Futurism is usually considered to be a series of explorations and practices across genres and media centered in Italy and Russia in the first half of the 20th century. But with the hindsight of the 21st century, Futurism has a greater temporal and spatial depth. If we experimentally define Futurism as a long-term trend of thought that focuses on the future, explores and imagines the changes caused by technological development, especially changes in production relations, social structure and world order, then we will start from the first wave of Futurism centered on the European continent, go through the second wave of Futurism (Futurology) centered on the United Kingdom and the United States, and arrive at the third wave of Futurism that emerged after the Cold War, that is, the Global South Futurism as the theme of the panel.

Starting with Afrofuturism proposed by Mark Dery in 1993, the non-Western futurism movement, which mainly emerged in the Global South, has become a grand spectacle today, including but not limited to Arab/Gulf Futurism, Latinx Futurism, Chicana Futurism, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism. Writers and artists in the Global South use a variety of forms such as science fiction, folk music, documentaries, digital images, and installation art to express the true feelings of ethnic groups and individuals who are caught up in the deepening globalization, reject ideological imagination of the future, and develop a local and world vision that reflects the cultural self-awareness of the Global South. The significance of this imagination is to strive for the right to define the future (as part of cultural hegemony), that is, the power/right to portray, write and predict the future world picture, life pattern and invention.

Our panel is dedicated to the discussion of Global South Futurism of various regions and forms. We especially welcome the following topics: How does Global South Futurism understand the past, present and future? How to view the relationship between locality (particularity) and globality (universality)? How to transcend the Western/North-centered imagination of the future? What role does Afrofuturism (African Futurism) play in the rise of Global South Futurism? How does Global South Futurism move from literary and artistic creation to social practice? How do the imaginations of the future of the South and the North communicate?

A global narrative refers to the overarching stories and interpretations that connect diverse historical events, cultures, and societies on a transnational scale. It provides a cohesive lens through which global interrelations, exchanges, and continuities are examined, shaping collective understandings of world history and culture. While works such as Cloud Atlas and Sense 8 are frequently discussed as exemplars of global narratives, they predominantly emerge from Northern perspectives. This paper examines how two Argentine science fiction works, Héctor Germán Oesterheld's seminal comic El Eternauta (1957-1959) and Samantha Schweblin's novel Kentukis (2018), contribute to global narratives by offering alternative perspectives on technological advancement, crisis management, and cultural identity from the South. Drawing on Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory, which advocates for decolonizing knowledge and amplifying the voices of the Global South, this paper argues that these works challenge the Nothern-centric narratives of the future while reflecting on the local struggles, aspirations, and cultural realities. Oesterheld’s El Eternauta grapples with an external crisis: a post-apocalyptic world where a small group of survivors must navigate both alien and political forces, utilizing technology as a means of survival and resistance. In contrast, Schweblin's Kentukis delves into an internal crisis, interrogating the commodification of intimacy and the ethical implications of surveillance technologies in a near-future setting where personal autonomy is increasingly mediated by invasive digital systems. Through these texts, the paper posits that Global South Futurism is not merely a critique of Western technological hegemony and political dominance, but also an assertion of the right to define the future, advocating for a more inclusive global humanity. By emphasizing cultural identity and local agency, both works offer alternative visions of the future that resist the ideological framework of the Northern imagination.

From the perspective of Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor, "Afrofuturism" has diverged from African experiences, aesthetics, and value systems, relegating Africa to the margins once again by prioritizing the concerns of African Americans. Consequently, she has introduced the concepts of "Africanfuturism" and "Africanjujuism," which place greater emphasis on African localization. Among these, "Africanjujuism," with its focus on “animism”, serves as an indispensable lens for understanding the unique characteristics of African science fiction. the influence of “animism” on modern life counteracts the notion of modernity as a linear movement towards progress.However, within the theoretical framework of Western literary criticism, animism is often defined as a pre-modern, tribal belief system or as a tool employed by African intellectuals to resist Western modernity discourse. This, in turn, obscures the complexity of indigenous African knowledge production. Africanjujuism, on the other hand, does not situate African knowledge in relation to European discourse. Instead, it conceptualizes animism as a polysemic space, emphasizing the materialism and unconscious dimensions of this traditional belief system. Although artistic practices rooted in Africanjujuism possess a mystical quality, they are capable of embedding themselves within economic, cultural, and social spheres through their unique cognitive frameworks. They propagate within the normative networks of society, influencing the cultures and subjects within these networks and becoming a driving force for collective subjectivity. Africanjujuism not only highlights the infinite interplay between the real world, the spiritual world, and the future world in African science fiction but also vividly demonstrates the complex dialectical relationship between tradition and modernity.

Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) was the focal point of academic attention in the 1990s, but discussions about his thought have gradually diminished in the 21st century. This decline can largely be attributed to the general academic consensus that there are misinterpretations and fabrications in Mou's thoughts. However, these discussions often approach his ideas either from a Western philosophical perspective, a Confucian traditional standpoint, or a focus on isolated concepts, with little attention given to Mou’s overall philosophical system. This paper attempts to address this gap by using political practice as the primary framework, weaving together Mou Zongsan’s key concepts of "inner sage," "outer king," and "judgment of teachings," in order to present these ideas within his own philosophical system.

Firstly, Mou Zongsan’s concept of "inner sage" is centered around what he calls a "moral metaphysics," which affirms the human capacity for "intuitive wisdom" — an innate ability to directly perceive the ontological reality. This allows the subject’s actions to be immediately connected with the moral essence. His metaphysical construction is aiming to reconcile the relationship between mind and matter at an ontological level, thus paving the way for his new conception of the "outer king." Therefore, critiques of Mou’s ontology should not be equated with Kant’s concept of the "thing-in-itself."

Secondly, Mou Zongsan introduces the concept of "the fall of moral consciousness" to enable Confucian spirit to guide modern democracy and science. According to Mou, through the self-restraint of the moral subject, space is made for the epistemic subject. Since Mou’s moral metaphysics already encompasses the immediacy of action, even when moral consciousness "falls," it continues to maintain its dominant role in practice. Hence, moral consciousness does not merely "open" the path to the "outer king," but leads it practically — it is not a theoretical abstraction.

Finally, Mou Zongsan made a critical judgment on the Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties. He regarded Hu Hong's (五峰) and Liu Zongzhou's (蕺山) theory as the perfect teachings of Confucianism. This is because they emphasized the objective spirit and the subjective mental substance, and were better able to resonate with the spirit of the times. It is clear that Mou’s ultimate aim is to reconcile Western epistemology, rather than diminish the historical position of Cheng-Zhu（程朱） .

Through examining the concept of "inner sage — outer king," it is evident that Mou Zongsan’s use of these concepts is a creative interpretation. Without this contextual understanding, one might obscure the true nature of his thought.

Afrofuturism has emerged as a critical paradigm for theorizing African and diasporic futures, employing speculative fiction, visual art, and digital media to destabilize colonial epistemologies and propose radical alternatives for Black existence. This paper examines the Afrofuturist construction of migration, decolonization, and planetary survival through multimodal speculative storytelling, analyzing how these narratives articulate postcolonial resistance, ecological reconfiguration, and technological agency within global imaginaries.

Focusing on Cristina de Middel’s photobook The Afronauts (2012), Anthony Joseph’s hybrid novel The African Origins of UFOs (2006), and Mussunda Nzombo and Manuela Grotz’s AI-generated visual exhibition O Futuro na Lista de Espera (2023), this study interrogates how African and diasporic artists engage in speculative remappings of human and post-human life in response to ecological degradation, forced displacement, and neocolonial expansion. Grounded in Malcolm Ferdinand’s concept of "colonial inhabitation" (2022) and Ytasha Womack’s theorization of Afrofuturist aesthetics (2013), this paper argues that these works reconfigure Africa as both a site of departure and return, subverting linear temporalities and positioning Black bodies as central to the technological, environmental, and metaphysical transformations of planetary modernity.

By employing an intersemiotic and transmedial approach, this study moves beyond traditional textual analysis to examine how Afrofuturist narratives function as counter-hegemonic discourses within the futurist paradigm. Through a comparative, multimodal framework, it explores how Afrofuturist imaginaries engage with space exploration, ecological collapse, and speculative mobility, producing alternative cartographies that challenge Eurocentric teleologies of progress. These works dismantle extractivist and exclusionary futurisms, repositioning Africa not as a peripheral recipient of technological modernity, but as an active agent in shaping the trajectory of planetary futures. By foregrounding Afrofuturism as a methodological tool for rethinking migration, agency, and transnational blackness, this also paper contributes to ongoing scholarly debates in comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and speculative aesthetics, demonstrating how speculative cultural production operates as a political praxis of survival and resistance.

From the first two decades of the twentieth century onwards, the use of the European Renaissance as an analogy for the multiple “renascences” in China’s own history became a prominent intellectual trend, particularly following Hu Shi’s famous invocation of the term in reference to the Literary Revolution. Debates surrounding the “Chinese Renaissance” became symptomatic of this critical historical moment, as Chinese intellectuals sought to address the nation’s social crises by engaging with Western intellectual traditions. This paper seeks to examine the various intellectual influences that shaped the conception of the “Chinese Renaissance” in its formative stages. The study focuses on the first two historical accounts of the European Renaissance written by Chinese authors: Jiang Baili’s History of the European Renaissance (1920) and Chen Hengzhe’s A Short History of the Renaissance (1926). By situating these works within the intellectual trajectories of their respective authors, this paper explores how China’s historiography of the European Renaissance was influenced by the works of Jules Michelet, Jacob Burckhardt, and Walter Pater, whose writings provided the foundational and orthodox conceptualization of the Renaissance since the second half of the nineteenth century. Key elements of these Western conceptions of the Renaissance are highlighted in the writings of Jiang and Chen, shedding light on their understanding of China’s own historical position.

The paper closely analyzes the texts and paratexts of these two early Chinese historical works, comparing them thematically with the aforementioned Western historians of the Renaissance. Additionally, it examines early translations, introductory essays, and book reviews of the works of Michelet, Burckhardt, and Pater in Chinese journals during the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, the paper investigates the history of reception and the intellectual exchanges that influenced these works, such as Jiang Baili’s and his teacher Liang Qichao’s visit to Europe between 1918 and 1919, including their meeting with Amédée Britch, the director of the Paris University Library, who lectured them on the European Renaissance. The study also considers the educational background of Chen Hengzhe, who studied at Vassar College and the University of Chicago and became the first female professor in China. By examining these different interpretations of the key elements of the European Renaissance, this paper seeks to understand the complex intellectual preoccupations of Chinese scholars as they critically reevaluated China’s classical past and pursued modernity, weighing lessons from the West against their own historical experiences.

The concept of an Iranian renaissance reflects key moments of cultural, intellectual, and political renewal, particularly in modern history. While pre-modern Persia saw cultural revivals, the 19th and 20th centuries introduced transformative movements like the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). The Pahlavi era (1925-1979) further advanced modernization through education and women's rights. However, the 1979 Revolution complicated this trajectory, intertwining religion with state power.

Drawing upon a leaked classified state survey conducted in 2023, the paper explores contemporary Iranian attitudes towards the relationship between state and religion, offering new insights into the possibility of an ongoing Iranian renaissance. The survey results provide a fresh perspective on the evolving discourse surrounding modernity, politics, and religion in Iran, revealing how these tensions continue to shape the country's cultural trajectory.

Don Quixote can be seen as a reflection and critique of multiple renaissances. At its core, the novel embodies the central theme of all renaissances—the tension between the old and the new. While Don Quixote attempts to revive a medieval past, Cervantes is keenly aware that such revival, without adaptation, leads to absurdity and failure. This tension is a key feature of every renaissance, where societies must decide how to reconcile their heritage with the demands of the present and future. This presentation examines Don Quixote in the context of the European Renaissance, while drawing connections with other "renaissance" movements, including the Catalan Renaixença, and the Harlem Renaissance, with a focus on how Don Quixote uniquely illuminates the challenges of cultural revival across diverse historical contexts. Ultimately, Cervantes' masterpiece transcends its European Renaissance origins to offer profound insights into the complexities and contradictions inherent in any cultural rebirth.

While the term "renaissance" traditionally evokes a specific Western time period and cultural movement, this panel challenges that narrow interpretation by expanding the concept to include diverse cultural rebirths across the globe. It critiques Eurocentric narratives in renaissance studies, advocating for a more inclusive understanding that recognizes the vibrancy of cultural revitalization in contexts such as the Arab Nahda, the Chinese Renaissance, the Hebrew Renaissance, the Persian Renaissance, the Catalan Renaixença, the Harlem Renaissance, the renaissances in India, and the Maori Renaissance, among others.

By exploring these varied movements, the panel highlights the unique historical trajectories and social dynamics that shape each renaissance, emphasizing the intrinsic cultural forces at play. Moreover, it proposes the establishment of a new field of "global renaissances," spotlighting often-overlooked cultural phenomena and their significance. Ultimately, this panel aims to illuminate the rich tapestry of these movements, encouraging readers to reconsider what a renaissance can signify in our interconnected world.

This Group Session is open to further paper proposals. Any questions should be addressed to Gang Zhou (gzhou@lsu.edu).

Unlike the assumption that associates the ‘birth’ of al-Nahḍa (erroneously rendered into English as the “Arab Renaissance/Awakening”) with the 1798 French expedition to Egypt, a counter-assumption stipulates that there existed an indigenous/local form of modernity in Egypt during the 18th and early 19th centuries. This study focuses on the contributions of Shaykh Ḥasan al-‘Aṭṭār (1766-1835), a polymath scholar, writer, and Grand Imam who published in Arabic grammar and composition, logic, science, medicine, astronomy, and history, in addition to literary endeavors. Al-‘Aṭṭār’s peculiar position in Egypt’s modern history, attested by both his entrenchment in an indigenous, Islamic worldview and a first-hand encounter with the French colonizer/enlightener?, makes him qualified, more than any of his contemporaries, to be labeled as the first nahḍawī. By investigating al-‘Aṭṭār’s scholarly and literary contributions, this study shall explore how such contributions qualify him as a beacon or a genuine predecessor of an indigenous, Islamic modernity that adds another layer of signification to the existing term al-Nahḍa.

This presentation begins by examining the contrast between the European Renaissance—a periodization scheme that emerged in the post-Enlightenment era—and various self-proclaimed Renaissances across Europe, which were cultural movements rooted in their unique contexts. Notable examples include the Irish Renaissance, the Scots Renaissance, the Catalan Renaixença, the Czech Renaissance, and the Hebrew Renaissance, among others.

Beyond Europe, many regions have also claimed their own Renaissances, such as the Arabic Nahda, the Chinese Renaissances, the Indian Renaissances, and the Harlem Renaissance as well as the Mexican Renaissance, among others. It is particularly intriguing to note that these Global Renaissances often emerged from societies with long-standing traditions and cultural legacies, or from young nations eager to forge a distinct identity.

While acknowledging the significant impact of the European Renaissance on world history, this paper argues that various Global Renaissances equally merit critical inquiry and comparative analysis. It argues that Renaissances are dynamic and interconnected global phenomena with diverse manifestations. At their core, the concept of Renaissance revolves around the pursuit of identity, self-definition, and cultural transformation.

Moderator

While the term "renaissance" traditionally evokes a specific Western time period and cultural movement, this panel challenges that narrow interpretation by expanding the concept to include diverse cultural rebirths across the globe. It critiques Eurocentric narratives in renaissance studies, advocating for a more inclusive understanding that recognizes the vibrancy of cultural revitalization in contexts such as the Arab Nahda, the Chinese Renaissance, the Hebrew Renaissance, the Persian Renaissance, the Catalan Renaixença, the Harlem Renaissance, the renaissances in India, and the Maori Renaissance, among others.

By exploring these varied movements, the panel highlights the unique historical trajectories and social dynamics that shape each renaissance, emphasizing the intrinsic cultural forces at play. Moreover, it proposes the establishment of a new field of "global renaissances," spotlighting often-overlooked cultural phenomena and their significance. Ultimately, this panel aims to illuminate the rich tapestry of these movements, encouraging readers to reconsider what a renaissance can signify in our interconnected world.

Amy Tan's long novel The Bonesetter's Daughter transcends the interpretive framework of the debate between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. The intervention of this work is to expose the hidden phenomenon of discrimination against the Chinese community in American society in the mid-to-late twentieth century, in which the dominant discourse places them in an inferior position in the civilization system by highlighting the differentiated characteristics of the Chinese American habitus. The native-born Chinese American community, represented by Ruth Young, is thus caught in an identity dilemma, and needs to further recognize the contributions and sacrifices of their forefathers by redeeming their ethnic memories and incorporating themselves into the genealogy of glorious traditions. As a result, the Chinese American community further acquires the ability to reconstruct historical narratives and to speak out on issues of modern civilization from multiple perspectives, questioning and critiquing dependent discriminatory relationships and their mechanisms of functioning, and thus, within a dialectical perspective between universality and ethnicity, seeking to achieve inter-subjective recognition for justice and equality in the social interaction.

This paper studies Li Kotomi’s 2022 fantasy novel, An Island Where Red Spider Lilies Bloom (彼岸花盛開之島), and investigates how the trope of translation illustrates a utopia of inclusion and transformation. Considering Walter Benjamin’s concept of “pure language,” an amalgam of fragmented languages that does not communicate the meaning of the original and is something “exiled among alien tongues,” I read the island in Li’s novel as a cultural imagination that challenges state sovereignty and a future-oriented vision. I argue that the fictive island designated as “the other side” (仁良伊加奈伊) symbolizes the intertwined relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, giving rise to a linguistic practice that resists constancy and lineage.

Jessica Tsui-yan Li will present a paper on “Eileen Chang’s The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962).” This paper focuses on the screenplay, The Greatest Wedding on Earth (Nanbei yijiaqing 1962), written by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing 1920-1995). Together with the Hong Kong based production team, Chang integrated the Shanghai elements into the Mandarin-speaking film scenes in postwar Hong Kong. The Greatest Wedding on Earth was marketed towards the Mandarin speaking middle-class Chinese diasporas in Hong Kong and other Asian countries. The younger generation of Chinese with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds resolve the conflicts through compassion and love. In this paper, I will analyze how various Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese cultural issues have been perceived, negotiated, or flattened out in depicting Chinese cultural diversities. I will also examine the Hollywood cinematic techniques of plot conventions and comic effects in portraying the images of new women of the time.

In my presentation, I discuss the preservation and transformation of cultural identity demonstrated in literary representation of Cantonese opera in a global and diasporic context, particularly in North America. In surveying the motif of Chinese opera in Chinese American literature and real-life performances in North America, I argue that the depiction of Chinese opera illustrates the struggles and dynamics of Chinese Americans remembering and negotiating their cultural identities between their hometowns and North America.

Chinese opera has been a popular cultural entertainment in Chinese American communities. It is a hometown entertainment for most Chinese in North America. Familiar themes and atmosphere in Chinese opera bring forth both individual and collective memory of Chinese Americans, reminding them of not only where they came from but also who they were prior to their arrival in Canada. Chinese opera performances and their related activities illustrate the manifestation of transcultural identity of Chinese American communities. The introduction and adaptation of these cultural activities in North America symbolize the transcendence of borders, linguistics boundaries, and geographic distance.

Cultural meanings and convention encoded in Chinese opera reinforced the early Chinese settlers’ cultural heritage, which was passed down to later generations of Chinese Americans. The impact of cultural imagination, identity and social memory transmitted by Cantonese opera was most vividly illustrated by the writings of Chinese American writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Wayson Choy and Denise Chong, who remade and reinterpreted the stories and cultural space of Cantonese opera in their Chinatown stories and memoirs.

What is a good death? I explore Ann Hui’s response to this question in A Simple Life (2011) in this paper. A Hong Kong New Wave pioneer, Ann Hui (b. 1947), describes the end-of-life choices of a maid—Ah Tao—who decides to retire to a nursing home after a stroke. Her clairvoyant preparation for what lies ahead as death looms draws attention to two pivotal approaches to ming: “accepting fate” (认命rènmìng) and “knowing the divine will” (知天命 zhītiānìing). Whereas the verb ren is often construed as a passive, feminine act of acquiescence to fated suffering, the verb zhi harnesses active, male-dominated Confucian learning to follow a path charted by Providence. Despite these gendered interpretations of ming, I argue that Ann Hui gives Ah Tao the agency to integrate acceptance (rèn) with acknowledgment (zhī) to illustrate the art of dying well in simple living.

At the end of the nineteenth century, within French Symbolist circles, translation emerged as a dynamic and experimental practice, distinct from the rigid academic philological approaches and the tradition of the belles infidèles. Many Symbolist writers, including renowned figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Marcel Schwob, as well as lesser-known but equally significant contributors like Alfred Jarry, Pierre Louÿs, Renée Vivien, Pierre Quillard, Laurent Tailhade, Hugues Rebell, André-Ferdinand Herold, Félix Fénéon, and Victor Barrucand, engaged in translation as a creative endeavor. These writers did not limit themselves to translating contemporary works; they also turned to ancient and medieval texts. For them, translation was not merely an act of linguistic transposition but a space for stylistic experimentation, where they navigated the tension between appropriation and self-alienation.

While it is difficult to define a unified ‘Symbolist style’ of translation, certain tendencies can be identified in their works, particularly in their resistance to the prescriptive norms of academic translation. The Symbolist belief in the inseparability of form and content inspired innovative approaches to translation, emphasizing the aesthetic and sonic qualities of language over strict fidelity to the source text. This creative ethos allowed Symbolist writers to view translation as a means of enriching their own literary practice, rather than as a secondary or derivative activity.

In this paper, rather than focusing on the linguistic choices made in their translations, we will examine the critical reception of these works, particularly within the Symbolist press and literary magazines. Reviews of their translations often highlighted questions of style, assessing how the act of translation influenced or diverged from the writers’ original creative output. These critiques reveal a broader cultural dialogue about the role of translation in shaping literary innovation. For Symbolist writers, foreignizing effects in translation were not merely about preserving the ‘otherness’ of the source text but also about using that otherness as a catalyst for innovation. They experimented with new linguistic possibilities in French, thereby expanding the expressive potential of their native language. The foreignness of the text became a means of transformation, enabling them to reimagine their own literary style and challenge conventional norms.

Ultimately, the Symbolists approached translation with a consciousness of creative gain rather than a sense of loss from the original. They envisioned translation as a transformative process, one that could create a space where the translated text became something entirely new—a work of art in its own right. This paper seeks to explore how Symbolist writers redefined translation as a site of literary experimentation, blurring the boundaries between original and translated works.

The dominant contemporary approaches to translation prize the visible translator’s subjective response to the source text as a responsible and ethical practice of translation. For example, Silvia Kadiu, in her Reflexive Translation Studies, reflects on ‘translator’s turn’ which highlights “the creative, experimental and subjective aspects of translating”. In so doing, Kadiu places the translator’s ethical practice in the tradition of hermeneutic reflexivity. This notion of the ethical translation derives from Kadiu’s rapports with Lawrence Venuti’s deconstructivist concept of foreignization. Venuti’s foreignization, heavily indebted to Fridriech Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, militates against the disciplined translation of domestication which emphasizes fluency and transparency. Kadiu’s rapport with Venuti returns us to Schleiermacher’s ethical base of an ‘oscillation between the determinacy of the particular and the indeterminacy of the general image’. As Andrew Bowie points out in his introduction to Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Essays, this oscillation characterizes “the relationship between the universal aspect of language and the fact that individuals can imbue the same universally employed word with different senses”: “Language only exists via thought, and vice versa; each can only complete itself via the other”. Here Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical translation/interpretation allows us to go beyond the failed ‘linguistic turn’. This paper, based on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, reads D. H. Lawrence’s translation of the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov’s Apofeoz bezpochvennosti (‘Apotheosis of Groundlessness’), which was published under the writer’s own title All Things Are Possible. Lawrence, as if he saw his role as an editor who “Englished” his Russian friend Samuel Koteliansky’s translation, penned a ‘Foreword’, which epitomizes Shestov’s anti-dogmatic and proto-existential thinking: “Shestov’s style is puzzling at first. Having found the “ands” and “buts” and “becauses” and “therefore” hampered him, he clips them all off deliberately and evn spitefully, so that his thought is like a man with no buttons on his clothes, ludicrously hitching along all undone”. Lawrence goes on to say that “The real conjunction, the real unification lies in the reader’s own amusement, not in the author’s unbroken logic”. His translation shows ‘language only exists via thought, and vice versa; each can only compete itself via the other’.

The idea of this paper germinated when we began translating a bunch of women-centric stories from Indian Nepali Literature into English. As faculty members of English Literature at Sikkim University, India, we live in Sikkim and have access to Nepali, the lingua franca of the state. In fact, for one of us, Nepali is the native tongue, although ethnically she is a Lepcha woman. The other translator is not a native Nepali speaker but has acquired the language (speaking, reading and writing). As we took up Nepali stories for translation, we were forced to think about our position as translators vis-à-vis the source language culture and target language. Encapsulating the narrative style of Nepali as a native language into English landed us in the dilemma of ethics and aesthetics for what appears “acceptable” in English language forced us to compromise with the style and tonality of the native texts. The paper therefore deals with the question of how to ethically represent a native text in the world literary scenario and carve a place for it in the world literature maintaining the aesthetics. How to negotiate the question of translatability and untranslatability when the translators are removed from both the source and the target language ethnically? How do the translator’s strategies define their relationship with place as they strive to retain the local “flavour” and “feel” of the narrative? Can ethics and aesthetics of translation be maintained at the same time? How is the mind of a postcolonial translator always dominated by the invisible English reader essentially occupying a superior position and dictating the terms of translation both through theory and practice? How then can the translators’ conscious choice of a readership help them to take decisions in regard to the representation of the native people and place?

Claude Debussy’s "Pelléas et Mélisande" (premiered 1902) is often seen as a quintessentially French opera and as an expression of the search for an authentic form of musical nationalism in the wake of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1871. Roger Nichols, for instance, refers to it as as “this most French of French masterpieces”, and Debussy himself signed himself proudly as a “musicien français” (and was described as such on his tombstone). Yet this reading of the opera overlooks the strikingly cosmopolitan range of musical influences that Debussy drew upon when writing the score, just as it fails to account for the libretto’s interest in alterity and articulation of an ethics of hospitality towards the other. This paper will first map the opera’s various foreign sources, arguing that they represent Debussy’s attempt to fashion a contemporary French musical vernacular that drew explicitly on foreign influences. Beginning with Maurice Maeterlinck’s original play, which offered a stylised view of the Northern European gothic as popularised by the English Pre-Raphaelites, these include the music dramas of Richard Wagner, echoes of the emerging school of Italian verismo, and even the dramatically declamatory style of Modest Musorgsky. Debussy’s opera thus emerges as a product of a deliberate act of translation, reflecting the lively debate between adherents of nationalism on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism on the other, that was then raging in literary circles in France. But there is more at stake here than merely the kind of routine assimilation of foreign influence and fascination with exoticism that were such a characteristic feature of French culture during the Third Republic (as evinced, for instance, by the kind of cultural and colonial encounters that took place at the sequence of Universal Exhibitions that were hosted in Paris). Here, the discussion turns to the opera’s mysterious heroine. Who is Mélisande, where is she from, and how has she found herself in the kingdom of Allemonde? There have been many attempts to answer such questions, with critics and commentators seeing her variously as a femme fatale, a naïve child, or even a survivor of abuse. This paper will propose that she represents a refugee and that her arrival in Allemonde tests the limits of the characters’ openness to the figure of the other. Strikingly, much of the social element of Maeterlinck’s original drama was omitted in Debussy’s libretto, lending the opera a timeless, abstracted air, yet traces of ethical debate remain. To test this hypothesis, the opera will be framed by a discussion of ideas dating from both a century before and a century after its composition: Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) and Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism (1997).

For the last decade Jhumpa Lahiri has written and translated fiction (including her own) in a third language acquired as an adult, Italian. She has described her upbringing as a psycho-linguistic conflict between adversaries: Bengali, the parental language of insulated early childhood; and English, the institutional language of education and American society. English is imagined as a demanding stepmother who has usurped the mother tongue. In this account, ‘becoming’ linguistically Italian allowed Lahiri to distance herself from the void (‘il vuoto’) of her origin and to triangulate the hitherto direct line of hostility between Bengali and English. Italian is born out of her (‘nasce da me’): linguistic self-formation is represented as a violent, Ovidian metamorphosis which clears the way to writing without style.

However, making a new home in language must result in the autogenesis of a new style rather than its removal. Lahiri is all too aware of the translingual literary ancestry she has followed, one which calls to mind writers such as Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov and more recently, Ágota Kristóf. For Lahiri, Italian words have sent her into a world (‘le parole che mi mettono al mondo’) and she has made an abode in it. This paper considers how the initially placeless abstractions of Lahiri’s Italian-authored, self-translated fiction only half-conceal her interactions with Italian letters. Italian is both the fountainhead of modern Italian literature, Dante, but also the language of racialised insult which ‘others’. Thus, the plural meanings of 'il volgare' and the vulgar are significant. The 'dolce stil novo' of Dante is the vernacular of Tuscan dialect: the so-called vulgar which supplanted Latin and became the modern-day language of the Italian nation-state. It is in this idiom that Lahiri conceives and rather programmatically self-fashions a literary 'vita nova'.

Many of the theorists have different interpretation to understand the morality principle viz-a-viz the nexus of causality and obnoxiousness when involve in inflicting moral judgements focusing on the thin properties of goodness and badness – because objective information is based about morality through intuition. John Milton’s book Paradise Lost claims that Civil Disobedience of Man justifies ways of God to Men. Michael Huemer in his book Ethics Intuitionism says moral judgements are cognitive states. While Immanuel Kant in his book The Metaphysics of Morals states that all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the “Categorical Imperative” – it means that categorization of basic moral duties towards ourselves and others, yet the same moral philosophy is interpreted in his other book The Critique of Practical Reason in making sense with such human endeavour that does not arise moral conflict due to too much of ethics – as moral absolutism/perfection may deprive of happiness or well-being if the subjectivity of one’s morality deprives existence as what Alexander Pope says in his book Essay on Criticism “Whatever is Right, is the Right”.

Concerning his decision to write in English, Ha Jin, who emigrated to the U.S. in his late twenties, claimed: “I do it for the freedom in English.” Prevented from going back to China by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the author explains that English gives him not only political freedom but also literary freedom since it frees him from the very elaborate traditions of Chinese writing. At the same time, he continues to write about Chinese and Chinese migrants. One of his novel’s settings, Korea, was chosen because, according to him, it “is a neutral space”—by which he must have meant a space in-between (his fourth novel, War Trash, is mainly set in a Korean POW camp during the Korean War Panmunjom negotiations), a symbolic condition of the linguistic and cultural movement of the author’s writings. In the 2010s, with much less an apparent political occasion, Jhumpa Lahiri, by then already much-celebrated and established Indian-American writer, started to write in Italian, moving back and forth between Italy and the U.S. When asked to explain her new choice of creative language, she answered: “I write in Italian to feel free.” She further explicates that she has always felt that she is “a writer without a true mother tongue,” and by choosing to write in Italian instead of an Indian language as people expected her to, she “complicated the situation considerably.” Yet even in Italian, Lahiri argues, her works continue to be “about migrants”—that is, “immigration and imagination.” The two writers’ rationales for writing in the languages they newly acquired, as well as their works written in them, illustrate that an author’s carving of a writer’s self sometimes has less to do with mastering a language than with moving away from a language and navigating complex relations between different languages. This study examines the way migrant authors create creative space from language differences, the linguistic negotiations and transgressions involved therein, and the broader implications of such projects for an expansive understanding of translation.

I propose to study the prominence of spatial metaphors to account for the translingual experience in Jhumpa Lahiri’s essayistic and fictional writing. This case study will explore the ethical and aesthetic stakes of “literary translingualism” (Kellman, 1991) in a bilingual author (speaking Bengali and English) who has made the original choice to learn a third language, Italian, a language with no apparent link to her spatial, linguistic and family origins, with no link to her parents’ emigration from Calcutta to London and then to the United States, and to turn it into a new writing language. In her language memoir In altre parole, estranged from both Bengali and English, without a homeland and a single mother tongue, the writer presents herself as “exiled even from the definition of exile”. Translingual self-writing does indeed appear to be an experience of defamiliarization. I will examine the singularity of this experience of inner exile in relation to notions of “third space” (H. Bhabha) and “non-places of exile” (A. Galitzine-Loumpet). Translingualism translates into a series of spatial metaphors that reflect the physical and linguistic displacements of the writer who lives on both sides of the Atlantic, between Rome and the East Coast of the USA.

I will focus on Lahiri’s recent essay, Translating Myself and Others (2022), and on the fiction entitled Dove mi trovo (2018, literally: Where I Am), the first novel Jhumpa Lahiri self-translates from Italian into English under the title Whereabouts. The study of spatial metaphors (such as the margin, the crossing of a lake, the fragile shelter…) will provide an opportunity to address questions of self-translation, translatability and untranslatable in the translingual experience. I will also discuss the conflict between minor and major languages in the literary field, as Lahiri takes the risk of writing in Italian, a language that modifies her writing style, as she declares: “In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way”. By writing in Italian, Lahiri has chosen an ethic of literary minority and linguistic diversity against the hegemony of English. The author’s translingualism thus perhaps offers a way of rethinking world literature by making the choice of a minor language not the object of an inheritance or a personal conquest but of a free ethical, political and aesthetic commitment – beyond the still powerful ideology of the “mother tongue” even in current reflections on translingualism.

When a writer translates their own work, are they reinventing it or maintaining it ? This question lies at the centre of ethical concerns in self-translation, an act that complicates notions of fidelity and creative freedom. If a literary text can be performed in infinite ways by different readers, then a self-translator is also a reader of their own work. From a comparative perspective, this paper will attempt to theorise and propose self-translation as a relational act of self-reading, where the author/translator engages with language difference and ideological/philosophical shifts. The paper will examine O.V. Vijayan’s self-translation of Khasakkinte Ithihasam (1969) in Malayalam into The Legends of Khasak (1994) in English in an attempt to answer: (1) What does the act of self-translation reveal about the ethics and inherent creative possibilities that arise when translating one’s own work? (2) How does the act of self-translation affect a writer's sense of "where they are writing from"? The English translation of the novel, The Legends of Khasak written after almost two decades, was bereft of the existential despair and ideological disillusionment that the Malayalam original was rooted in. Vijayan in his English translation is writing from a new political moment, where his self-translation positions Khasakkinte Ithihasam differently in relation to India’s socio-political and cultural situation. Vijayan’s translation becomes an authorial self-reading that leads to an ideological and formal transformation of the original. Vijayan, in translating the work into The Legends of Khasak, does not just reproduce a previous text - he re-reads it as a new ‘work’, a self-reading across time. Rebecca Walkowitz’s concept of "born translated" points to works written with translatability and its circulation in mind. Vijayan’s self-translation, however, can be read as a “reborn translation”, a work re-read by the writer himself through the prism of time, space and history. By engaging with the questions put forth, this paper will argue that self-translation can be seen as an ethically charged act of self-reading where the author does not simply render meaning into another language but reinterprets and re-constructs their own work.

Samuel Beckett’s bilingual oeuvre provides a fertile ground for examining the role of translingualism in literary creation, particularly through the practice of self-translation. Translingualism refers to the phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one, as first defined by Steven G. Kellman in his seminal and controversial work The Translingual Imagination (2000), and later expanded upon by other scholars to encompass broader dimensions of cultural and linguistic hybridity in literary practices. Beckett's deliberate choice to write across languages, particularly in English and French, transcends mere linguistic dexterity; it embodies a conscious artistic pursuit of a ‘third way’ that challenges traditional monolingual frameworks and modernist linguistic innovations.

Beckett’s transition to writing in French in the 1940s was initially perceived as an attempt to escape the stylistic constraints of English. Beckett famously chose French in order to “write without style,” believing that the constraints and unfamiliarity of French allowed him to strip language to its essentials. Paradoxically, this shift to French enabled him to return to English with a renewed sense of simplicity and detachment. Beckett even confessed that English had become foreign to him due to his immersion in French (Charles Juliet, 1986). His linguistic oscillation exemplifies the notions of ‘decentredness’ and ‘decentred recentredness’ (Kim, 2024). Beckett's translingual approach reflects David Bellos’s provocative question, “Is your native language really yours?” Beckett’s answer, embedded in his works, suggests, beyond George Steiner’s concept of ‘unhousedness’ (1971), a deliberate linguistic homelessness that paradoxically facilitates the construction of new literary homes across languages.

This paper explores Beckett's translingualism as both a framework for creating bilingual works, focusing on how it interweaves questions of ethics, space, and style in his creative process. By writing and self-translating, Beckett transcended linguistic limits and explored the aesthetic potential of dialogic interaction and constant shifting between languages. By situating Beckett’s translingual creative process as a precursor to contemporary writing practices, including the works of multilingual writers like Jhumpa Lahiri or Kazuo Ishiguro, this paper highlights how his approach challenges traditional linguistic boundaries and offers foundational insight into the complexities of language and creativity.

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.

Levy Hideo’s short story “Mihosō no Mama” (Left Unpaved, 2016) opens with a vivid description of the author-narrator’s room in his Tokyo home, in which the pattern of bamboo shadows falling upon a shoji sliding frame is described as being “different and yet the same, the same and yet different” to that he saw half a century prior, in the Japanese-style house in Taiwan which he lived in as a young boy. This comparison, or transposition, of a typically Japanese aesthetic, perceived in two distinct places and times, insofar as it functions as a definition of translation itself, implies that a metaphor of translation might be useful in making sense of the legacy of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, and by extension colonialism in general.

In this paper, I will consider the scope of this translational metaphor as it functions within this specific short story, while also referring to other writings by Levy which support such a reading. Such consideration is complicated by the fact that Levy is an American-born exophonic writer of Japanese, who acquired the language midway through life, and whose writing itself thus, arguably, inherently contains an element of translation. Whether or not this is the case, Levy’s writing is characterized by an awareness of (un)translatability from Japanese into his mother tongue of English, something that can even be observed in the above quote, pivoting on the conjunction “no ni”, which only roughly translates into English as “even though”, or “and yet”. Therefore, this paper will also consider the question of Levy’s writing style in relation to the dynamics of translation between Japanese and English, to provide further context on the viability of conceiving colonialism through a metaphor of translation.

In 1933, the German architect Bruno Taut emigrated to Japan in order to flee from the Nazi regime. By that point Taut was already an extremely prolific and noted exponent of architectural modernism and a pioneer of functionalism. He had been invited to Japan by the European-trained Japanese architect Isaburo Ueno and, once there, the businessman Fusaichiro Inoue arranged for Taut to move into a small traditional house in a rural location near Takasaki, in Gumma Prefecture, where Taut was to write several influential treatises on Japanese architecture.

This paper explores the intersection between space and intercultural/interlingual translation by focusing on a book that Taut wrote when residing in Taksaki: Houses and People of Japan (1937). Written in German, the book first appeared in Japan in an English translation by A.J. Sington, with the Tokyo-based Sanseidō publishing company.

Taut’s Houses and People of Japan is remembered for focusing international attention on traditional Japanese domestic architecture. But the book also lends itself to be read as a narrative of Taut’s personal encounters and experiences in Japan. It is significant in this sense that, in his prospectus for the book, Taut described it as ‘fill[ing] a gap in world literature’ and as being designed not ‘exclusively for architects, but rather for every member of the general public who is interested in things cultural’. Indeed, Houses and People of Japan is surprisingly lacking in technical details. Examining Taut’s descriptions of Japanese domestic settings and tracing his sources (notably to the 1886 Japanese Homes and their Surroundings by the American zoologist Edward S. Morse) enables us to piece together an international textual network of writings that represent the acts of entering and inhabiting traditional Japanese houses and experiencing Japanese hospitality (Taut tellingly dedicated his book to his ‘Japanese friends’). Such writings, following Taut, can be understood as a distinctive genre of world literature, in which the treatment of domestic space is used as a foil for questions of intercultural communication and translation (Taut, again, describes his Japanese house as a ‘medium of contemplation’).

My paper will address the following questions. How is hospitality described in Houses and People of Japan, notably through acts of interpretation, translation and failure of translation? How did translation shape the material production and circulation of Taut’s book? How does it portray the relationship between home-making and world-making? How does the progression from estrangement to acculturation enabled by domestic space in Taut map onto the concept of 'domestication’ as understood by translation studies?

Hsieh Pingying’s (Xie Bingying) Autobiography of a Girl Soldier (Nubing Zizhuan 1936) is a key text in modern Chinese autobiographical writing. Existing scholarship focuses on the genre’s enabling power for female writers to articulate new forms of gender relations regarding family, sex, and domesticity and how it contributes gender perspectives to the imagination of nation and modernity. Hsieh’s autobiography is exceptionally international in its circulation and reception, as it experienced translation and reverse translation between Chinese and English languages. This essay focuses on the transnational and translingual aspect of this text as world literature through translation. Adet Lin and Anor Lin (daughters of the Chinese bilingual writer Lin Yutang, who had earlier translated sections of Hsieh into English) translated it as Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying, which was published by America’s John Day Company in 1940. In 1943, London’s George Allen & Unwin published another English translation, Autobiography of a Chinese Girl, by the Chinese writer Tsui Chi, who is author of A Short History of Chinese Civilization (1942). This essay engages with a comparative analysis of these Chinese and English editions. Seeing translator as non-transparent cultural intermediary, it looks at how gender (male and female translators) and location (Britain and the U.S.) intervene in the different choices of specific translation strategies as well as paratextual construct, and how these interventions function as mediation between original textual representation of Chinese female subjectivity and Anglo-American expectations of China and the Chinese. The essay also highlights the specific Anglo-American context of the early 1940s (particularly John Day and George Allen & Unwin as important publishers of writings about China in the U.S. and Britain respectively) and examines how the two English editions translate the relationship between female subjectivity, nation and war (Chinese civil war of the 1920s) into a renewed imagination of transnational connection during the World War.

Taking as my test-case Jamie McKendrick’s The Years, a sequence of fifteen picture-poems of varying length and measure, I’ll re-examine, first, George Steiner’s still powerful postulate that Western culture is the “translation and rewording of previous meaning,” and, then, the model of translation Pascale Casanova adapts for her “world republic of letters.” In The Years, McKendrick uses such rhetorical devices as graphic illustration, allusion, citation, repetition, and imitation in order to gain access to other spatio-temporalities than his own, and to transfer and transmute—partially and topologically—his meaning into the appropriated or inherited meaning and thereby claim for himself citizenship of the “world republic of letters” (as Casanova envisions it). The allusions to and citations from canonical writers of the West—Horace, Catullus, Dante, Petrarca, Shakespeare, or Hardy—in The Years are the sites where such maneuvers take place. In brief, McKendrick’s case enables us to discuss culture as translation, translation as a cultural understanding of cultural understanding, and the world republic of letters as a construct based on such understanding of understanding, a republic of translated letters, whose spatio-temporal boundary is necessarily unstable and ever shifting.

Tim Parks’s short 2010 piece on the ‘dull new global novel’ has provoked some interesting responses. Parks regrets the tendency of some authors to write, as he sees it, for translation and the global market, avoiding the linguistic, cultural and epistemological difficulties of the local, the idiomatic and the recondite. In Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in the Age of World Literature, Rebecca Walkowitz considers works that acknowledge the place of translation in both literary history and in ongoing literary circulation, reminding us that translation ‘operates differently across languages and literary cultures’. Moreover, the choice is not simply between an emphasis on the local or the global, as Walkowitz argues: ‘Refusing to match language to geography, many contemporary works will seem to occupy more than one place, to be produced in more than one language, or to address multiple audiences at the same time. They build translation into their form.’

This paper will explore how questions of language and space are negotiated in Sarah Bernstein’s novel Study for Obedience (2023), set in an ‘unnamed northern country’. The nameless narrator has come to live in her brother’s house in a country where she cannot speak the language, despite her efforts to learn it and her previous prowess at learning German and Italian. Gradually the country is revealed to be a site of persecution of their ancestors, ‘an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits’. Although the word ’Jewish’ is never mentioned, it is clearly implied by references to their early life, such as saying the bracha over classroom Sabbath ceremonies. But the text is not only an allusion to ongoing anti-Semitism; it can also be read as a study of existential unhousedness: ‘I wanted so badly to live in my life, wanted to meet it head on, wanted above all for something to happen, for this terrible yearning to be quenched’. Similarly, the narrator’s status as ‘incomer, offlander, usurper’ is complicated by her relationship with her brother: the eponymous ‘study for obedience’ can also be seen in the shifting power dynamics between siblings. By avoiding fixed correlations between place, language and identity, Bernstein produces a novel where the local is both present and elusive; the narrator’s resistance to understanding the townspeople compels her attempts to translate their spoken and body language and express it in English.

The novel ends with a measured aspiration towards the global: ‘So much transpired on a scale of time and space that was longer than a lifetime, wider than a country, vaster than the story of the exile of a single people, and bigger still.’ I argue that Study for Obedience belies Tim Parks’ distinction between the global novel and its counterpart: Bernstein create a nexus of spaces and languages that invites personal and allegorical readings, a nexus which is written both for and from translation.

The Prix Goncourt stands as France’s most renowned literary prize, enjoying both national and international acclaim. Its influence extends beyond the literary field into the commercial realm, where the award often ensures broad visibility and strong sales for the winning title (Pickford 2011; Sapiro 2016). This intersection of critical recognition and commercial viability plays a key role in promoting the French language and culture on the global stage, particularly through translation.

This presentation investigates the Prix Goncourt’s function as an accessible and effective form of soft power. Drawing on Nye’s (1990) definition—achieving influence through attraction rather than coercion—it considers how the symbolic capital of the prize, along with the media narratives it generates (rumours, anticipation, controversy), fosters the international circulation of French literature (Heilbron & Sapiro 2018). For publishers abroad, the award acts as a pre-existing marketing machine, meaning much of the promotional groundwork is already laid and commercial success in translation is, to a large extent, pre-secured.

The methodology combines quantitative data on translations into Spanish and Catalan over the past thirty years with qualitative analysis of paratexts and media coverage. This dual approach allows for an exploration of how publicity —and in particular, scandal— can shape reception and drive translation interest.

Selected case studies will examine whether the Goncourt creates enduring visibility for authors beyond the award year. Special attention will be given to works that sparked media controversy, assessing whether such attention enhances or undermines the soft power effect. Ultimately, the study reflects on how literary prizes like the Goncourt serve not only as markers of cultural value, but also as strategic tools for international cultural influence.

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

Tsubouchi Shōyō is known as the ‘father’ of comparative literature in Japan, and his pioneering Shakespeare translations (completed between 1909 and 1928) are rooted in his comparative outlook. One comparative framework that seems to have influenced Tsubouchi throughout his career, starting in the 1880s, is the pedagogic ideal of 'wakanyō', namely the synthesis of local Japanese ('wa'), universal Chinese ('kan') and spiritualized Western ('yō') elements that was influential in late 19th century Japan. 'Wakanyō' is relevant to the gradual replacement during the period of Japan’s modernisation of the traditional 'kundoku' method of reading and translating classical Chinese texts according to Japanese syntax and word order with translation styles based on the contemporary colloquial. In the case of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translations, this movement (known as genbun icchi) facilitates a dynamic engagement with Shakespeare’s spoken idiom based on a modern techne of translation in which techniques such as paraphrase and compensation emulate the normative authority of Sino-Japanese characters, and can be demonstrated by comparing Tsubouchi’s early 1884 adaptation of Shakespeare’s "Julius Caesar" with his 1913 translation of the same play in modern Japanese. Tsubouchi does not necessarily need to appropriate Renaissance ideals such as honour that are embedded in the play, and yet his creative and domesticating translation style does beg comparisons between such ideals and, for example, the Buddhist and Confucianist ideals that shaped the Chinese tradition, and can be set against the changing cultural relationship of China and Japan over the course of Tsubouchi’s career. My presentation will survey the basic techniques (or techne) of Tsubouchi’s Shakespeare translations, and consider what it means for them to refer not only to Shakespeare’s Renaissance culture but to the Chinese cultural sphere in which his early education was based.

To illustrate the cultural attributes of costume in the novel from a translation viewpoint, the research delves into the cultural translatability of costumes in the classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, focusing on the translation work of David Hawkes and John Minford. The theoretical foundation derives from previous scholars’ cultural translatability theories, summarizing the previous research and debates on translatability and untranslatability.

This study aims to expand the existing researches on cultural translatability in translation studies by investigating the subject through unconventional theoretical lenses. Based on the three aspects of translatability proposed by previous scholars, this study redefines three levels to evaluate cultural translatability: Linguistic level, Literary level, and Cultural level. From linguistics level, the study focuses on accuracy, examining whether Hawkes’ costume translation conveys the original textual content. In terms of literary level, The research investigates whether English clothing translations, like their Chinese counterparts, communicate character personalities, using Wang Xifeng and Jia Baoyu as case studies. From the perspective of cultural level, the study explores the extent to which clothing translations transmit the cultural connotations of the original text. Furthermore, it adopts a triangulated methodology encompassing questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews, and comparative textual analysis. Through this mixed-methods approach, the research seeks to address methodological unicity in previous investigations while providing complementary empirical evidence to advance current understandings of cultural translatability.

The study finds that while Hawkes’ translation captures the essence of the costumes, it partially fails to convey the deeper cultural connotations, especially for those unfamiliar with the novel. The research concludes that costume translation plays a supportive role in character portrayal rather than a dominant one and suggests using paratext to compensate for cultural losses in translation.

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the artistic production of Conceição Evaristo, we will analyze Insubmissas lágrimas de Mulheres (Unruly Tears of Women), a book that narrates thirteen stories of women contacted by a common narrator, harking back to the oral tradition of storytelling. Each of these stories conveys the physical, symbolic, and psychological pains and violence experienced by a Black body. Given that this is a work within the theoretical field of comparative literature, we will introduce the visual artist Rosana Paulino, who also works with the same themes but in a more illustrative and concrete manner. Her artistic productions incorporate diverse materials such as lines and embroidery, and drawings where the main character lived experience of Black women, particularly about gender and social issues, is a critical area of analysis. This proposal embarks on a compelling study of two prominent Brazilian artists who powerfully explore identity, memory, and the experiences of Black women, specifically within the Brazilian context. We will conduct a comparative analysis of Conceição Evaristo, a distinguished writer, and Rosana Paulino, an acclaimed visual artist. Their narratives and artistic expressions illuminate profound stories of ancestry, effectively reconstructing identities and a sense of belonging that have been profoundly altered by the legacies of the slave trade and the enslavement of human beings.

Theoretical references

Aliaga, Juan Vicente. Orden Fálico: Androcentrismo y violência de gênero em las prácticas artísticas Del siglo XX. Madrid – Espanha, Akai, 2007.

Archer, Michael. Ideologia, identidade e diferenças, In.: Arte Contemporânea: Uma História Concisa. Tradução: Alexandre Krug e Valter Lellis Siqueira. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001.

García Canclini, Néstor. Diferentes, desiguais e desconectados: mapas da interculturalidade. Tradução: Luiz Sérgio Henriques. – 3ª Edição. 1 rep. – Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2015.

Jeudy, Henri-Pierre, O corpo como objeto de arte. Tradução: Tereza Lourenço. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2002.

Maffesoli, Michel. A transfiguração do Político: a tribalização do mundo. Tradução de Juremir Machado da Silva. – 3 edição – Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2005.

Nicholin, Linda. Por que não houve grandes mulheres artistas? São Paulo, Editora Aurora / Publication Studio SP, 2016.

Silva, Tomaz Tadeu da. Quem precisa da identidade? In Identidade e diferença: a perspectiva dos Estudos culturais / Tomaz Tadeu da Silva ( org. ). Stuart Hall, Kathryn Woodward, 15ª edição, Petrópolis, RJ, Vozes, 2014.

Harlem Renaissance is the first intellectual movement in the African American history and is of great significance in the modernization and prosperity of African American literature. This paper, by taking “transnational literary community” as a perspective, offers a tentative re-examination of this movement, and casts new light upon the nature, dynamics and consequence of this intellectual movement, which lie remarkably in transnationality. In some sense, this movement, while contributing to the independence of American literature, is a renaissance of the world African diasporic literature and culture.

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

Folklore is a significant part of one’s social identity and is important in every society. This study examines folklore representations through a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Mayasalun Hadi’s The Prophecy of Pharaoh (2011). Both novels represent African-American and Iraqi cultures, respectively. This article aims to investigate and analyze the use of folklore in resisting racial oppression, empowering African-American women against racism and family abuse, conveying power and cultural identity to the next generation, creating an identity for people, and protecting people from cultural assimilation. The article employs analytical strategies such as postcolonial analysis and an in-depth examination of the selected novels, focusing on the traditional elements of the embedded folklore, their cultural and social contexts, functions, and their connection to humanity, nationalism, and cultural identity. Additionally, this study consults the established theories and notions set by modern folklorists such as William Thomas and William Wilson to understand the hidden meaning behind folklore adaptation.