Moving through the ACLA Reports, beginning with the Levin Report in 1965, the practice of translation was very much an argued over space. Levin and Greene reports were adamant on the elitism of programs and courses on Comparative Literature. The reports were skeptical of reading literary works in translation without knowing the source language. However, considering humane limitations, the Levin report states that in a comparative literature program if a reasonable amount of literary work is read in original language, then it would be “unduly puristic” to read certain remote languages in translation. This ideology poses a threat to the “marginal” languages and literature systems in the global context. It will obviously result in a Eurocentric bias, which is already seen happening to remote language literary systems. “The Translator’s Invisibility” by Lawrence Venuti clearly states that translations in the English language is significantly higher than any other European languages let alone remote and non-European languages. Bernheimer report provides a positive and accepting view on translations, where it is exclaimed that translation gives us a scope to understand larger contexts and interpret various cultures and traditions. This skepticism for translation is totally wiped out in “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares”. At this point, translation is given a special role to understand possibilities and limitations of any language. Translations may be a site of cultural clash, language is not merely a delivery system anymore but have its own rules, structure, and resistance.

The history of translation in Comparative Literature is provided to better understand the effect of culture, traditions, language literary system, politics, ethics of a translation practices. It is a complex phenomenon where the translator must evaluate and understand cultural specificities if he/she wants to truly portray the source text in the original manner in the target language, that is by foreignization. In today’s time, with the development of AI, machine translations are widely popular. These technological developments claim that it uses deep learning algorithms, neural networks to interpret and understand the context and structure of both the source language and target language. Despite the bold assertions, how much has AI succeeded in proper and correct translations? Even if I ignore the cultural and traditional contexts of any language literary systems, the machine translations are not even up to the mark is translating a coherent grammatical structure. Examples are all around our devices and social networking sites, where the audience is quite satisfied if they understand the shell of the foreign language as generated by AI.

AI is basing its results on data, algorithms, and patterns but often this information is not helpful in translating a tongue genuinely into another. Any translation should have a personal touch which can only be given by a human and never a machine or technology no matter how advanced. Translation requires not only the correct use of language and grammar but also the understanding of tones, sarcasms, emotional and physical condition of the speaker, which cannot yet be detected by AI.

The politics of translation is intertwined with both the source text and target text and are very complicated. Let me elaborate with some examples, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, when translating Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi”, left out an entire passage without translating as that passage contained a tribal song which Devi’s Bengali readers were not supposed to understand without delving deep into the tribal community and language. Spivak respected Devi’s method by not giving the opportunity to the English reading audience to know and understand the story fully without any hassle. Maintaining cultural specificity of the source language the translation turns rough, and readability is lessened. This readability is a result of the made-up hierarchies in language. For instance, colonial language holds a power in contrast to a colonized tongue. Machine translations might work well for industrial translations but in the case of literary translations, AI will not be able to grasp the politics which goes behind any language medium. A machine translation which does not even interpret the correct grammar will surely not understand the asymmetrical power relations and the apparent balance between languages. As Levy considers translations as a series of decision-making process.

AI translation always uses the method of domestication instead of foreignization. This is threat to marginal, non-European, remote cultures, and languages. AI, with domestication, will not take into account any cultural specificity of source text and will break it down to fit into the norm of the target language which will lead to a hierarchy of languages and cultures. Certain Bengali words such as “bhaar”, “anchol”, “payesh” cannot be translated into English without losing the essence of the language, yes, we can domesticate it and easily come up with “cup”, “hanging part of saree”, “rice pudding” but any Bengali speaker will immediately understand that its not the same. AI and machine translations thus will roughly translate a source language ignoring its cultural specificity making it easier to understand by the target readers, but is it worth it? A translation should be done to delve into a foreign language, understand the minds of the foreign tongues, not merely just get a content and structure of a foreign work, and be satisfied with just that.

However, before the contemplation of politics of translation process, machine translations take us back to Roman Jakobson’s idea of translation where he bases his idea on Sassure’s idea of sign, signifier, signified. Jakobson gives a simpler view of translation where circumlocution will give us a signified from a foreign sign. In one language we will never always find a single sign replacing a sign in the source text, so we require the help of various other signs to explain the foreign word in the target language. Machine translations does just that, detecting and interpreting a foreign word and replacing it with the closest possible signifier. Like, thesaurus and synonyms can replace a word but the essence of a sign cannot be captured.

This study examines the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to function as a comparatist by analyzing its ability to interpret and compare diverse poetic and cultural traditions. Focusing on the works of Jibanananda Das and Louise Glück, the research investigates how AI engages with contrasting frameworks, such as Das’s rootedness in Bengali landscapes and mysticism versus Glück’s introspective modernism and stark minimalism. Through case studies of AI-generated analyses of their poetry, the study evaluates AI’s capacity to grasp cultural nuance, aesthetic complexity, and symbolic depth. While AI demonstrates proficiency in pattern recognition and thematic identification, it often struggles with contextual sensitivity and interpretative subtlety. The findings highlight the need for culturally inclusive training datasets and interdisciplinary approaches to enhance AI’s comparative capabilities. This research ultimately argues for AI’s role as a complementary tool to human scholarship in comparative literature.

The contingencies facilitated by Artificial Intelligence in literary analysis, with its diverse applications and evolving definitions, are puzzlingly vast. The anxiety of originality in textual culture is on the rise, but particularly relevant concerning experimental literature, which has many alliances with the digital environment. Technelegy by Sasha Stiles is a book of poetry published in 2021 that was generated by Artificial Intelligence as a response to the prompts she wrote. As a digitally facilitated narrative that amalgamates experimental attributes and Artificial Intelligence, in form and content, it functions as a self-aware digitally enhanced print entity. Apart from the variety in scope, the text in its contemporariness, semiotically exposes the expositions of AI through its algorithmic creativity, as a metaphor to carry and indulge in. The paper primarily focuses on examining the interrogations of agency, authenticity, and the modalities of the representations of anxiety in the acknowledgment of AI. By closely inspecting Technelegy, the paper attempts to reflect upon the shifting cultural and social landscapes surrounding AI and to highlight its existence in the emerging digital ecologies of information. As we navigate the uncharted territory of AI-infused creativity, experimental approaches such as the concerned text offer a path forward, challenging us to redefine the boundaries of what it means to be an author/creator in the age of digitality.

In recent years, research on the Anthropocene has been a rage, but it is rarely

discussed from the perspective of ecological literature. The relationship between -

human and animals comes up repeatedly in ecological novels, and their views can be roughly divided into two: one holds that humans are the center of all things while the other advocates the rejection of anthropocentrism. I find that neither of these two

views truly understands the ethical and ecological significance of “actual animals.”

My master’s degree thesis studies the metonymy of “actual animals” in novels that

depict epidemics, in which animals, serving as hosts for parasites, spread viruses and impact the ecological environment and human society. Animal ethics is also involved, from which I proceeded to explore the relationship between animals, ecology and society. On this basis, my present project will delve into animal ethics and animal rhetoric in ecological novels.

Literary works often discuss ethical relationships. Yet, it is worth thinking about

why literature is not limited to writing about human ethical relationships, but instead

extends the consideration of human ethics onto the animal world. Can the true

relationship between animals be characterized “ethical”? Does the behavior of

animals really reflect the emotions of loyalty, gratitude, etc. that humans project onto

them? I will explore the relationship between animal behavior and ethics in literary

works, taking the study of ethology as my point of departure.

Similarly, the relationship between animals, ecology and society is manifested in

the rhetoric of ecological novels, including metaphor and metonymy. My MA thesis

has demonstrated that existing research rarely pays attention to animal metonymy. I

therefore propose to continue to explore the metonymic relationship between “actual

animals” and ecology in ecological novels, and the metaphorical meanings of animal

totems in different tribal communities at the same time.

As defined on these pages, ecology is no longer limited to nature itself, but also includes cultural anthropology, which is premised upon the inseparability of human

culture and nature. In the ecological novels since the new century, Wolf Totem (《狼

圖騰》) (2004) and Tibetan Mastiff (《藏獒》) (2005) respectively write wolves

and Tibetan mastiff totem culture. Wolves and Tibetan mastiffs are endangered

grassland animals. The metonymy of wolves and Tibetan mastiffs leads to the

speculation as to whether biological extinction is the normal run of affairs of the

ecosystem. At the same time, what kind of “contribution” can humans make regarding this issue? From the perspective of cultural anthropology, wolves represent Mongolian culture, and Tibetan mastiffs represent that of Tibet. The metaphorical meaning of totems has a profound relationship with tribal communities, and therefore defines the ethical relationship and national discourse of “actual animals.” In addition, animals in Southeast Asian ecological novels Monkey Cup (《猴杯》) (2000) and When Wlid Boars Cross the River (《野豬渡河》) (2018) play the role of demigurge, even humans breast-feed animals’ kids as a way of showing back-feeding. Therefore, the ethical relationship of “actual animals” is not only between animals, between humans, but also between humans and animals. This study will explore cultural anthropological allegories through animal metaphors and analyze animal behaviors and ecology through animal metonymy.

The objective of this study is to examine Latin American ecocriticism through an analysis of Agustina Bazterrica's "Tender is the Flesh", with a view to critiquing anthropocentric thinking from the perspective of posthumanism and considering alternative perspectives. Latin America serves as the primary setting for postcolonial ecocriticism, a region that is profoundly concerned with environmental degradation and posthuman existence. In her work, Bazterrica draws international attention to environmental issues and social justice by addressing the unethical practices of animal agriculture in societies facing the dual challenges of pandemics and environmental degradation. In order to establish a methodological foundation, this study examines the theoretical aspects of ecocriticism and posthumanism. The theories are then applied to the analysis of the works in order to identify their messages and literary historical significance, with a particular focus on human existence and identity in the posthuman era.

In order to establish a methodological foundation, this study examines the theoretical aspects of ecocriticism and posthumanism. The theories are then applied to the analysis of the works in order to identify their messages and literary historical significance, with a particular focus on human existence and identity in the posthuman era. By reexamining the question of human-animal identity, this study challenges the assumption that humans have the exclusive right to manage and exploit animals. It calls for a significant shift in speciesist thinking, which has been deeply embedded in human civilization since its beginnings. To achieve this, it critically examines anthropocentrism by integrating its concerns into discussions of the adverse effects of ecosystem destruction and the problems it causes between humans and non-human life forms.

In her 2019 novel, Barefoot Doctor, Can Xue tells the story of Yun Village, a paradisiacal society seemingly disconnected from the modern world and its concerns of capital and progress, where a group of barefoot doctors continues the traditional practice of bringing life-saving herbs from the mountainside to the doorsteps of village inhabitants who entrust them with their lives and well-being. Reading the novel through frameworks of ecocriticism and incorporating ideas of urbanism and technology, this paper explores how Can Xue constructs a communication network between plants, animals, and humans that resembles the information networks of the internet age. In this literary world, Can Xue imagines the existence of an invisible network of communication between all beings that is built on the foundations of technological progress and traditional knowledge and provides a vision of a less anthropocentric and more eco-friendly future.

The novel uses the knowledge and practice of traditional Chinese medicine as a device to explore the intimate connection between local flora, fauna, and human inhabitants to construct a natural world that embodies its own subjectivity at the largest scale of unfathomable wilderness to the smallest scale of the single plant. Drawing from the work of American ecocritics, such as William Cronon and Wendell Berry, in addition to Chinese ecoaesthetics and East Asian ecocriticisms, the paper begins by examining how Can Xue characterizes natural and human-nature relationships in the spaces of wilderness, rural village, garden, small town, and eventually, urban city center. In each encounter with the natural world, whether it is with the unpredictable mountain ecosystem or the single stalk of banlangen, nature and its parts wield the power to affect change and communicate with their human counterparts, establishing a reciprocal relationship between nature and humanity.

Though the urban city center is never explicitly described, through themes of profit and progress and characters that return from the city, Can Xue casts, in negative, a rough outline of where the city is located in the minds of her characters. Eventually, the space of the city is filled by her post-urban vision where countless pockets of human settlements are placed alongside gardens, farms, and forests, between which constant, invisible, and far-reaching communication occurs indiscriminately between all living things. Such a vision aligns with recent urban theories that suggest that the future of cities lies in increased connectivity and delocalization.

Barefoot Doctor offers a framework where technology and tradition can work in tandem to address the problem of environmental deterioration. In the intricate literary world that Can Xue creates, the unity of nature and man that dominates traditional aesthetics in ancient Chinese literature finds new life in the webs of information networks and urban infrastructures, offering a post-urban vision of the world.

This paper explores how the creatures in Classic of Mountains and Seas (山海經) collapse the logic of human-nonhuman binaries by transgressing body boundaries, discussing to what extent Classic of Mountains and Seas reunifies the dichotomy and revivifies the archaic by magnifying ecophobia. This research also examines the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for comparison. Despite their distinct historical and national backgrounds, both texts employ similar descriptive methods in the nonhuman narrative, representing the nature of body queerness, a celebration of heterogeneity and diversity, and the rejection of human-constructed uniformity and collectivism. However, compared to Frankenstein, Classic of Mountains and Seas goes further in terms of the temporal sense of narrative, highlighting the vital difference between Gothic and ecogothic. In Classic of Mountains and Seas, the temporal sense is constructed as evolutionary rather than biographical. Overall, the research employs a comparative approach, drawing on the theories of Simon C. Estok’s ecophobia (2009) and Sigmund Freud's “uncanny.” It argues that although the creatures in Classic of Mountains and Seas follow the Gothic tradition regarding Freud’s “uncanny” effect and share some similarities in body appearance, such as “patchwork” with the creature in Frankenstein, Classic of Mountains and Seas further questions the human-knowledge-constructed logic of ecological binaries and collapses anthropocentric speciesism by evoking a deeper ecophobia. This study contributes to the ongoing questioning of human-nonhuman dualism under the anthropocentric gaze and offers new insights into how to recognize another Chinese map of cultural consciousness. In this renewed but ancient map, the “metanarratives” of the absolute dichotomy between human and nonhuman, such as the myth of Kua Fu Chases the Sun (夸父追日) and The Foolish Old Man Moves the Mountain (愚公移山), are refreshed by a healthier interaction of more openness and possibilities. From this perspective, the interpretation of Classic of Mountains and Seas could be a good starting point for reviving the archaic in modern times.

The Creative Woodblock Print Movement (創作版画運動) emerged as a distinct departure from ukiyo-e, establishing a new direction for printmaking in modern Japan. This movement initially arose as a reaction against the mechanization of printing, emphasizing the artistic value of woodblock prints. The magazine Housun (方寸) is considered a pioneer in this field. Published during the late Meiji era, Housun was an artistic magazine that showcased various forms of creative printmaking and literary works. It was independently produced as a coterie magazine by nine members, with contributions from various writers. The magazine’s primary creators, Kanae Yamamoto (山本鼎) and Hakutei Ishii (石井柏亭), were not only accomplished artists and writers but also skilled craftsmen in the field of visual printing. A distinctive feature of Housun was that all production processes were carried out by the members themselves. They took on the roles of editors, publishers, and creators, embodying a holistic approach to their work. The individuality of Yamamoto and Ishii drove the magazine’s deep integration of art, literature, and technology during a time when visual printing techniques and artistic expression were not yet clearly separated in early modern Japan. Utilizing their diverse talents, they engaged in experimental techniques to enhance the magazine’s appeal. This presentation will examine how Yamamoto and Ishii expressed their artistic vision and critical perspectives through their expertise in woodcuts, lithography, copperplate printing, and the new printing technologies of their time. It will also explore how their work positioned the creation of literature and art as a dynamic interplay between the creators’ expressive goals and the methods and technologies available to them.

Mythology has been the subject of scrutiny in Indonesian visual art for decades, even centuries; it has been adopted into, challenged and even (re)appropriated to critique an array of sociopolitical issues in Indonesian society. Specifically, these myths are almost always patriarchal in narrative and or visual aesthetic, characterising female characters as submissive and or demonising their resistance to the gender status quo. As such, Indonesian women artists, in particular, have subverted these expectations and inquired into gender representation in their oral histories. This paper will analyse how contemporary Indonesian women artist, Citra Sasmita, (re)appropriates patriarchal Balinese and Javanese mythology through her intermedial usage of text and visual art: her installations spotlight snippets of Indonesian mythology literature alongside her macabre depiction of naked, chimaera-like women in her rendition of Balinese Kamasan paintings. Together, her installations — as part of her broader Timur Merah Project — present the symbiotic relationship between text and her visual iconography as they influence, complement and wrestle with each other in the gallery space. My paper will first begin by establishing the (gender) politics of Indonesian mythologies and how it is reflected in their national sociopolitics. After establishing the significance of mythology in Indonesian society, I will link this significance to the development of modern and contemporary Indonesian visual art iconography, and how artists such as Sasmita have come to appropriate mythology for her gender critique. Lastly, I will textually and visually analyse Sasmita’s intermediality and how it bolsters her inquiry into the representation of women in mythology (and by extension, in Indonesian society). I will be placing my analysis in conversation with other theorists such as Roland Barthes and Wulan Dirgantoro. Ultimately, my paper aims to excavate the semantic and visual intricacies of text and visual art as an intermedial form of gender critique in Indonesia, and how this informs our wider understanding of the significance of mythology as a critical tool in Indonesian visual art and literature to date.

Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is a work dedicated to Bob Dylan. With the growth of cross-media research between music and literature, such a theme in this story hasn't been systematically brought to deeper study. This article aims to explore the unique cross-media narrative features of literary and musical integration in the story, and the implications of this from the perspective of cross-media narrative.The protagonist Connie’s personal experience closely mirrors the themes of Dylan’s song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” And this connection is particularly evident in the story’s end, where Arnold Friend’s reference to Connie as “little blue-eyed girl” directly mirrors the song's title, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” By utilizing the characteristics of the music, the text creates a thematic resonance that aligns the music with the fiction’s underlying motifs, thereby enriching the emotional and spiritual depth of the narrative. This interplay between music and literature lends the story greater significance, reflecting the distinctive cultural and social context of the 1960s. This article provides a new perspective in the research of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", and a new example for further studying in cross-media narrative.

As a young artist who has grown up in the 21st century, Li Shun employs “light and shadow” as the medium for his artistic creation. In the three sections of his art exhibition titled “Capturing Light and Shadow”, he has accomplished the inheritance and innovation of traditional Chinese literati art through intermedia means by utilizing video, paintings, calligraphy works, and urban landmarks. From the perspective of Lars Elleström’s theory of media modalities, Li Shun’s exhibition is intricately connected across four aspects: material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic modalities, forming a media mixture of “light and shadow” art within the intermedia field. Li Shun’s intermedia reinterpretation of traditional Chinese literati art inspires young artists not only to modernize traditional art in terms of form and content but also to recognize that art is a metaphysical spirit rather than a physical skill. Intermedia art creation is in the ascendant, and the mission of young artists to “fight for art” continues.

Abstract:

Cultural productions related to “comfort women” continue to thrive due to the growing urgency to remember this socio-political and historical issue. As of September 2024, only eight survivors remain in Korea, following the recent passing of another victim-survivor. “Comfort women” is a term coined by the Japanese military when the Imperial Army forced women from its colonies into sexual slavery during World War II. It took four decades for the first victim in Korea to come forward and expose the “comfort women” system. However, the patriarchal Korean society at that time suppressed these women’s voices, burdening them with societal guilt and shame. In the absence of public recognition, literature emerged as a crucial medium through which the experiences of these women could be explored, offering a space for reclaiming their lost histories and empowering their narratives. It also became an inclusive platform for writers from outside Korea to engage in the redress movement.

Among the many writers addressing this sensitive historical issue, Mary Lynn Bracht, a Korean American author, stands out for having crafted a historical novel about “comfort women” with the aim of providing literary redress. The work effectively merges Bracht’s creative reimaginings with historical references, such as Jeju haenyeos (self-sufficient women divers) and testimonies from Kim Hak-sun and Jan Ruff O’Herne. The novel recounts the story of two sisters, Hana and Emi, whose experiences evoke the collective memory of the “comfort women.” Hana is forced into the “comfort system” but consistently resists her oppressors. Emi, whom Hana saves from being taken, preserves the memory of her sister and underscores the necessity of remembering all “comfort women.” Bracht’s narrative thus links the silenced trauma of the victim-survivors with the memory and recognition of future generations, ensuring that these marginalised histories are preserved and acknowledged. Her novel addresses historical omissions and contributes to a broader discourse on the need to remember and bear witness to these unspoken atrocities.

The deportation of several peoples of the (North) Caucasus to Central Asia in 1944-45, accused by I. Stalin of having collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War and pardoned only after 1956, remained a taboo topic across the USSR until M. Gorbachev popularised a policy of transparency (ru. Glasnost) and lifted censorship in the late 1980s. Before that, local writers who remembered this collective trauma in fiction and non-fiction were either left untranslated – thus hindering their reception in a supralocal context – or, in case their works did appear in Russian, forced to rely on Aesopian language to avoid heavy censorship. This contribution will compare and contrast three works of historical fiction that focus on the deportation, written by Chechen, Ingush, and Balkar authors and published in Russian in the early 1990s: the novellas Odin den sudby (en. One fateful Day, 1993) and Vyiti zamuzh za ogon (en. Getting married to Fire, 1991) by A. Aidamirov and S. Chakhkiev respectively, and the drama Tiazhkii put (en. The difficult Path, 1991) by A. Tepeev. It will highlight personal similarities between these authors and focus on the interplay between the form of their works and their content. As non-Russian Soviet writers who started publishing in Russian in the 1960s, these authors adhered to the formal tenets of Soviet multinational literature – a project with strong imperial undertones tied to the doctrine of Socialist realism and gradually implemented in the USSR since the 1920s. However, by (more or less overtly) criticising Stalinist imperialism and contributing to keeping alive the local collective memory of the deportation, they incorporated elements of early postcolonialism in the content of their works. This contribution will thus elucidate the interrelations between the conventional form of Soviet multinational literature and the subversive character of early postcolonial content in a time of transition for both Russia and the North Caucasus.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was one of the most significant British writers of the 20th century. He was born into a Brahmin family of Indian descent in Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean island nation. For a long time, historical narratives of the region had been predominantly shaped by European colonizers, whose perspectives were inclined toward their own interests and values. Consequently, these narratives often concealed the violence and oppression inherent in the colonial process while neglecting the voices of the colonized. As a British writer of Indian descent born in the Americas, Naipaul's multicultural identity enabled him to examine the impact of colonialism from a unique perspective.

The Loss of El Dorado is one of V. S. Naipaul’s most representative works of historical writing, focusing on the history of Trinidad in the Caribbean region. Through meticulous archival research and narrative reconstruction, Naipaul not only reflects on the profound impact of colonialism but also seeks to transcend Eurocentric narratives by uncovering overlooked historical truths and suppressed voices, thereby challenging dominant power discourses. Moreover, for Naipaul, the rewriting of history is not merely a retrospective examination of the past but also an exploration of contemporary cultural identity. The Loss of El Dorado offers the Caribbean people an opportunity to reexamine their history—an endeavor that extends beyond historical authenticity to questions of how postcolonial societies understand themselves and construct their cultural identities.

This study aims to explore V. S. Naipaul’s rewriting of Caribbean history from both postcolonial and historiographical perspectives, examining his motivations, strategies, content, characteristics, as well as the significance and impact of his historical reconstruction. Specifically, the research will address the following questions: (1) What are Naipaul’s motivations for rewriting Caribbean history? (2) What does Naipaul’s rewritten version of Caribbean history entail, and what narrative strategies does he employ? (3) How does Naipaul’s historical rewriting compare with other colonial narratives in terms of its distinctive features? (4) What impact does this rewriting have on Caribbean cultural identity and its reconstruction?

In conclusion, this study not only enhances the understanding of historical narratives in postcolonial societies but also prompts a critical reflection on the crucial contemporary significance of identity construction in postcolonial nations, particularly in the context of their ongoing cultural and economic ties with the West.

The revolutionary hero Zhu Fusheng is a typical example of "real characters and real incidents" in the literature of the liberated areas. He is a real person beside the Yihe River in Shandong Province. He is the object of the writers and the star who actively integrates into the new democratic revolution. News reports and literary and artistic works with Zhu Fusheng as the theme emerge one after another. He is a model worker and a hero supporting the front in Dazhong daily and Luzhong Dazhong; He is a resourceful, heroic and unyielding fighting hero in the Gu Ci Zhu Fusheng turns over; He is a typical figure in the reportage Zhu Fusheng. The themes of literary and artistic works of different genres are intertextual. Newspapers, news and letters explain the times of the turned heroes. The reportage Zhu Fusheng praises the heroic character rationally. The drummer Zhu Fusheng turns over presents revolutionary passion. The works narrate Zhu Fusheng's emotional world from different aspects. The news praises the hero from the emotional dimension of the opposition between the enemy and ourselves. The drum CI looks forward to the hero with the emotion between the comrades. The interview explores the hero's growth path from the emotional adjustment of the hero's self; Aesthetically, they jointly shape the lofty form. News reports weaken the concrete production and highlight the lofty spirit. Literature and art emphasize the details of life and highlight the dignified tone. The art production in the liberated areas draws materials from real people and stories to shape the laborer Zhu Fusheng, a model of the times with people's character.

This article examines the integration of chuānyuè (time travel), a narrative trope popularized by Chinese Web literature—particularly on platforms like Jinjiang—into more traditional literary and artistic forms. While scholarship on chuānyuè has predominantly focused on its role in reflecting contemporary societal dynamics, little attention has been paid to its adoption into works that transcend linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries. This study addresses this gap by analyzing Shan Sa’s Les Quatre Vies du Saule (1999) and the ballet Dūnhuáng (2017), both of which employ chuānyuè to blur boundaries between genres, time periods, and geographies, creating what Bhabha terms "third-space" and Glissant calls "chaos-monde."

In Les Quatre Vies du Saule, chuānyuè intertwines fantastical transformations with historical and cultural narratives, as a willow branch-turned-woman journeys across centuries in pursuit of love and self-discovery. Similarly, Dūnhuáng reimagines the trope through a mystical quest inspired by the Mogao cave frescoes, bridging ancient artistic traditions with contemporary dance performance. These works not only reinterpret chuānyuè but also reverse the conventional trajectory of cultural exchange—typically West to East—by projecting Chinese cultural forms into Western frameworks such as the French novel and classical ballet.

This paper argues that through the trope of chuānyuè, these works disrupt established hierarchies of genre, geography, and temporality. They allow disparate cultures and temporalities to merge while preserving their inherent tensions, fostering a dynamic space for cultural dialogue and exchange. This synthesis reflects a broader theoretical framework, where chuānyuè serves as a vehicle for articulating the “chaotic” interplay of global cultures, neither erasing differences nor subordinating one tradition to another.

German dramatist Bertolt Brecht's dramatic theory, characterized by its cross-cultural and critical nature, fundamentally transformed 20th-century dramatic aesthetics. This paper employs a comparative literature perspective to elucidate the genesis, dissemination, and transformation of Brecht's dramatic views. First, Brecht challenged Aristotle's empathy-based system by introducing "epic theater" and the "alienation effect," thereby exposing theatrical conventions and undermining illusionism. His reinterpretation of Chinese opera's stylized performance laid the groundwork for reconstructing Western dramatic traditions. Second, from a historical perspective, Brecht dialectically engaged with the Enlightenment tradition, responding to Diderot's notion of "rational control of actors" while critiquing Stanislavski's acting system to redefine the relationship between spectatorship and performance. Additionally, his dialogue with Artaud's Theater of Cruelty further highlights the tension between rational enlightenment and sensory revolution in modernist drama. Finally, this paper examines the proliferation of Brecht's theories in the digital age, where interactive theater in the era of social media has engendered new forms of alienation, thus activating art's potential to intervene in society within the context of globalization. The comparative literature approach not only deconstructs the binary opposition between traditional Eastern and Western drama but also reveals the productive misreadings that occur during theoretical migration, offering a novel framework for reevaluating the relationship between drama and ideology.

My paper focuses on Indigenous Canadian and Greenlandic performances: Émilie Monnet’s Okinum (2018) and Din historie er også min / Oqaluttuaatigut (2023) produced by Teater freeze Production & Naleraq Lights.

First of all, Okinum, the interdisciplinary and immersive performance of Anishnaabe/Algonquin /Francophone artist Émilie Monnet, echoes the cultural and political realities experienced by First Nations in Canada. The multilingual performance (English, French and Anishnaabemowin) revolves around the oneiric metamorphosis with the mythical figure of the beaver which helps the protagonist heal, reclaim her language and embrace her identity. Following the same themes, the multilingual Din historie er også min / Oqaluttuaatigut performed by Josef Tarrak and Else Danielsen draws on the traumatic past of colonized Greenland and follows an intergenerational dialogue fuelled by dreams and a constant search for identity.

By putting these artists in dialogue, I aim to analyse the artists’ non-anthropocentric approach which focuses on the re-interpretation of a traumatic collective experience of human violence through the perspective of the more-than-human. Moving beyond anthropocentrism, the performances highlight the poetic, political and ontological importance of more-than-human elements in Indigenous theatre. Staging humanimality (V. Greene) and focusing on nature is a strategy that allows a mediation of care towards the oppressed and enables alternative ecologies of response-ability (D. Haraway) and care. Exploring profound issues revolving around memory, colonialism and identity reclamation, these two performances are deeply rooted in care ethics, reflecting their attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (J. Tronto). Furthermore, the artists rethink this concept and develop an “ethic of kinship” (K. Nelson) fuelled by an Indigenous understanding of otherness. In addition, the performative genre of this work implies a complex range of technological approaches through embodiment, visual and aural devices.

Drawing on ecocritical, post-humanist and feminist perspectives, my paper seeks to explore Indigenous Canadian and Greenlandic performances as they illustrate identity exploration, empowerment and kinship with the more-than-human. By analysing these performances as a case study and bringing together cultural, animal and performance studies, my paper argues that staging of the more-than-human challenges the existing framework of care ethics and enables theatre to become a genuine space of empowerment, dialogue and allyship.

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- ---------- Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1st ed.). Routledge. 1993.

The technical advance of artificial intelligence in recent years rekindles the anxiety over a scenario where a created being would turn on its creator. Science fiction since the early 20th century has featured such plots as AI rebellion, AI takeover, AI-controlled society and human dominance, in which human beings and AI are understood as hostile to each other. Such anxiety has prevailed in literary imaginations and popular culture since the 19th century, as early as Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein. My point in this paper is that the anxiety over AI is not new but already existent in human history. For example, the postbellum Southern United States also witnessed the anxiety over black dominance during the Reconstruction Period. This paper will focus more on the mechanics of othering than the representation of AI in literature and popular culture. It proposes to recognize the anxiety over revengeful AI as an extension of the language of othering and dominance, which can be found in texts of or about, colonialism, slavery, gender or any other form of divisions. This paper will specifically focus on Flanery O’Connor’s short story “The Artificial Nigger” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

“The Artificial Nigger” presents how the racism towards an imagined concept of “Negro” absurdly serves to reunite a white boy Nelson and his grandfather Mr. Head after they have had a quarrel. It is when they see a statue of a “Negro,” an “artificial nigger,” that they suddenly burst into laughter and become reconciled with each other. In this scene, racism symbolized by the “artificial Negro” is represented as a quasi-religion because they both feel their differences dissolve like an action of mercy. Racism in the story is essentially used to unite the white community by othering African Americans. The story unveils that the notion of “Negro” is the mere imagination of the white community and has nothing to do with the African Americans. Never Let Me Go articulates another aspect in othering: the ownership of people’s body. The novel revolves around human clones created to “donate” their organs to human beings. The notion of organ transplantation is reminiscent of the bodily exploitation in slavery, while it also broadens the vision of othering and questions the practices that undermine communities of people or AI for the integrity of the privileged communities.

Through the examination of the two works, this paper eventually aims to call into doubt what Isaac Asimov calls the “Frankenstein complex,” which is essentially based on a master-slave narrative deeply rooted in atrocious historical events like imperialism and slavery. In the face of AI, we should look at history and find solutions to the existent inequality and social divisions, so that when someday AI become more than just tools that benefit human life, we could negotiate a way of coexistence rather than repression and othering.

This paper explores the implicit role of companionship in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) by examining the bond between two technologically marginalized characters: Klara, an outdated B2 model Artificial Friend, and Rick, an “unlifted” boy who has not undergone genetic enhancement. While existing scholarship has focused on the bond between Klara and her owner Josie, this study shifts attention to Klara’s companionship with Rick, arguing that their common experience of social exclusion fosters a unique form of solidarity. Drawing on Barbara Rosenwein’s theories of companionship as a means of transcending exclusive social stratification, I demonstrate how the companionship between Klara and Rick, rooted in physical and emotional support, mitigates their sense of loneliness while critiquing the social atomization and interpersonal indifference of the privileged elites. A further comparison with Ishiguro’s earlier novel Never Let Me Go (2005) reveals how Ishiguro depicts humanity as challenged by a hierarchical society shaped by technologies including AI and cloning, and needs to be reaffirmed on the basis of empathy and mutual care. By underscoring humanity as a dialogically constructed instead of inherent trait, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing discussions on literary reconceptualization of (non-)humanity, a theme that serves as the central theme of both Ishiguro’s oeuvre and literary studies on posthuman literature.

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

Never Let Me Go employs the nonhuman clone Kathy as a first-person narrator to explore the character development and life choices of herself and her two clone companions. Existing studies, both domestic and international, have primarily focused on the ethical implications of cloning, critiques of dystopian biopolitics, and explorations of identity and agency in Ishiguro’s works. However, a gap remains in addressing the ethical dynamics between individual and community coexistence among clones. This paper applies the framework of ethical literary criticism to examine the clones’ “othered” identities, conflicting moral dilemmas, and compromised ethical choices as they navigate interactions within both human and clone communities. The analysis reveals two key findings: First, the transition from opposition to coexistence reflects the clones’ intrinsic identity consciousness, emotional capacities, and struggles with their destinies, presenting them as ethically complex beings rather than mechanical entities. Second, their pursuit of ethical understanding symbolizes the growing significance of ethical considerations in contemporary and future human societies. This study critically reflects on the ethical dilemmas posed by biotechnological and AI advancements in high-tech contexts. It also highlights the deliberate efforts of ethnic writers to integrate teaching values in cloning narratives, showcasing literature’s role in fostering ethical awareness and navigating the moral challenges of technological progress.

In his renowned work, “Philology in Three Dimensions” (part of his celebrated ‘Philological Trilogy’), the esteemed Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock elucidates the threefold dimensions of textual practice, which can be fully applied to the study of the universal humanities. These dimensions are: first, the moment of textual production; second, the historical reception of the text; and third, the presentation of the text in the subjectivity of the reading subject, ‘I’ itself. Pollock’s three dimensions of philology are closely related to the concept of ‘World Philology’, which he and numerous contemporary philologists advocate. In examining the history of the discipline, it becomes evident that the humanist elements and methods embedded in the ‘New Philology’, which was championed by scholars from Auerbach to Said in the mid-to-late twentieth century, also played a role in the development of contemporary philology. By coincidence, the development of contemporary ‘world literature’ theory has also been profoundly influenced by the ‘new philology’, especially in the basic guidance of the research path, so it is not difficult to see that in today's era of globalisation, the mutual understanding between philology and world literature is bound to increase. Thus, the three practical dimensions of philology may be used to examine the mechanisms and paths through which intercultural texts of world literature produce meaning. David Damrosch, a leading figure in the theory of world literature, defines world literature as a mode of reading and a circulation mechanism, in which the translation of multiple texts and the multiple meanings generated by cross-cultural interpretation cannot be separated from the practical guidance of contemporary philology. The internal disciplinary crisis faced by contemporary and comparative literature has prompted scholars on both sides to endeavour to save themselves, while the dilemma faced by the two is itself a two-sided problem, and it would be mutually beneficial for both sides to reach a full cooperation.

Since its release in 2021, "Pioneer Summer: A Novel," a Russian queer coming-of-age novel by Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova, has generated exceptional hype, sparking widespread discussion and cultivating a dedicated readership. However, in October 2022, following the Russian government’s expansion of its ban on so-called “LGBT propaganda” from minors to all age groups, the novel was officially prohibited under the new legislation in the country. Despite this intensified censorship, the circulation of "Pioneer Summer: A Novel" did not cease. Instead, the novel found a new life through unofficial channels, particularly fan translation, allowing it to transcend national borders and reach new audiences. This article examines the novel’s transnational journey through fan translation, tracing its movement from Russia to Canada and ultimately to China—another restrictive media environment where queer-related content faces intense scrutiny and censorship. Drawing on qualitative research methods, this study includes semi-structured interviews with two Canada-based Chinese fan translators, who played key roles in translating and disseminating the novel within Chinese online spaces. These interviews seek to explore the translators’ strategies for navigating and circumventing state-imposed restrictions on queer narratives. In particular, the study examines the role of digital platforms and online communities, including SosadFun and Xiaohongshu, which enable the novel’s distribution across national borders, providing a space for the transnational flow of queer narratives under censorship. Through a cross-national framework, the research traces the novel’s movement from Russia, where it was banned, to Canada, where it was translated, and then to China, where it reached a new audience despite censorship. By mapping the novel’s trajectory across regulatory regimes, the study emphasizes the subversive role of fan translation as a form of resistance to censorship, offering insights into the global circulation of queerness across repressive anti-queer contexts.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, a massive effort was made by this new country to translate Chinese literature into English in order to convey a good national image, and Sidney Shapiro's translation of the Chinese classic novel Shui Hu Zhuan - Outlaws of the Marsh is one of them. Shui Hu Zhuan has serious misogynistic overtones that run counter to the concept of gender equality promoted by New China and the reality of the improvement of the status of Chinese women, and is therefore likely to be rewritten. Drawing on André Lefevere’s rewriting theory, this research explores translator Shapiro's (re)constructions of female images in his Outlaws of the Marsh. The research begins by outlining the domestic and international context of the Outlaws of the Marsh translation, analysing the patronage, ideological and poetic factors that would influence this translation. Based on the contextual analysis, this research finds that the misogynistic overtones in the original text were inconsistent with the ideology at home and abroad at the time and faced being rewritten. However, through textual analysis and reader acceptance analysis, this research finds that due to the pursuit of faithfulness, and the fact that the original text is deeply misogynistic, the translator rewrote the female images only through some words and phrases. This has no mitigating effect on the misogyny of the novel.

In this presentation, I will compare and examine the American Disney animated film “Mulan” (1998) and the Japanese historical novel “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse [Kaze yo, Banri wo Kakeyo]” (1991) by Yoshiki Tanaka, both of which are bold adaptations of the ancient Chinese poem “The Ballad of Mulan,” focusing on the heroine’s cross-dressing and gender transgression from the following perspectives.

“The Ballad of Mulan,” composed of just over 300 Chinese characters, tells the story of a young girl named Mulan, who, in place of her elderly father, disguises herself as a man to join the army, achieves great military success as a soldier, and then returns home to resume her female identity. In both “Mulan” and “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse,” this setting of Mulan disguising herself as a man to serve in the army and achieving great military success, as depicted in “The Ballad of Mulan,” is retained. However, there are differences in how the heroine’s cross-dressing and gender transgression are portrayed. For example, in Disney’s “Mulan,” Mulan is discovered to be a woman during her service and is expelled from the army, but when the kingdom faces a crisis, she rises up in the form of a woman to confront the nation’s enemies and save the country. In contrast, in “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse,” Mulan’s female identity is not revealed until the scene of her return home, and her subsequent activities as a woman are not depicted. This presentation will compare and examine the characterizations and portrayals of Mulan in “Mulan” and “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse,” clarifying the relationship between Mulan’s cross-dressing and gender transgression and empowerment in each work, and the significance of Mulan's female identity being revealed within the context of the works.

Additionally, to achieve the above objectives, it is effective to compare the animated film Mulan with the manga adaptations of Tanaka’s “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse.” Inspired by the release of the animated film “Mulan,” the shoujo manga [girls’ manga] adaptation of “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse” by Mari Akino, titled “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse: The Legend of Hua Mulan [Kaze yo, Banri wo Kakeyo: Ka Mokuran Monogatari]” (1999), was published. Seventeen years later, another shoujo manga adaptation of Tanaka’s novel by Eri Motomura, titled “Fly, Wind, Across the Vast Expanse [Kaze yo, Banri wo Kakeyo]” (4 volumes: 2016-2018), was published. These two shoujo manga works focus on the inner thoughts of the protagonist Mulan, which were not given much emphasis in Tanaka’s novel due to its focus on historical circumstances. The manga artists made unique changes to cater to a young female audience, reconstructing the story as that of a cross-dressing warrior girl, Mulan. This presentation will also compare the animated film “Mulan” with the two aforementioned shoujo manga works to further elucidate how the motif of a girl disguising herself as a man to serve in the army, inherited from “The Ballad of Mulan,” functions in the realization of the heroine’s gender transgression, empowerment, and self-realization.

Disney’s Mulan is inspired by the Chinese legend, The Ballad of Mulan. In contrast to the Chinese version, Disney puts an emphasis on Mulan’s individual values by challenging her subordinate gender role in a patriarchal society. In Mulan I (1998), Mulan is depicted as a self-reliant person, who successfully transforms herself from an anonymous countrywoman into a national hero in a male-dominated world. On the other hand, there might be a danger for her to become a radical individual or an egocentric person, who ignores the values of others. In its sequel Mulan II (2005), Disney does not underscore Mulan’s individualism. Instead, it depicts her as an open-minded female, who accepts opposite views from others. In a deep sense, Disney neutralizes Mulan’s possible tendency to radical individualism by drawing from the Chinese concept of “harmony”. In this way, Disney successfully shapes Mulan into an excellent female who embodies both the Western conception of female independence and the Confucian ideal of a virtuous female with altruistic concerns for others.

In “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” one of the essays published in Film Form, a compilation edited and translated by Jay Leyda, Eisenstein argues: “Cinematography is, first and foremost, montage” (1949, 28). This conception of cinema is clarified in “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” another essay in the book, where the filmmaker offers the reader a crucial definition: “In my opinion, […] montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots” (1949, 49). Based on a comparative approach, the Brazilian literary critic Modesto Carone analyzes Eisenstein’s concept in Metaphor and Montage (Metáfora e Montagem: Um Estudo sobre a Poesia de Georg Trakl). Carone observes that the idea is also mobilized by Eisenstein to reflect upon other forms of art, including literature (1974, 104), and evaluates how the dynamics involved in the creation of a new meaning via montage – according to Eisenstein, “a value of another dimension, another degree” (1949, 30) – might be compared to the metaphorical process. Revisiting issues related to montage theory and comparative aesthetics, the presentation will address key aspects of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings in order to reassess the symmetry between montage and metaphor proposed by the Brazilian critic.

Bibliography

Carone, Modesto. Metáfora e Montagem: Um Estudo sobre a Poesia de Georg Trakl. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1974.

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.

The paper examines the literary and visual narratives of the lasting traumatic aftermath of China’s Tangshan Earthquake in Sinophone Canadian writer Zhang Ling’s newly translated novel Aftershock as well as its film and television adaptations. The heroine Xiaodeng has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since the earthquake, when she and her twin brother were buried under the two ends of a cement slab; saving one would lead to the death of the other. The mother’s decision to save the son devastates Xiaodeng. She has been tormented by a sense of abandonment and loss of trust. Taking readers’ criticism of the novel’s equivocal ending as an entry point, this paper comparatively analyzes the representation of psychological trauma on earthquake survivors through the lens of forgiveness and reconciliation.

The novel refrains from delivering the healing comfort of familial reconciliation. The visible trauma of abandonment and the invisible trauma of sexual molestation make forgiveness difficult, betraying the patrilineal tradition in Chinese society that keeps women in an inferior position. The gendered position occupied by Xiaodeng as the victim of various traumas is subsumed under a unified national discourse in cinematic adaptation. By foregrounding shared suffering and humanity in the face of natural disasters, the film interpellates Xiaodeng into the collective Chinese community and facilitates the reconciliation process. Based on both fiction and film, the TV series delivers an ambivalent message with forgiveness constantly delayed and memories questioned, revealing the enduring tension between individual experience and collective construction in the representation of trauma.

Rivers have long served as both vital natural resources and profound cultural symbols, shaping the contours of human civilization across time and space. In both British Victorian literature and Chinese modern and contemporary fiction, rivers emerge not merely as geographical features, but as rich imaginative sites where historical memory, emotional sensibility, and cultural values converge. This thesis undertakes a comparative study of river imagery in these two literary traditions, seeking to uncover the ways in which rivers are endowed with divergent meanings shaped by distinct cultural contexts, historical experiences, and literary aesthetics.

Drawing on close textual analysis and existing scholarship, the study observes that while river imagery in Victorian British literature often reflects a tension between the celebration of nature and a critique of industrial modernity, Chinese literary representations of rivers are more deeply embedded in historical trauma, national sentiment, and collective identity. British authors tend to engage with the river as a site of introspective reflection and ecological longing, whereas Chinese writers portray rivers as carriers of cultural inheritance, as well as symbols of displacement and loss during periods of war and social upheaval. This contrast reveals a subtle yet significant difference in literary orientation: a more individualized, even metaphysical engagement with nature in British texts, and a socially inflected, historically grounded river consciousness in Chinese works.

Through a comparative reading of selected texts, the thesis examines how river imagery articulates the evolving relationship between humans and the natural world, and how it encodes broader cultural attitudes toward modernity, memory, and belonging. In doing so, the study illuminates the shared concerns and differing emphases that characterize Chinese and British literary traditions, and reflects on how ecological awareness is shaped by both local experience and transhistorical imagination. Ultimately, this project aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of river writing as a cross-cultural literary phenomenon, as well as to the ongoing conversation between comparative literature and environmental humanities.

In this paper, I examine how in Beyond the Blue: Kuroshio’s Voyage Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi addresses technologies that (re-)mediate the darkness of the sea and transform humans’ relationship with the latter. Beyond the Blue is a collection of sea journals kept by Wu together with Hui-chung Chang and Kuan-Long Chen when they voyage around Taiwan on the ship Turumoan, though about two-thirds of the diaries are written by Wu. This work records the three’s thoughts and observations during the journey, an excursion serving as both a scientific investigation into the human detriment to the island’s near coast ecology and an opportunity allowing the passengers to learn how, in Wu’s words, “to get along with the sea.” The latter goal is enabled by several technological devices that (re-)mediate the sea darkness, as illustrated by the various media referred to in Beyond the Blue, including the vehicle that carries Wu and others around, the instruments employed to measure the percentages of dissolved-oxygen saturation and microplastics in different near-coastal ocean regions of Taiwan, and the poetic language Wu adopts to depict the sea water. Notably, these technologies are not adopted to render the sea an object of conquest or comprehension or to romanticize it as what remains pristine and bears no human footprint. Rather, they function as the very means by which the human travelers come to encounter the sea, primarily as what they barely understand or know how to grapple with. With these contrivances, the passengers on Turumoan are exposed to what is dark to them, to what is ungraspable to them and what causes anxiety and discomfort to them, be this “what” associated with the sea waves, the sea waste, or the sea as such. More importantly, these dark experiences occur over and again, triggering the sea change of these travelers—they finally know how to get along with the sea, not by overcoming or recovering from the dark feelings it arouses but by adapting to and even adopting them. In the meantime, an alternative interaction with the sea arises: no longer perceiving it as what is exploitable and inconsequential, those coming across the darkness pertaining to the sea come to consider their impact on the latter and alter how they treat it. Put differently, Beyond the Blue stages the (re-)mediation of darkness in a double manner: it re-mediates or transcribes recurrently the dark emotions brought about by the sea and stresses the significance of remediating or modifying the way human beings approach the latter. My purpose here is to analyze the technologies Wu conceives of in his journals respecting this twofold (re-)mediation. I first review the nature of the darkness at issue in my paper in light of Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology. Then, I discuss how the diverse technological devices or what I prefer to name “dark media”—the ship, the body, the sampling apparatus, or the sea waste—articulated in Beyond the Blue (re-)mediate the human-sea relationship. Afterwards, I draw attention to Wu’s understanding of the way humans can get along with the sea both in tandem and in contrast with Morton’s thoughts on this matter.

Taking contemporary feminist literary film adaptations as the research object, this paper applies theories of comparative literature and world literature to explore the reconstruction of feminism in cross-media narratives. Through analysing a number of film adaptations, it reveals the dimensions of women's emotional mobility, family relationships, and ethical views, and shows women's self-awakening and identity construction in modern society. Taking My Altair as an example, the film explores women's changing roles in family and society, as well as their defence of the basic rights to survival and life. This paper deconstructs women's rebellion against patriarchal space in the film adaptation, reconstructs social space, suspends the disorder of historical space with artistic vision, concerns the reproduction of heterogeneous space in the spatialisation of the female subject, provides a new perspective for understanding the film adaptation of feminist literature, and looks forward to the development trend of feminism in the future.

In recent years critical scholarships in the field of biopolitics or biopower have developed towards a recategorisation of the unattended forms of social life, reconceptualising the materiality and vulnerability of the lifeless in the changing social spacings of the Anthropocene. Through posing new, other wise kinds of analytics which disrupt the dominant binary between Life and Death, scholars have theorised around the redistribution of affect, in an attempt to tend to the slow, ordinary forms of violence which inhabit the lived spaces of the human and nonhuman. In particular, Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) poses three figures of geontopower (the maintenance of difference between Life and Nonlife) – the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus – as indicatives of the otherwise within late liberalism, which harbour the potential to enlighten an alternative form of governmentality.

Parallel to this, recent publications within multiple realms of artistic practices have addressed the increasing sense of urgency towards manifold environmental crises and geopolitical traumas, participating in the reinvention of the inert or inorganic, offering new, imaginative ways of survival and endurance. This research will contribute to the ongoing debates which explore the interaction between art and the plurality of “life worlds” (Biehl and Locke, 2017), responding to queries posing whether alternative theoretical approaches or glossaries are able – or not – to illuminate the precarious realities of entangled existences.

Moving beyond the museum or gallery space, I will examine the public spheres animated through site-specific video installations, here conceptualised as disruptive interventions which may reimagine certain moments or conditions of existence, thus opening alternative spaces and orderings wherein new arrangements of life forms may persevere. I will analyse the functionality of digital media and technologies in relevance to site-specificity, following the notion of site-specificity as “writing over the city, as palimpsest” which “decode[s] and/or recode[s] the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden operations”, posing the projections as new, digital layers added to the earthly fabric of shared spaces within society, therein creating dispersed spatial platforms attuned to the constitution of multiple temporalities.

This paper explores Jean Epstein’s early experimental and theoretical writings on modernist poetry alongside his later writings on film that articulate film as a nonhuman intelligence and an ancestral form of artificial intelligence.

Poetry serves as both a moving target of emulation and a litmus test of humanlike intelligence for large language models like ChatGPT. The emergence of AI-written poems conjures an existential fear as they signify a nonhuman encroachment into not only logos, a uniquely human realm of language, but also poetry, its most capacious and revealing form. Recent studies show that readers find AI-generated poetry to be virtually indistinguishable to those written by humans, if not more favorable. In response, philosopher Yuk Hui points out that to consider the goal of AI as imitating human beings is a product of a long-lived and problematic understanding of technology as defined by industrialization and consumerism, whereby technical objects are only imagined as functional replacements to human labor and creativity rather than prosthetic aids to them.

How can we articulate a new relationship between humans and technical objects that is rooted not in the threat of replacement but in open imagination? This paper attempts to outline one possible answer by turning to the work of Jean Epstein. I bring together three areas of scholarship on Epstein’s writings on literature and film. First, I examine how Epstein’s theorization of modernist poetry has been considered as one heavily imprinted and transformed by cinema. Second, I examine the contemporary readings of Epstein’s book Intelligence of a Machine as an exposition of film as a form of AI. Christophe Wall-Romana elucidates how Epstein saw that the poetry of early 20th century France centered on sensory experience, which also formed the core of his theory of photogénie as an embodied epistemology of cinema. Christine Reeh Peters points out that Epstein’s later writings show a belief in the cinematograph as a machine capable not of image-production that approaches human impression, but of a uniquely nonhuman perception of the world that exists alongside a human one. I argue that his prescient articulation of machinic intelligence evades the anthropocentric prescription of the human-machine relationship. Lastly, I look at the influence of his work on ecological thought by considering his Breton films in which the ocean and the French littoral life are featured as a prominent motif, and question what it means to consider his films as a quasi-articulation of AI, given the devastating environmental impact of generative AI today.

Ultimately, I suggest that Epstein’s philosophy of literature and of cinema is simultaneously a philosophy of machinic thinking, and that it can helps us ground our own relationship to AI and technical objects at large not in post-apocalyptic fear of robot revolt but instead in the full imaginative capacities of human thought.

This paper attempts a comparative study of gender issues figuring prominently in three films of the Gothic genre set in the backdrop of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Bengal, where gold and women intertwine in tales of darkness and desire. The films selected for analysis are Satyajit Ray’s Monihara (1961), a classic in Bengali Gothic cinema, Goynar Baksho (2013) by Aparna Sen, and Bulbbul (2020), directed by Anvita Dutt, in an attempt to shed light on the symbolic and narrative significance of gold in the Bengali female gothic genre. The selected films utilise the Gothic’s trademark elements—the uncanny, the macabre, and supernatural—to navigate women’s roles in a society transformed by colonialism, economic change, and shifting gender dynamics.

To analyse the relationship between gold and women in the backdrop of 19th Century Bengal, Fentje Henrike Donner draws attention to “the common usage of the Bengali idiom of “women and gold” (kaminikanchan), whereby women are symbolically equated with gold, and both signify the mundane world which is opposed to spiritual progress” (Donner 1999: 377-378). The words “kamini” and “kanchan” are Sanskrit terms used in almost all Indian languages— “kamini” means “woman” and “kanchan” means “gold.” Gold, in this cinematic context, serves as more than a material asset; it becomes a conduit for exploring ideological constructs around gender, wealth, and desire.

The three films, while portraying women in complex roles as Gothic heroines, foreground the societal conditions that both elevate and stigmatise women’s connections with gold. In Monihara, the female protagonist’s obsession with her jewellery intertwines with themes of loss and spectral vengeance, while Goynar Baksho and Bulbbul explore power dynamics through characters who navigate colonial and patriarchal constraints, asserting autonomy through their association with gold. This paper contends that gold in Bengali Gothic cinema is emblematic of a broader critique, serving as a gendered trope that exposes underlying social anxieties and reshapes traditional representations of femininity, power, and materiality in colonial Bengal. Through such Gothic representations of the “golden” brides of Bengal, gold transcends mere ornamentation, becoming central to a discourse on power and identity in a rapidly transforming cultural landscape.

Discourses around Bengali cinema, both critical and popular, have historically dealt with the question of crisis. This paper will look at the crisis narrative represented in early Bengali film criticisms of the 1930s and 1940s. This period is important in the history of Bengali cinema as well as in the cultural history of Bengal. Print cultures have been central to the articulation of modernity and political identities in nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. Writings and criticisms about popular entertainment forms largely contributed to these discourses. With the rise of cinema as a mass entertainment form in India, journals and magazines dedicated to cinema, including many in vernaculars, emerged in the 1920s and gained momentum in the 1930s. Colonial Bengal, being one of the most important sites of film production in India, and due to the presence of an English-educated middle class, saw the emergence of numerous film periodicals during this time. The articles published in film magazines like Nachghar, Filmland, Bioscope, Deepali, Batayan, and Kheyali dealt with diverse topics around the popular medium, which included questions on the social and moral function of cinema and its aesthetic standards. This paper will look at select writings published in the early Bengali film magazines and will try to trace whether the crisis is concerned only with the medium of cinema or corresponds to the greater crisis of the Bengali middle class. The paper will also examine the questions of moral and cultural choices, modernising practices, and the formation of national aspirations.

Le Mont Athos a été lʼobjet dʼinnombrables récits de pèlerins ou visiteurs. En Occident en1422, le Florentin Buondelmonte ouvre la marche avec un ouvrage en latin. Plus tard, en France, “dès 1547, Pierre Belon, médecin et botaniste, grâce à lʼappui éclairé de la cour de François 1er et du cardinal de Tournon”, pourra “visiter la Sainte Montagne et en laisser une fidèle description”. Mais parmi ces récits qui décrivent les couvents et la vie quotidienne des moines athonites, il existe des écrits de la fin des années 20 et du début des années 30, qui mettent en lumière les visions des moines athonites.

Ce sont des approches singulières qui touchent à un certain tabou, dans la mesure où deux dʼentre-elles sont des descriptions faites par des femmes, qui étaient interdites de séjour à la Sainte Montagne, et qui montrent un certain contraste avec celle données par des hommes. Cʼest ainsi que nous nous proposons de les approcher dans leurs dimensions stylistiques et littéraires, au travers de trois auteurs que quelques années séparent: Marthe Oulié et Hermine de Saussure avec leur "Croisière de 'Perlette', 1700 milles dans la mer Egée (1926), Maryse Choisy, journaliste, prétendant avoir passé un mois parmi les moines de la péninsule interdite aux femmes depuis 1046, dans son reportage intitulé “Un Mois chez les hommes”, paru en 1929 aux Editions de France et Eugène Mercier qui en 1933 publia "La Spiritualité Byzantine, L'Orient grec et chrétien, Attique, Thessalie, Macédoine, Salonique, le mont Athos" aux Editions du Cygne .

Cette étude comparative de ces trois récits de voyage au pays des Hagiorites mettra en lumière ce qui a, de tout temps fasciné le pèlerin-voyageur, le quotidien de ces moines vivant comme dans un Moyen-Age byzantin figé mais non moins étonnamment réel constituant lʼessence même de cette admiration pour les uns, ce non-sens pour les autres, surtout quand il est question de femmes, qui se sentent exclues de ce “Jardin de la vierge”, qui en reste la maîtresse exclusive.

Références Bibliographiques:

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BOUSQUET, P. A. Abbé, Les Actes des Apôtres Modernes, Relations épistolaires et authentiques des Voyages entrepris par les missionnaires catholiques pour porter le flambeau de lʼEvangile chez tous les peuples et civiliser le monde, Tome Deuxième, Paris, Au Bureau, 1852, pp 105-119.

CHOISY, Maryse, Un Mois chez les Hommes, Paris, Les Editions de France, 1929, 230 p.

DE MEESTER, Placide, D., O. S. B., Voyage de deux Bénédictins au Mont-Athos, Paris, Rome, Bruges, Bruxelles, Desclée de Brouwer, 1908, 321 p.

DE NOLHAC, Stanislas, Athènes et le Mont Athos, Paris, E. Plon et Cie Editeurs, 1882, 314 p.

DE VOGUE, Eugène-Melchior, Viconte, Syrie, Palestine, Mont Athos, Voyage au pays du passé, 2ème édition, Paris, E. Plon et Cie Editeurs, 1878, 333 p.

GEORGIRENES, Joseph, Archbishop, A Description of the Present state of Samos, Patmos, and Mount Athos, Licenfed, London, 1678, reprinted in ΒΙΒΛΙΟΘΙΚΗ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΚΟΝ ΜΕΛΕΤΜΩΝ 23, Athènes, BΙΒΛΙΟΠΩΛΕΟΝ ΝΟΤΗ ΚΑΡΑΒΙΑ, 1967, 112 p.

GOTHONI, René, Paradise Within Reach: Monasticism and Pilgrimage, Helsinki: Helsinki University, 1993. 183 p.

MERCIER, Eugène, La Spiritualité Byzantine, LʼOrient grec et chrétien, Attique, Thessalie, Macédoine, Salonique, Le Mont Athos, Paris, Editions du Cygne, 1933, Chap. VII-XXIV, 187-520.

NEYRAT, Alexandre-Stanislas, Abbé, LʼAthos, notes dʼune excursion à la presquʼîle de la montagne des moines, Paris, PLon; Sourrit et Cie Editeurs, Lyon, Librairie Briday, 1884, 247 p.

OULIE, Marthe, de SAUSSURE, Hermine, Croisière de 'Perlette’, 1700 milles dans la mer Egée, Paris, Hachette, 1926, 253 p.

PERILLA, F. Le Mont Athos, Son Histoire - Ses Monastères - Ses Œuvres dʼart- Ses Bibliothèques, Paris, J. Danguin Editeur, Salonique, édition de lʼauteur, 1927, 188 p

This paper examines the life and diary of the ‘American Goddess of Mercy’—Minnie Vautrin, who managed an all-women refugee camp during the notorious Nanjing Massacre in China. Starting with a concise biography of Vautrin, this paper probes her embodiment of cross-cultural identities and pioneering role in Chinese women’s educational reform. In particular, I highlight the dual function of her wartime diary and how her descriptions of sexual violations unveiled the convoluted gender and racial power politics in the refugee camp. For the past few decades Vautrin’s diary has inspired a myriad of literary and cinematic works featuring the Nanjing Massacre transnationally. I examine the afterlife of Vautrin’s diary by mainly focusing on the characterisations of Vautrin and Chinese heroines in a constellation of novels and films which manage to reimagine stories out of the silence, gaps, and aporia in her diary. I contend that such a way of writing out of silence and fissures in Vautrin’s life writings revisits the American Goddess of Mercy myth and gives voice to the violated Chinese women who are usually marginalised in official historical discourse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this paper, I aim to stimulate praxis reflections about the ways in which Western scholars could approach Indigenous literatures without running the risk of voice appropriation. I wish to show how the perspective of a non-Indigenous “Multi-Perspective Culturally Responsive Researcher (MPCR)” can shed light on Indigenous novels from Canada and New Zealand, Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) and Whiti Hereaka’s Kurangaituku (2021). In their article “Research Is Relational: Exploring Researcher Identities and Colonial Echoes in Pacific and Indigenous Studies,” Tui Nicola Clery, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe describe the MPCR stance as a way of engaging sensitively and responsibly with different cultures. These scholars conceptualise the MPCR stance as rooted in the Samoan notion of teu le va: “To teu le va is to attend to, care for, and nurture the relationships and relational spaces among and between people […]. Working within the va involves working critically and thoughtfully in the “inter” in the spaces between people, cultures, and disciplines” (306). I shall thus seek to demonstrate how comparative literary poetics facilitates the implementation of a trans-Indigenous MPCR practice, thus creating a dialogue between scholars of different cultural positionalities, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, “which better reflects the complex realities of an increasingly globalized and transnational world” (307).

My first case study examines the use of the Native myths of the Trickster and the Windigo in First Nation Canadian writer Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow. Based on an apocalyptic scenario, this novel depicts how a northern Ontario native reserve suddenly loses access to power. This may be due, we come to understand, to a complete technological collapse experienced by white society. For the Indigenous community, this entails a desperate quest for survival, as supplies of food and gas progressively diminish throughout the hard winter. Indigenous storytelling pervades the novel, specifically when a character named Dan recounts to his grandchildren a variant of the story of the Indigenous trickster, also known as Nanabush, and its encounter with geese. Magical realism also characterizes the novel’s aesthetic, as the supernatural and the ordinary merge through the figure of a white man named Scott, who turns out to be a replica of the Windigo, a native mythical monster. In an echo of the Windigo’s treacherous nature, Scott displays cannibalistic instincts. In an attempt to survive, he and his friends devour the corpses of the members of the Indigenous community who died during the crisis. However, thanks to their sense of endurance and solidarity, the natives manage to survive. Indeed, the epilogue entitled “Spring” suggests the possibility of a new departure.

Kurangaituku, authored by the young Māori novelist Whiti Hereaka, reveals a different perspective on Indigeneity, which is mostly reflected in the novel’s formal innovations. The combination of an MCPR stance and comparative poetics enables Western scholars to engage with this world vision. While Moon of the Crusted Snow displays only sporadic instances of magical realism, the universe of Kurangaituku is steeped from the start in the supernatural universe of mythology, which in the ambiguous mode typical of magical realism is presented as if it were real. Within this framework, the Māori mythological story of Hatupatu and the bird-woman is retold from the perspective of the female protagonist, thus suggesting the importance of female agency. The novel comprises three narratives. The first chronicles the life of Kurangaituku, her ensuing meeting with Hatupatu, and her subsequent death after being betrayed by her male lover. The second, which can be accessed from the reverse side of the book, enables the reader to follow the journey of Kurangaituku in the Underworld. The reader is actually invited to discover these two opposed narratives in the way he/she chooses, which presupposes a blurring between beginning and end reflecting the non-linear aspect of Māori epistemology. The two narratives converge in the retelling of the mythical story of Hatupatu in a more traditional way in the central section of the volume, entitled “Hatupatu and the Bird-woman.” Eventually, it is suggested Kurangaituku continues to live though the stories told about her.

All in all, placing Moon of the Crusted Snow in a trans-Indigenous conversation with Kurangaituku evidences the polymorphous nature of Indigenous literary forms. Therefore, they cannot be homogenized. They can only be approached by Western scholars through a methodology that construes comparative poetics as an illustration of an MPCR attitude, i.e., as a relational tool bridging rigid cultural dichotomies between Western and Indigenous world views.

Work Cited

Clery, Tui Nicola, Acacia Dawn Cochise, and Robin Metcalfe. “Research Is Relational: Exploring Researcher Identities and Colonial Echoes in Pacific and Indigenous Studies.” Pacific Studies 38.3 (December 2015): 303–36.

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), an emblematic writer who belongs to the classical canon of modern Japanese literature. Despite being a well known figure within Japan, interpretations to the light of new mechanisms of reading are lacking. Under this methods we find postcolonial readings through Gayatri Spivak’s theoretical framework.

For this endeavor, Soseki’s opus magnum, I Am a Cat (1905-1906) is at the center of this research. Through Soseki’s eloquent and satirical depictions, a scenery of a society thrust upon projects of Western fascination and cultural adaptation towards the fiction constructed by Japan of what the West is, tied to principles of imperialist expansion, a narrative ripe for postcolonial interpretation germinates. While Soseki is examined through a postcolonial optic, he is not portrayed as a postcolonial author. His critical approach was limited by his own Eurocentric-colonial epistemological framework, holding unsolved contradictions. However, the deconstruction of his work through Spivak’s methodology holds great value for postcolonial studies.

2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, one of the landmark events of Third World solidarity and decolonisalisation in the twentieth century. The border-crossing aesthetic and political imagination of post-independence anticolonial thought made it possible to envision such solidarity – unity in heterogeneity – across the Global South.

Postcolonial state-building in the mid-twentieth century required a combination of pathos and pragmatism. The world that anticolonial activism brought into existence only vaguely resembled the world it had endeavoured to create; national independence was the bare minimum of anticolonialism’s demands. The great decolonial wave that swelled across the Global South left newly independent countries beached on the shores of the Cold War. For Fanon, the post-independence world was no less “Manichean” than the colonial world. History repeated itself, first as empires, then as blocs.

​In response, post-independence political thinkers returned to their training in sociology to insist on alternative forms of political community beyond and underneath the nation-state. This paper argues that it was via social sciences that it became possible to imagine a singular category of ‘the oppressed’ which nevertheless retained a heterogeneous quality – rendered in its grandest form at Bandung in 1955. At one level, this observation is made possible by a curious historical coincidence: that future African American, African, and Indian leaders all received degrees in the social sciences, many of them still relatively new. At another level, however, this observation is made possible by the use of these social sciences to produce ‘a new man’. At various points throughout the first half of the twentieth century, black American, African, and Indian thinkers forced a variety of social sciences to ‘hesitate’ (in DuBois’s famous formulation), to stumble back on themselves, to produce a space for new categories, as well as confluences of those categories.

This included W.E.B. DuBois’s and B.R. Ambedkar’s interest in sociology; Jawaharlal Nehru’s interest in political science; Jomo Kenyatta’s interest in anthropology; Frantz Fanon’s commitment to psychoanalysis; and Kwame Nkrumah’s creation of socio-mathematics. In other words, these thinkers used the emergent social sciences to produce new forms of identity, which in turn relied on new aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical protocols offered in the guise of sociology, anthropology, and political science. By causing these relatively new social sciences to “hesitate” these thinkers opened up the space to reconsider identity as a historical and political category, which had been made only partly possible by earlier thinkers. 2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference, one of the landmark events of Third World solidarity and decolonisalisation in the twentieth century. The border-crossing aesthetic and political imagination of post-independence anticolonial thought made it possible to envision such solidarity – unity in heterogeneity – across the Global South.

This article examines the role of nonhuman narrative in world literature through the kalpavigyan (Indian science fiction/fantasy) of Satyajit Ray. While Ray is internationally recognized for the humanist ethos of his films, his literary oeuvre – particularly his kalpavigyan short stories –foregrounds encounters between human and nonhuman entities, including super-abled animals, extraterrestrial beings, and artificial intelligence. These narratives engage with global traditions of nonhuman storytelling, from indigenous cosmologies and magical realism to contemporary posthumanist fiction, offering a distinct postcolonial perspective on interspecies relations. Ray’s fiction does not, however, fully embrace the posthumanist decentering of the human; rather, posthuman themes coexist in these stories with an appeal to human ethics and indigenous mythological references that situate them in the humanist cultural discourse of world literature. I will argue, therefore, that Ray’s position regarding interspecies relations can be described as a proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism.

Situating kalpavigyan within world literature, this article examines Ray’s work alongside broader traditions of nonhuman representation. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s theorization of “minor science,” Isabel Stengers’ concept of “cosmopolitics,” and Judith Butler’s notion of precarity, I explore how Ray’s narratives engage with interspecies ethics, revisionary fantasies premised on the theory of evolution, and postcolonial critiques of Western epistemology. Stories such as "Khagam" and "Mr. Shasmal’s Final Night" feature spectral animals that trouble anthropocentric distinctions between human and nonhuman deaths, echoing animist traditions and global eco-fictional critiques of speciesism. Meanwhile, Ray’s Professor Shonku stories – populated by sentient machines, prehistoric creatures, and enigmatic nonhuman intelligences – resonate with transnational science fiction narratives that problematize the constructed boundaries between species and technologies.

By examining Ray’s engagement with nonhuman agency within the kalpavigyan tradition, this article theorizes the zoöpolitical nuances of his proto-posthuman cosmopolitanism. His speculative fiction neither fully dissolves human-nonhuman distinctions nor reaffirms human exceptionalism but instead constructs a framework in which ethical proximity to nonhuman others reshapes both scientific inquiry and moral consciousness. In doing so, Ray’s narratives contribute to a broader literary discourse on nonhuman storytelling, demonstrating how speculative fiction from a postcolonial context offers alternative epistemologies of interspecies relations and challenges the hegemony of Eurocentric and anthropocentric knowledge in world literature.