices.

In the domain of AI-enhanced literary education, ethical concerns loom large as well. Many platforms collect granular data on learners’ reading patterns, discussion posts, or even biometric responses in VR. While these data can drive personalized learning paths, they also raise questions about user consent and privacy. Moreover, biases in AI algorithms can subtly shape the direction of literary interpretation by emphasizing certain authors or interpretive frameworks over others. To address these issues, my presentation will propose guidelines for ethical AI implementation in literary pedagogy. Transparency—educators and institutions should clearly communicate how AI tools gather, store, and utilize student data; data governance—access to any collected data should be carefully regulated, ensuring it cannot be used for purposes beyond pedagogical improvement, and algorithmic diversity—course materials and references should intentionally include texts from marginalized communities, thereby broadening the dataset on which AI tools base their analyses. Such measures underscore the fact that technology should serve as an aid—rather than a determiner—of interpretive inquiry and pedagogical practices.

Another challenge that I explore is the fact that literary study has historically thrived in communal settings—whether seminars, reading groups, or literary societies. One might reasonably worry that online courses dilute the social aspects of learning, reducing rich, face-to-face discussions into text-based message boards or solitary VR experiences. However, a key proposition of my presentation is that AI and VR can, paradoxically, open up new forms of communal engagement. VR-based co-presence can, at times, be more inclusive for geographically scattered learners, offering real-time dialogue that surmounts physical distance. AI chatbots can simulate ongoing conversation partners, especially for students who hesitate to speak up in group settings or who struggle with confidence in a second language. Still, these technologies cannot entirely replicate the serendipity and intimacy of in-person gatherings. My conclusion will stress the need for a balanced, “blended” approach that situates AI and VR as tools that augment, rather than replace, the fundamental human act of reading and discussing literature together.

Ultimately, my presentation aims to provoke a broader discussion among conference participants, educators, and policymakers about how best to harness the power of AI, VR and online educative platforms to reimagine the future of literary education. Through case studies, critical reflections, and practical guidelines, I hope to offer a framework that both celebrates the possibilities and acknowledges the limits of these new digital horizons.

Contemporary studies in sexuality have increasingly focused on social construction of identities and categories, emphasising the influence of gender, power and political-economic dimensions (Parker & Aggleton). While studies in Indian erotic literature do shed light on gender roles, literary motifs and artistic appreciation of erotic literature, they under examine the role of material culture, mainly cosmetics, in the process. Instead, cosmetics have been studied as a subject of everyday life, detached from the innate connection it shares with sexuality. In ancient Arab societies, for instance, the use of perfumes is intricately tied to the aspect of eroticism (Hirsch), also to be noticed in Rabbinic texts that deal with women’s use of cosmetics in ancient Judaism (Labovitz).

Such academic scholarship is yet to develop on India, possessing a rich erotic literary tradition where application of pastes with designs on bodies of both men and women served as acts of sexuality and tools of seduction. This paper addresses these gaps by examining the neglected relation between sexuality and material culture of cosmetics, specifically focusing on body pastes such as sandalwood, musk, henna, and camphor and their designs in the early Indian literary traditions of Sanskrit and Tamil.

By employing an interdisciplinary conceptual framework grounded in material culture studies and comparative analysis, this paper questions: What functions did cosmetics serve in erotic contexts in Early Indian Literature? What role did they play in construction of gender roles and sexuality? Through a vast corpus of early erotic and love poetry in Sanskrit and Tamil, this paper finds gendered and regional variations in application of the same pastes and designs between these literary traditions situated in acts of sexuality, where the very act of application became a tool of seduction. For instance, sandalwood paste on female bodies was eroticised in Sanskrit poetry while application of the same paste on male bodies by females became an act of seduction in Tamil poetry.

This paper contributes to the field of comparative literature by bridging the gap in scholarship between sexuality and material culture of cosmetics. It demonstrates that cosmetics’ usage showed considerable change across ancient India that was reflected directly in erotic literature, for it played an important role in sexuality. Secondly, the material culture of cosmetics corresponds directly with the culture of clothing that in turn, corresponds to the socio-religious norms of the changing society, signalling a complex relationship between material culture of clothing, sexuality, gender and social acceptability.

By situating cosmetics within the broader context of Indian erotic literature, these findings serve implications to fields of literature, gender and cultural studies, offering a deeper understanding of how material culture shapes and reflects cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality.

The paintings of Late Qing Lingnan artists Ju Chao (居巢) and Ju Lian (居廉) have garnered attention from art historians due to their extensive engagement with regional subjects and their meticulous, realistic style. However, their active participation in Lingnan's intellectual and literary circles, along with their poetic works and interactions with their paintings, has yet to be thoroughly examined. This paper focuses on the cross-media interaction between their poetry and paintings, seeking to reassess the material culture of Late Qing Lingnan. It explores their works depicting Lingnan's regional characteristics from three cultural levels: first, as regional knowledge from the southern frontier of the empire; second, as part of the Eastern world in a foreign trade port; and third, as scenes of daily life within the local community. This paper begins with their pursuit of likeness and realism in art, restoring the historical context of their perceptual engagement with the material world. Secondly, the paper investigates the innovative significance of 'food' as a motif in their paintings, exploring its role in everyday life and its contribution to the cultural strategy Lingnan painters adopted during early globalization. In conclusion, this paper seeks to position Ju Chao and Ju Lian's artistic creations within an increasingly complex and fragmented cultural context, offering a new understanding of the local perspectives and potential embedded in their painting styles and orientations.

This research focuses on the popular AI role playing story writing with an aim to comprehend the author-reader dynamics in AI generated literature. AI is the digital extension of literature that comes with the highest technological thrive in the fourth industrial revolution of information and techenology. Literature has long ago moved beyond the literacy media to the electric media. AI has offered digital assistance in creating literature. One of the most used AI features is the role playing stories. Role playing stories is the pattern of conversational story writing where AI writes a role and the person using AI writes another portion of the story. The user can play his part including adding characters and roles into the stories where ai provides the plot and details to the character. This is a popular function of entertainment nowadays for the GenZ. When AI and the user both write a story together, who becomes the author and who is the reader? Who is in the prime role of the storyteller?This study dives into this question exploring the power relation between AI and human users in this digitized notion of writing story. For the analysis the data is collected from popularly used AI role playing online platforms and apps. The critical analysis adapts key aspects from 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'. a 1964 book by communication and media theorist Marshall McLuhan. The paper provides understanding in three critical points. Firstly, there is a thorough discussion on the sociology of AI literature focusing on the language model of these role playing stories. This will highlight how AI story writing is employed to foster new forms of ethical behaviour, thought and creativity in the language and literature. Secondly, the analysis examines how these AI plots mostly offer Genz fantasies of story writing, generating from mostly trendy topics on the internet. This tendency blurs the presence of the original author as several sources of information are blended into. Thirdly, The study shows how this AI role playing story pattern deals with the dichotomy of reader and writer and how the reader merges into the role of writer. The user acts and reacts, reads and writes the story at the same time . With these three comprehensive analysis parts the paper uncloaks the power dynamics of author and reader in the digitized version of literature provided by artificial intelligence.

As of 2025, the popularity of born digital literature is at its peak. Readers from across the globe are intrigued about the new and engaging forms of born digital texts. Though an emerging genre, born digital literature are not very easily and widely accepted and placed side by side with print texts by the readers, academicians, or critics. They often base their opinions and judgements keeping in mind the traditional print culture. A 'book' can now mean both the conventional, physical, and material thing and a born digital text which do not have a material existence. Certain readers do not consider the born digital texts worthy of being a literature. Born digital literature is essentially ludic. The idea of ludocity is automatically attached to digital texts without any critical view as opposed to “serious” texts which are the printed texts. The print culture has certainly dominated heavily over the past few centuries and even more with the rise of capitalism, thus the minds are very used to the print medium and this change into digital media requires some getting used to. The printed words in a book have been regarded as uncontestable, whatever has been published is final and absolute. This teleiopoesis is the norm of the print culture. This standard faces a challenge in digital culture. Readers do not place the same faith in an e-book like a printed book. Digital literature is placed in the same box as that of video games, but should not video games also account for a genre which can be considered as literature? Certainly, games like "Zork", "Myst", and "Planet Alpha" can give us a text with a critical perspective. We, as comparatists, cannot just discard them to a non-serious domain of games. Born digital texts often do not undergo screening and are easier to publish independently in contrast to a printed book so the chances of error are much more of a probability for an e-book. Thus, the highest integrity and supremacy given to a book in the print culture is undergoing a change in the digital culture.

With the debut of born digital texts the concept of book and reading has remodeled. The limitations of a printed text are lifted from a digital text. Jean Pierre Balpe’s "Towards a Diffracted literature", clearly explains the phenomena of the change of media bringing forth a change in the mode of reading. In an e-book we are not only invested in the meaning making process but also the outer makeup of the text or the structure. Modifying and playing with the font style, size, colour, brightness, and backgrounds engage the readers into a play of medium. This interest in the outer structure of the text is due to the new found freedom from all limitations which are imposed by a print text. The readers feel a kind of power, power to participate in the text, power to manipulate the text, power to feel like an author and go above the author.

We experience a shifting of cultures with the shifting medias. From oral to print culture now we are in a digital culture surpassing the print-based realm, but the similarity of digital culture with oral culture is obvious. The authorship fluctuates in both the oral culture and the digital culture, the physical immateriality of both the medium brings forth quite similar possibilities and challenges. Different from print culture where one or a few individuals claim the authorship of the book, the productions in digital culture are usually a collaborative work. E-text is the creation and production of texts, images, videos, audios, graphics all together so a digital work is a cooperative work, where authorship is usually not claimed by an individual. "The Death of the Author" becomes an easier manifestation in the digital culture to the point where in some texts the name of the text is of enough information for the readers unless he/she wants a deeper dive in the process of the making of the texts. Texts such as "SBS Boat", "First Draft of the Revolution" by Emily Short, "Sultana’s Reality", "Nippon", "Flash", "Chroma" by Erik Loyer are some examples of the performance texts in digital culture. The above-mentioned texts provide a new and unique opportunity for students of comparative literature to understand and consider the process beyond the close reading of the texts, and the notion of authorship is not simple here. When the texts are far removed from a specific, 'supreme' author then the texts become truly global, authorship connects a text to a geo-political location which is not applicable for digital literature. In a born digital literature, the creators can collaborate even from different time zones from opposite parts of the world, in asynchronous collaboration. These practice produces a transnational situation which is free from any hierarchy, be it social, political, or economic.

Xiaoyuzhou FM is a Chinese podcast app officially launched in March 2020. Unlike other multi-functional social apps, it provides listening experiences exclusively for users. Podcasts tailored to users will be recommended according to personal preference(by tags). At the same time, users can also search for their favorite programme, send pop-ups and comments in every episode, and find fellow podcasters with similar tastes. In recent years, podcast has become much popular among young people. Eye-friendly, rich-in-content, and full of emotional connections, it fully satisfies young people's need to receive information in fragmented time. On Xiaoyuzhou FM, people can express their views and have in-depth communication and discussions with other listeners. Through this process, they find themselves being more confident, caring and reflective, which helps to promote individual interaction, self-cognition and public participation.

Now more and more people engage in Digital Social Reading on Xiaoyuzhou FM. One of the most attractive reasons is that they can find a community with the same reading interests, which guarantees a sense of belonging. Listeners usually crowd under certain podcasts, where topics considered to be inappropriate or unlucky in offline conversations(like families and schools) can be talked about freely. For example, many podcasters have shared books about aging, disease and death in their programme, which are rarely mentioned in Chinese culture. These books include Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Erik Olin Wright’s Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying, and Shi Tiesheng’s Disease Gap Broken Pen. Also, the listener feedback function allows podcasters to adjust the content according to their audience’s responses and thus a two-way communication is built up. This new pattern of Digital Social Reading has changed the reading practice of Chinese young people as well as comparative literature studies. And this research aims at exploring how readings about themes that are not encouraging in Chinese society are carried on by young people on Xiaoyuzhou FM, and how they are received and understood through people’s communication with others in the online community.

The title of the Group session applied for:

A3. Convergence of Literature and Technology: “The Transformation of the Book and Reading in the Post-Digital Age; Born-Digital Literature”

Martin Heidegger is known for his fourfold concept of the world: the holy whole of earth, sky, mortals, and gods. Cryptically, this unity has transformed into the subsequent diminishing epochs: from the original mythological to the threefold religious, twofold scientific, and the collapsed technological. The last two manifestations—modern and postmodern—are considered a threat, particularly the final one. Could the decline turn into a salvation? What would be the next worldview that overcomes the technical danger? Are there any poetic premonitions of it in art and literature?

We may present this phenomenological plot graphically as follows (see Merilai 2023: 35).

[Enclosed Figure 1. The Heideggerian worldview epochs.]

References

Heidegger, Martin. 1954. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfulligen: Günther Neske Verlag.

Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Die Technik und die Kehre. Pfulligen: Günther Neske Verlag.

Heidegger, Martin. 1976. „Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.“ – Der Spiegel, No. 30 (May): 193–219.

Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Basic Writings: from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins Editions.

Merilai, Arne. 2023. A Technical Turn and Poetic Declination: God Help Us. – Merilai, Arne. Estonian Pragmapoetics, from Poetry and Fiction to Philosophy and Genetics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 30–48.

This study focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian fiction Klara and the Sun (2021), specifically analysing how technology amplifies loneliness and prompts society to create more advanced technological solutions to alleviate the feeling of isolation. For example, sentient robots have already been developed to take care of human loneliness. The technology has proven successful in eliciting appropriate emotional responses, but “there is psychological risk in the robotic moment” (Turkle 55). By examining the relationship between mankind and Artificial Intelligence (AI), this study evaluates to what extent technology can genuinely lighten this uniquely human experience of loneliness from the Heideggerian perspective. In the novel, advanced androids, known as Artificial Friends (AFs), are designed to accompany children and even serve as continuities for those who have passed away. In such an intricate relationship, humans view AFs as manageable resources providing companionship, while AFs disconnect humans from the true Being. This interaction visualises Heidegger’s “Enframing” (Gestell). I thereby argue that we are risking relinquishing essential aspects of humanity when we allow AI to increasingly involve in our narrative. As a result, I advocate that we need a more nuanced approach to how we engage with technology, especially concerning sentient machines, to effectively and ethically address loneliness.

Being and Time is Martin Heidegger's magnum opus and a cornerstone of his reputation as one of the greatest modern philosophers. However, this masterpiece is notoriously difficult and obscure. Is there a way to present its core ideas in simpler, more accessible language so that scholars and readers unfamiliar with Western philosophy can understand and appreciate it? A more important question is: how can we bring Heidegger’s philosophical thoughts into a dialogue with Chinese philosophy, thus bridging the gap between Eastern and Western philosophy and facilitating the integration of both perspectives? Inspired by the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead's advice to scholars—"If you want to understand Confucius, read John Dewey. If you want to understand John Dewey, read Confucius," the author attempts to create a dialogue between Laozi and Heidegger across time, culture, and civilization. This dialogue aims to understand Being and Time through a reading of Tao Te Ching, and to deepen our understanding of Tao Te Ching through a close reading of Being and Time. This paper focuses on a detailed reading and comparison of Tao Te Ching and Being and Time, with the goal of deepening our understanding of the core concepts of "Tao" (the Way) and "Sein" (Being), and making a modest contribution to the fusion of Eastern and Western thought.

Tao Te Ching, in the minds of the Chinese, is considered a profound work—just over five thousand characters, yet it conveys deep meanings and encompasses the universe. Being and Time, as a modern philosophical text, may not have the same far-reaching and lasting influence as Tao Te Ching, but it holds immense importance in the Western world. In this book, Heidegger questions the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy, which has been built over centuries, and provides a deeper and ontological interpretation of human existence. Although both of these philosophical masterpieces are groundbreaking in their own right, they seem to have no obvious connection from their introductions, making a comparison between them seems unnecessary. Tao Te Ching explores the general nature of existence between humans and the cosmos, with humans being the central focus, though not seen as the center of the universe. On the other hand, Being and Time centers on human existence (Dasein), asserting that the world gains its meaning from human existence. In this sense, Being and Time appears to have a narrower scope in its interpretation of existence. This difference is undoubtedly related to the contrasts between Eastern and Western thought. Chinese philosophy, especially Taoism, emphasizes nature and views humans as part of the cosmos and nature, with human existence needing to align with the universal way. In contrast, Western philosophy, especially mainstream metaphysics, is human-centered and explores existence through the lens of human beings. Heidegger’s existentialism further emphasizes human existence as distinct from other beings. In terms of structure, Tao Te Ching is divided according to its content, while Being and Time is divided through logical reasoning. This structural difference reflects the different approaches to interpretation between Eastern and Western philosophies—namely, the distinct pursuits of the logic of interpretation. Chinese thinkers tend to prioritize the accessibility of ideas, aiming to transmit knowledge and truth to the student, whose task is to absorb the logic and source of knowledge through repeated reading and contemplation. In contrast, Western philosophers, especially Heidegger, resemble scientists (Of course, Heidegger would certainly sneer at such a metaphor, but the process of his interpretation in Being and Time indeed presents a strong sense of scientific rigor. ) in that they emphasize revealing the origins and development of knowledge and truth, focusing on the formation process and the problems that arise within those ideas. Given these differences, one might wonder: with such contrasting approaches to thought and expression, is there any meaningful comparison or dialogue between Laozi and Heidegger’s core ideas? How can the central concepts of "Dao" and "Being" be understood in relation to each other, despite these fundamental differences in thinking and presentation?

In order to comprehend the dialogue between two great thinkers and philosophers, we need to learn to play the role of “the child” (chi zi, 赤子) that Laozi refers to, or “the child” in the three metamorphises of human existence mentioned by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, jumping out of the constraints of tradition. When comparing Tao Te Ching and Being and Time, we need to learn to forget: forget that Laozi was from ancient China, the founder of Taoism, and Heidegger was from twentieth-century Germany, a major figure in Western existential philosophy, the so-called "Nazist"; forget that Tao Te Ching was written in Chinese, the "king of all Chinese classics," and Being and Time was written in German, a monumental work of postmodernism; forget that in Tao Te Ching, the human being is just a part of the cosmos and nature, while in Being and Time, the human being is the meaning of the entire world; forget that Tao Te Ching teaches people to act without action, to align with nature, while Being and Time emphasizes human initiative and the unique fact of being born for death. In fact, regardless of how to evaluate Tao Te Ching and Being and Time, both works explore existence, and existence—especially human existence—is the core that Laozi and Heidegger want us to focus on. Tao Te Ching mainly explores what the Tao is and its relationship with the world. So, what is the Tao? According to Wang Defeng, a famous philosopher and a philosophical professor in Fu Dan University in China, Laozi doesn't explain what the Tao is in Tao Te Ching, but rather, he tells us what the Tao is not. To follow the Tao, one must first perform subtraction, that is, Laozi's concepts of "loss" (sun, 损) and " non-action" (wu wei, 无为). Through Tao Te Ching, Laozi tells people how to exist in the world, how to follow the universal law of existence—the Tao—by practicing "sun" and "wu wei," and thereby "doing nothing and yet nothing remains undone" (无为而无不为). Being and Time primarily explores what Sein (Being) is, particularly what Dasein (human existence) is. Of course, Heidegger would likely object to the concepts of "is" and "what" in this context, because throughout Being and Time, he strives to free philosophy from the concepts of "is" and "what," which have constrained and misled Western thoughts for centuries, and he seemingly does not intend to answer such questions. However, it is undeniable that while attempting to reveal the phenomenon of existence from the perspective of human existence, Heidegger does answer what human existence is.

Laozi’s Tao and Heidegger’s Sein have commonalities. The first is the ineffability of the philosophical concepts "Tao" and "Sein." The second is the ambiguity of the concepts of "Tao" and "Sein." The third is the duality within the structure of "Tao" and "Sein." Furthermore, both philosophers highlight the concept of dualistic unity of opposites in their works. Firstly, the concept of "being and non-being" (you/wu, 有无) is a core idea in Laozi's philosophy, and a similar concept of "being and non-being" (thingness and nothingness) is proposed in Heidegger's philosophy. It is undeniable that Heidegger's thought may have been influenced by Western classical philosophy and art, such as the Greek god Dionysus in ancient Greek mythology. Here, it is necessary to compare the concept of the Greek god Dionysus with Laozi's philosophy of Yin and Yang, as both are the origins of binary thinking in Eastern and Western philosophies. In this context, we can observe the similarity between Heidegger's concept of being and Laozi's Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang: the opposing sides of a contradiction cannot be completely separated; they complement each other. Secondly, Laozi says, "Therefore, you and wu give birth to each other," and "All things in the world arise from you, and you arises from wu." Heidegger states that what is lacking in the everyday experience of "being-in-the-world" is a foundation that Dasein can rely on or stand upon. This inherent deficiency, according to Heidegger's analysis, is "nothingness." Therefore, from an ontological perspective, the core of being-in-the-world is this "nothingness." He also believes that "nothingness" is a higher state of existence than "thingness" and is the essential nature of being-in-the-world. Heidegger deliberately avoids using the word "thingness" in Being and Time, as it has been overused in Western metaphysics and scientism, and it fails to reveal the most essential phenomenon of human existence. Heidegger argues that "nothingness" has the capacity to reveal this essence.

Through a close reading and mutual interpretation of the core concepts in Laozi and Heidegger's philosophies, this study does not aim to prove that the thoughts of Laozi or Heidegger are superior to each other, nor does it seek to compare the superiority or inferiority of Eastern and Western existential philosophy. Furthermore, the study does not intend to suggest that Heidegger’s existential philosophy benefits from or originates from Laozi’s Taoism (although Heidegger’s philosophy does exhibit elements of Taoist thought, this influence is not the focus of this study). Rather, the aim is to highlight the "fusion of horizons" between Eastern and Western existential philosophy, an aspect that was once overshadowed by the opposition between Eastern and Western thought and Western-centered epistemology. As Mr. Qian Zhongshu said: "In Eastern and Western scholarships, the ways and methods have not yet entirely different from each other; in the South Sea and North Sea, people’s psychology is the same." Although Tao Te Ching and Being and Time seem to be entirely different philosophical works, the principles and philosophical reflections they present share commonalities. The purpose of comparative literature and comparative poetics is not to determine whether the West influenced the East or the East influenced the West, but to explore the commonalities between Eastern and Western thoughts, or the universal laws they share. The ultimate goal is to find out the fusion of the horizons from different cultural traditions.

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.

Jia Pingwa’s works are characterized by folk languages and traditional cultural elements, the translation of which have become the focus of Chinese folk literature translation study. From the perspective of translator behavior criticism, this paper analyzes the translation strategies of Chinese folk language in The Mountain Whisperer, summarizes the tendency of translator behavior and discusses the underlying factors based on Bourdieu’s field theory. It is found that, by adroit adoption of various translation strategies, the translator behavior slides on the continuum with “utility-attaining” as the major pattern and “truth-seeking” as a salient one, which is determined by the interaction of such factors as the positioning of Chinese literature in the field of English translation literature, the capital of different actors and translator’s habitus. This paper will provide reference for the study of translator behavior in Jia Pingwa’s translations as well as the translation of Chinese folk literature.

This essay examines the pivotal role of Chinese classical poetry in shaping Anglophone modernism from a cross-cultural and gender perspective, highlighting how Eastern linguistic and cultural dimensions influenced key modernist figures and forms in the West. Central to this discussion is the experimental collaboration between Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell in translating Tang poetry, which elevated Chinese poetry to a more prominent position in the modernist milieu. Their work exemplifies how female modernists’ experimentation with Chinese poetry was deeply enriched by close interactions with Chinese poetic and artistic traditions as well as sustained contact and exchange with Chinese locals. Ayscough and Lowell’s fascination with Chinese ideograms, syntactic structures, and philosophical underpinnings informed their modernist innovations in form, aesthetics, and meaning-making. More importantly, their engagement with the affective dimensions of the Chinese language is not merely a matter of narrow literary concern but also carries important social, cross-cultural, and political implications. This essay demonstrates that the Chinese language, as mediated through the collaborative translations of Ayscough and Lowell, was not merely

an exotic aesthetic choice for Anglophone modernists but a form of cultural and poetic capital as much as a dynamic force that expanded women modernists’ linguistic, artistic, and affective horizons, enabling them to challenge and, in some cases, outshine their male counterparts.

This paper examines translator autonomy in the translation of Korean-Chinese and Chinese-Korean children's literature. Since the cultural shift in translation studies in the 1990s, the role and autonomy of translators have become central topics in translation studies. Translator autonomy refers to the translator's subjective initiative in achieving translation goals, influenced by external factors. Using a sample of 187 books and focusing solely on title translations, this study conducts both quantitative and qualitative analyses based on translation methods. In comparing translation approaches, it references Newmark’s strategies of "source language" and "target language" while also considering Korean-Chinese/Chinese-Korean translation practices. Translation methods are categorized into three types: faithful translation of the source text (including character and transliteration translation), free translation for the target text, and target text revision following "transformation" of the source text. This paper deeply analyzes the title translations of children’s literature published between 2001 and 2020 in Korea and China, aiming to compare translator autonomy and its limitations in Korean-Chinese and Chinese-Korean children's literature translation practices. Findings reveal that in 101 Korean children's books translated into Chinese, 25 titles (24.7%) were revised; in 86 Chinese children's books translated into Korean, 28 titles (32.5%) underwent revisions. In these revisions, translators in both countries creatively adapted titles to better align with the cultural context and readership of the target culture, demonstrating the translator’s subjective initiative. Korean-Chinese translation emphasizes preserving the unique linguistic charm of Korean, while Chinese-Korean translation focuses more on making the title accessible to Chinese readers. When dealing with unique cultural elements, translators adjust their translations according to the cultural acceptability and cognitive habits of the target audience. Furthermore, the purposes and audiences for Korean-Chinese and Chinese-Korean children’s literature adaptations vary; some are aimed at meeting children's reading needs, while others are geared towards cultural promotion or exchange. Different translation purposes and audiences influence the strategies, methods, and quality of translations.

This article attempts to employ the method of ethical literary criticism to study the symbolic ethical dilemma confronted by the protagonist in the Chinese classic drama The Orphan of Chao. In the drama, the character orphan Chao remained oblivious to the tragic extermination of his family, yet was confronted with a painful choice of whether to seek revenge. Following the collapse of an ancient dynasty in Chinese history, there emerged a faction of loyalists to the previous regime who resisted cooperation with the new ruling authority. Their offspring, known as “the second-generation remnants”, also struggled with whether to be loyal to the new regime. The latter lacked emotional recognition for deep hatred and pain towards the previous dynasty and felt a closer emotional affinity towards stability under newly established regime. Without the indoctrination of their predecessors or their unique cultural psychology, they found it difficult to empathize with or develop special feelings towards the overthrowing of the previous dynasty. This psychological predicament bears resemblance to that experienced by the orphan Chao; hence this ethical choice can be called “the Dilemma of Orphan Chao”. Indeed, the so-called “Dilemma of Orphan Chao” is ubiquitous and eternal, manifesting not only as a literary archetype but also as a common ethical dilemma in daily life. When one is alienated from a certain era but passively or actively caught in a dilemma about whether to inherit their identity as “remnants” due to pressure from elders or personal preferences (such as second-generation immigrants), this situation can be referred to as “the Dilemma of Orphan Chao”.

Drawing on trauma studies and memory theories, this paper examines Malaysian Chinese writer Tan Twan Eng's English novels, The Gift of Rain and The Garden of Evening Mists, analysing how they engage with themes of forgiveness and memory ethics in the context of Malaysia's 1980s Look East policy. Tan's novels powerfully depict the trauma of Japanese occupation in Malaysia while exploring his protagonists' complex struggle between preserving wartime memories and healing from trauma. Rather than advocating for post-war retribution, his works thoughtfully examine the intricate process of restoring justice while preserving traumatic memories.

Tan's novels skillfully balance the duty to remember with an aspiration for peace, proposing a path toward non-violent reconciliation with former perpetrators. Through this lens, Tan's work offers both a novel approach to traumatic narrative and a fresh perspective on justice. While acknowledging that historical memory and justice for victims remain essential moral imperatives, Tan suggests that love, forgiveness, and friendship can serve to promote peace and reconciliation with former adversaries.

This is particularly evident in the meaningful interactions between protagonists and their Japanese visitors, which symbolise an ethics of non-violent reconciliation, whereby collective remembrance facilitates communal healing. Through these encounters, Tan envisions a future where former enemies can forge peaceful relationships, potentially preventing future conflicts. His work demonstrates that while we must maintain our responsibility to remember history and seek justice for victims, these goals can be achieved through paths that emphasise understanding and reconciliation rather than retribution.

Abstract: Numerous discussions of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics have focused on whether and how the two fields interact and overlap with each another. Behind such discussions lies an explicit assumption that aesthetics and ethics are distinct and an implicit supposition that aesthetics is superior to or prior to ethics in literary criticism. This paper argues that aesthetics is neither superior to nor prior to ethics nor is it the so-called “mother of ethics”. Instead, the ethical and the aesthetic are inextricably intertwined with one another, the former being the internalised kernel of the latter, while the latter is an ideal manifestation of the former. Theoretically, aesthetical ethics holds that the aesthetical is ultimately a means to gain access to the ethical and hence the unity of the aesthetical and the ethical. With the increasing development of AI technology, AI Aesthetics has now become a hot topic in the field of ethical literary criticism. This paper attempts to address the issue of subjectivity of AI in aesthetic judgement and its ethical controversies.

This proposal discusses strategies for comparative analysis growing out of the recent joint-authored book, *Modernist Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism* (2022), by the American presenter, Professor Ronald Schleifer and his Chinese colleague, Professor Tiao Wang (of Harbin Institute of Technology). The book is written in English and published by Palgrave Macmillan. Its work pursues comparative analyses on three levels:

• LANGUAGE, which compared linguistic strategies in Chinese and English literature (in terms of laughter in Joyce and Zhongshu; poetics in Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and ethics in Faulkner and Mo Yan);

• PHILOLOGY, which compared “semantic overlap” and complexity growing out of disciplinary strategies of literary studies across cultures; and

• CULTURE, which examined similarities arising with a “consumerist” culture and differences arising from significantly different cultural assumptions and habits.

These comparative analyses are set forth in the context of bringing together language, thought, and culture in the very discourse of its join enterprise. That is, the very titles of the chapters of their book do so in relation to a “key” Chinese and English term: Preface: qian yan 前言 (“preface [speak before]”); Introduction: gai 改 (“change”); Chapter 1: shi chang jing ji 市场经济 (“market economy”); Chapter 2: xian feng 先锋 (“avant-garde” or “pioneer”); Chapter 3: che dan 扯蛋 (“joking”); Chapter 4: zhou 周 (“completion”); Chapter 5: kun nan 困难 (“difficulty”); and Afterword: fei jian dan 非简单 (“non-simplicity”).

What *Modernist Poetics in China* does not do is examine and analyze the work of its authors shared enterprise, namely a focus on its own “action.” This presentation’s focus examines the particular systematic strategies of linguistic, personal, and cultural interaction which constitutes the particular practical work of intercultural understanding. Such “work” manifests itself in both cross-cultural analyses and in bringing together various strategic focuses such as those noted above – laughter, poetics, and ethics – in day-to-day practical collaboration. In other words, the work of comparative studies creates informative parallels between bringing together literary cultures and human responses focusing upon: community-building (laughter), enhanced experience (poetics), and shared value (ethics).

Professor Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, America. His most recent book is *Literary Studies and Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare* (Bloomsbury, 2023; an open access book). He has recently completed another book, *The Haptic Arts: How Touch Builds Tools, Shapes Our Place in the World, and Informs the Traditional Arts*.

This presentation addresses the relationship between Zen Buddhism and modernist art, focusing on examples of Japanese artists who travelled and stayed in the USA in the early 20th century. Zen Buddhism began to attract attention in Western societies from the 19th century, and since the 1950s, after the WW2, a Zen boom has occurred around the world, starting with USA, and which is known to have had a significant impact on art and thought. However, as this presentation will reveal, the activities and roles of Japanese people who transcended national borders from the early 20th century to the first half of the 20th century are very important.

Particularly central are examples of poetry and religious expression by artists active in the USA, such as Yone Noguchi (1875-1947) and Shigetsu Sasaki (1882-1945). They travelled and lived throughout the USA and provided the essence of Eastern thought, especially in their dialogues with Westerners. They tried to incorporate elements of Zen Buddhism into their poetry and to express Zen ideas in their poetry. These activities were not only an assertion of their own cultural identity as Japanese writers, but also a response to the demands of their Western contemporaries. This presentation will also explain the growing interest in Eastern philosophical ideas such as Zen and Buddhism in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century.

When Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha, he oriented his creative process towards symbolic forms. The journey he describes through India is totally unrealized, and reflects an inner journey. Hermann Hesse's dreamlike image of India is based on Romantic sources. It was already towards the end of the 18th century, with the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones in Calcutta in 1784, and later with Sanskrit translations, that knowledge of India was spreading in Europe. But it was the German Romantics who turned Indian wisdom into a model. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer takes up traditional Indian thought, showing that the truth of the world lies in the one. This idea is at the heart of Hermann Hesse's novel, and the object of the quest of its main character, Buddha. This paper will analyze the relationship between European representations and traditional Indian thought.

This paper examines how French rap artists deploy multilingual practices as sociolinguistic resistance strategies, analyzing their works as literary texts that exemplify complex language contact phenomena. Focusing on works by PNL, Niska, and Jul (2015-2017), and drawing on contact linguistics frameworks (Kotze 2020; Malamatidou 2016), I analyze how these artists construct what Guérin (2018) terms "contemporary urban borrowings" through the incorporation of Rromani, Arabic, Lingala, and regional French varieties.

The study specifically investigates three key manifestations of language contact in rap as a literary genre: code-switching as resistance to institutional French, language crossing as solidarity-building across ethnic boundaries, and the emergence of hybrid urban vernaculars. Through close analysis of linguistic data from rap lyrics as literary texts, I demonstrate how these contact phenomena operate at both individual and community levels, creating what Rampton (2015) describes as "cross-ethnically we-coded" spaces.

The research reveals how rappers' multilingual literary practices extend beyond mere lexical borrowing to constitute complex sociolinguistic strategies. These include tactical deployments of minority languages to challenge monolingual ideologies, deliberate code-switching to signal group membership, and the cultivation of hybrid vernaculars that reflect urban demographic realities. Such practices exemplify what recent contact linguistics scholarship identifies as "manifest and latent multilingualism" in creative literary contexts.

This case study contributes to understanding how language contact manifests in contemporary literary production, particularly in contexts of urban multilingualism and postcolonial language dynamics. It demonstrates how creative writers can exploit language contact phenomena to challenge dominant linguistic hierarchies while constructing new possibilities for multilingual literary expression.

Les expérimentations poétiques de Mallarmé, en transcendant les limites du langage, de la forme et du sens, ont profondément influencé l’art multisensoriel ainsi que la création artistique contemporaine utilisant les technologies numériques. Mallarmé disposait les mots de manière visuelle, générant simultanément sens et images. Sa poésie offre des pistes pour explorer les possibilités esthétiques de l’interaction entre texte et image dans l’art numérique.

Selon Flusser, l’image est un médiateur entre le monde et l’humain. L’espace de l’image constitue un espace d’interprétation et un complexe de significations, où les interactions entre les images prennent forme. La théorie musicale est étroitement liée à la complexité et à l’interconnexion de la littérature et de la peinture, abordant ainsi la capacité de la musique à être expressive ou représentative.

Selon Platon, le moment de création est un moment de folie divine, où les poètes, sous l’emprise de l’inspiration, établissent un lien avec la Muse, déesse de la musique. Aristote regroupe la composition, le caractère, le style et la pensée pour définir le texte, et voit dans le langage une richesse apportée par le rythme et la musicalité.

Mallarmé, à travers l’agencement physique des textes et des expérimentations structurelles, poursuit la quête d’une musicalité visuelle. Pour lui, l’art est une création technique complète, séparée du monde ordinaire. Le rythme de ses poèmes découle de l’utilisation technique du langage. Il considère le langage non comme un simple outil de communication, mais comme une technique artistique intégrant la forme et le contenu.

Mallarmé exploite les espaces entre les textes comme des silences dans une partition musicale, permettant au lecteur d’expérimenter le langage de manière sensorielle, comme la musique. Il pensait que le langage, par essence, ne pouvait jamais exprimer complètement la réalité, mais il n’a cessé de mener des expérimentations techniques pour dépasser ces limites.

Selon Julia Kristeva, ce que Mallarmé désigne comme le « mystère dans les lettres » fait référence au rythme sémiotique inhérent au langage. Dans ses poèmes, l’espace profond du texte est rythmique, libre, et intranscriptible en mots intelligibles, tout en restant profondément musical. Cependant, cet espace est limité par la syntaxe. La poésie révèle cette fonction mystérieuse des lettres tout en la rendant accessible grâce à la syntaxe. Le poète, guidé par son instinct rythmique, limite ce mystère au domaine de la musique.

Mallarmé a concrétisé le rythme poétique et la structure musicale à travers l’agencement visuel du texte. Cette étude a pour objectif d’explorer la modernité dans la poésie de Mallarmé à travers la musicalité visuelle et le rythme sémiotique qui s’y manifestent.

‘The Songlines’ (1987) a representation of travel writing by Bruce Chatwin is an exposure to the aboriginal tsuringa-tracks, or songlines. Chatwin has created a whole new Australia with an aboriginal grounding. In this travel writing, Chatwin is present as an author with Arkady; a half Russian, Australian citizen. It is through their eyes, that we perceive the aboriginals; the original inhabitants of Australia and its culture.

Chatwin on his Australian trip completed two decades of writing about the nomadic instinct. In Chatwin’s understanding of the aboriginal myth of creation, the totem ancestors-the great kangaroo, or the dream-snake, first sung themselves into existence and then, as they began to walk across the landscape, sung every feature of the natural world into existence. Each time they sung a rock or a stream, it came into existence. ‘A song’, Chatwin writes, ‘was both map and direction finder…’ (Chatwin,15). The ancestors ‘sang’ the world into existence, so much so that the sole aim of the aboriginal religious life was ‘to keep the land the way it was and should be’ (Chatwin,16).

The songlines comprised oral instructions and tradition passed down through generations. In hunter-gatherer societies, intimate knowledge of the landscape and its amenities was the key to survival. Many songlines were lost during the colonial encroachment of the 19th and early 20th centuries, many others exist to this day, preserving the living link between the land and the people who have lived on it for tens of thousands of years. The link is preserved through art, which is no longer for the sake of art. A study of songlines and allied concepts will be undertaken in this paper with special reference to the impactful role they play in Aboriginal art, enriching its layers of meaning and cultural significance. Aboriginal paintings are a visual representation of the land. The use of dots, lines, and patterns in Aboriginal art represents the topography, landscapes, and the pathways of these songlines.

Each painting encapsulates stories, ceremonies, and rites of passage connected to the songlines. These artworks are repositories of shared knowledge. The use of specific symbols, colors, and patterns delineate different clans and their ancestral territories.

Artworks connected to songlines are often used in rituals and ceremonies, reinforcing their spiritual significance. These practices ensure the continued transmission of knowledge and cultural heritage. Contemporary Aboriginal artists integrate traditional elements of songlines into modern art, blending the old with the new to tell their stories. This can be seen in various media, from canvas works to digital art. Artworks are used for advocacy, raising awareness about Indigenous rights and environmental conservation, and gender underscoring the contemporary relevance of songlines. Works by artists like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's artworks are renowned for their depiction of songlines, merging traditional methods with innovative approaches. Women on the other hand were not really encouraged to paint, either by the men except as helpers, or by the arts advisors. Pansy Napangarti an unusual woman, a strong person who became a successful artist marketed her work herself in the early ’80s and learned a lot from Clifford Possum. Art works by artists and their contemporary relevance with songlines will be studied in this paper.

Sijo, which is roughly equivalent to the Japanese haiku, has been composed, enjoyed by and circulated among Koreans for more than 600 years. Sijo used to be a poetry genre appropriated mostly by the male Confucian elite during the Chosun dynasty. However, Sijo developed itself as the genre that most powerfully appealed to Koreans’ communal sense of aesthetics.

The essence of Sijo poems lies at the frugality of language use, usage of clear images, and the dialectical combination of manifested imagery and implied philosophy in the concluding line. To be more specific, as for the economics of language, Sijo is composed of strictly three lines, each of which contain about 15 syllables, thereby usually no more than 45 syllables as a whole. The first two lines usually provide backdrops for the final line: they are often devoted to describing or representing natural beauty or human episodes. The genuine intention of the poet reveals itself in the ending line. The poet manifests his or her realization of esoteric truth, sense of juissence, exhilaration, regret, self-rebuke, and resentment, which are often extracted from the episodes or scenes in the previous lines. Sijo has continued to reform itself complying with the demands of zeitgeists of new eras as Korean society shifted towards modernity: its form experimented with narrative style Shijo once so that it could function as a genre of engagement literature and it also attempted to incorporate elements of modernity in diverse ways.

By examining the ways foreigners— James Gale, Richard Rutt, Kevin O’rouke et al-- translated traditional Sijo into English, one can identify the particularities of sijo as Koreans’ unique form poetry in a broader global context.

Jane Loudon’s three-volume novel, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), expresses a dystopian/utopian world where an Egyptian mummy of Cheops is reanimated in 2126 and he challenges to improve England damaged by political and religious conflicts as well as advanced technology. England in 2126 is ruled by absolute monarchy, governed by Roman Catholicism, and managed by scientific and technological inventions such as telegraphic machines, moving houses, and ariel voyages. Influenced by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), however, Loudon’s The Mummy presents the revived Cheops as a temporal savior of the collapsed society. The ancient Egyptian civilization as a popular trend for the Victorians represents a possible space of the unknown world, and the rapidly introduced scientific inventions embody an experimental reference to create a futuristic novel (later, so-called Science Fiction). The Egyptian mummies which were employed as medicine in palaeopathology in the Middle Ages are examined in bioarchaeological and biomedical fields. Unwrapping mummies in the nineteenth century are connected with surgery as a medical treatment in the twentieth century when they are investigated by X-ray and CT scanning. The Mummy explores a series of cultural and scientific traits of ancient Egyptian mummies such as biomedical references, improves the awareness of ancient cultural and medical heritage as a global treasure of human beings with scientific examinations, and furthermore, proposes an anticipated transfiguration of technology and science that affects humanity. Loudon intends to create an innovative future world with a satirical and critical perspective.

In 2012, Chinese American writer Yan Geling published the English novel The Flowers of War along with Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s same-titled blockbuster. The novel’s main plot surrounds the clashes between a group of schoolgirls and fourteen sex workers inside an American church during the Nanjing Massacre. However, few people know that the main storyline of The Flowers of War originates from the 1988 Chinese film Taking Refuge. This paper traces how Yan’s story travels from the 1980s Chinese nationalist, patriarchal cinematic discourse to a transnational fictional narrative, contextualizing the cinematic and literary narratives within their respective historical, sociopolitical, and cultural environments. In particular, this essay examines the transformations of racial and gender politics in Yan’s revisions by mainly focusing on the cinematic and literary representations of two groups of people—the Chinese sex workers and the foreign priests. The comparison between the 1988 Chinese film Taking Refuge and the 2011 English novel The Flowers of War is, by virtue of the specific genre of self-adaptation, able to offer glimpses not only of the Chinese cinematic discourses regarding foreigners, nationalism, and the female body in the 1980s but of the transnational historical consciousness, feminist space of agency and potentiality, and post-coloniality reverberating in Yan’s diasporic writings.

La production de Tannhäuser du metteur en scène d’opéra d’origine canadienne Robert Carsen a été controversée pour avoir remplacé les chevaliers chanteurs médiévaux par des peintres contemporains. Par exemple, Jean-Jacques Nattiez reconnaît l’originalité singulière de cette production, mais remarque aussi son infidélité non négligeable par rapport au contexte d’origine 1).

En revanche, Thierry Santurenne, qui a publié une monographie sur Carsen, souligne la parenté avec une scène du film de Jacques Rivette La Belle Noiseuse, librement inspiré du Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac 2). Mais quant à l’infidélité de son interprétation, il dénonce également le décalage contextuel créé par la réécriture, des chanteurs aux peintres. L’ouvrage met le doigt sur les points suivants : la scène de l’original où Tannhäuser chante un hymne à Vénus et avoue être avec la déesse de la beauté est transformée en un scandale causé par le fait qu’il enlève en public le voile d’une toile qui représente un nu avec des coups de pinceau passionnés. Et selon Santurenne, un artiste contemporain rappelant Jackson Pollock ou Yves Klein ne ferait jamais scandale dans une galerie new-yorkaise ou parisienne d’aujourd’hui qui adore les provocations intellectuelles.

Nous sommes donc tentés de conseiller Carsen de la manière suivante : et s’il avait été un peintre moderne au lieu d’un peintre contemporain ? La mise en scène de l’opéra par Carsen se termine par l’acquisition du tableau de Tannhäuser -- dont on ne voit que le chevalet et le verso de la toile -- par un musée imaginaire. Le tableau sera accroché à côté du Déjeuner sur l’herbe d’Edouard Manet, qui fit scandale au Salon de 1863.

Vu sous cet angle, le Tannhäuser de Carsen ne dépeint pas seulement l’angoisse créatrice personnelle de l’artiste, mais aussi sa lutte avec la société. Cette tension entre l’artiste et la société constitue la nouveauté de L’Œuvre de Zola par rapport au Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac. Et comme l’un des modèles du protagoniste de L’Œuvre est, bien entendu, Manet, et qu’il provoque un scandale comparable à l’exposition du Salon des Refusés de 1863 en peignant un tableau, qui rappelle Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, la mise en scène de Carsen a donc offert des clés pour rendre visibles les parentés cachées entre Tannhäuser et L’Œuvre, lesquelles ont déjà été évoquées par Patrick Brady, mais de façon tout à fait différente 3).

1) Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Fidélité et infidélité dans les mises en scène d’opéra, Vrin, Paris 2019.

2) Thierry Santurenne, Robert Carsen. L’Opéra charnel, PUV, Saint-Denis, 2016.

3) Patrick Brady, ‘‘L’Œuvre’’ de Emile Zola : roman sur les arts, manifeste, autobiographie, roman à clef, Droz, 1967.

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

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

1. Sign of transformation;

2. Moral and social type;

3. Emotional and sensitive marker;

4. Spatial and temporal marker;

5. Relational function;

6. Cultural sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical Excursion", written by the modern Chinese female author Dymai Hsiung (also known as Tsai Dymia, 1910-1987) and published in 1952, was the first Chinese female autobiographical novel published in Britain. The narrative recounts the life experiences of a Chinese intellectual family that moved from mainland China to Britain between the 1930s and 1950s. It depicts the challenges faced by emigrants, focusing particularly on how the main characters establish marriages, families, and careers in a new environment. The book was initially written in Chinese by Dymia Hsiung and later translated into English by her husband, Hsiung Shih-I (1902-1991). During the translation process, Hsiung Shih-I significantly enhanced the content, especially intensifying the cultural conflicts between the East and West encountered by the characters abroad.

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of both the English and Chinese versions of Flowering Exile. It first discusses the intersection of “autobiography” and “novel”, highlighting how the writing traits traverse the boundaries between literature and history, as well as between fiction and reality. Secondly, the national imagination and self-representation in this Chinese female author’s autobiographical novels are worthy of in-depth study. I advocate exploring how it resists Orientalist stereotypes of China while catering to the interests of English-speaking readers, thereby reshaping the image of overseas Chinese intellectual families. Finally, this paper discusses the female narrative perspective presented in the work, including rich internal monologues and the switching between the perspectives of two female characters.

This paper focuses on the fox stories in Chinese and Japanese Zhiguai novels, taking Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio written by Pu Songling in the Qing Dynasty and Yasōkidan by Ishikawa Kosai in the Meiji Period of Japan as typical cases. In terms of similarities, the fox spirits in both works generally possess supernatural abilities, can change their forms, cast spells, and also display many human characteristics, such as emotions and desires. Both show the interaction between fox spirits and humans. The image of the fox reflects social reality and the good and evil of human nature. The differences are significant. First of all, the influence of cultural background is the main reason for the difference in the images of fox demons between the two. The fox in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio are often portrayed as complex characters with emotions and moral qualities, influenced by Confucian and Taoist thought, and embodying a human side. In Yasōkidan, fox spirits often present more weird and mysterious characteristics, which is closely related to Japan's unique religious beliefs and cultural traditions. Secondly, in terms of narrative style, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio mainly revolves around themes such as love and friendship, with twists and turns in the plot and romance; Yasōkidan focuses more on fantasy and horror elements. Finally, in terms of theme and meaning, the fox demon stories in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio often explore human nature, morality and social issues, while Yasōkidan incorporates more thinking about science and superstition in the context of the times. This thematic difference reflects the different cultural attitudes and social backgrounds of the two countries when it comes to supernatural phenomena. Through comparison, we can gain a deeper understanding of the influence of different cultural backgrounds of China and Japan on the creation of supernatural novels, and provide a new perspective for cross-cultural literary research.

The dramatic texts of the Russian "First Wave" diaspora writers in the 20th century continued the aesthetic principles of the Russian Silver Age, focusing on reconstructing identity and ethical relationships within a cross-cultural context. By examining Russian playwrights in France after the October Revolution, it is evident that Russian diaspora drama presents dynamic relationships between diasporic space and ethical construction.

The existential crisis of the Russian emigre community can be understood through three spatial restrictions: physical, social, and psychological. During exile, the adverse living conditions reflected material scarcity and a lack of spatial privacy and security. Employment restrictions and discriminatory policies in host countries further compounded these challenges, relegating them to a state of "second-class citizenship." These experiences generated collective existential anxiety, leading to compensatory psychological mechanisms based on fantasy.

In intercultural spaces, conflicting relationships between Russian emigrants and their own community and other groups created ethical identity dilemmas. Political antagonisms within the émigré community undermined consensus, with texts depicting conflicts between pro-Soviet, anti-Soviet and opportunist factions, revealing internal crises of trust through betrayal among compatriots. In interactions with other ethnic groups, while being marginalized by mainstream society, Russian emigrants simultaneously created new "others," forming a process of "double othering". Nevertheless, the eventual achievement of ethical consensus demonstrates that new ethical spaces that transcend geographical boundaries have the capacity to reconstruct community.

The space of the homeland, constructed through cultural symbols, fragments of memory and imaginations of the future, serves as a crucial bond for the Russian emigre community. Cultural domains formed by culinary practices and festivals maintain ethnic identity, while memory spaces support identity verification through geographical coordinates and multi-sensory experiences. However, in the absence of stability and continuity, these elements have led Russian emigrants to turn towards an imagined future space. Although the Russian image, based on extreme fantasy, was far removed from reality, it provided spiritual comfort. A more modern mode of spatial cognition is embodied by wanderers who embrace fluidity as a philosophy of life, offering alternatives to traditional concepts of home.

Diaspora communities are likely to form cohesive units only through symbolic 'nesting'. The trauma of exile generated spatial aspirations that combined maternal worship with utopian imagination, while the imaginative construction of homeland space shaped the collective consciousness of the diasporic community.