“Nonhuman narrative” can mean several things: stories with a physical setting devoid of humans; stories about artificial intelligence, robots, animals with humanlike qualities, and so on; it can also encompass otherwise lifeless, non-sentient beings with such qualities. This presentation, which examines the work of the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998), is about the last category. Despite being best known for his poetry and essays, my focus in this presentation is on one of Paz’s few short stories, “Mi vida con una ola,” or “My Life with a Wave,” from his 1951 collection Aguila o sol. The story’s narrator and protagonist, an average male not unlike any other one might find in a large Latin American city during the middle of the previous century, travels to the coast. There he takes a bucket of sea water from a crashing wave and proceeds to fall in love with it. This is only natural. After all, the “wave” has all the qualities he ever wanted in a lover. This anthropomorphized wave, then, amounts to the story’s antagonist, and she and the narrator journey – improbably – through the major cycles of a failed relationship. With Paz, this story about a wave is also about other matters, which I will analize in this presentation.

Of particular interest is his understanding and use of the concept of solitude: a concept that in many respects has become emblematic of the Latin American condition and to some extent of the Latin American region as a whole. Solitude, for Paz, was not a static term: it evolved over the course of his career; similarly, his usage of the term takes on different meanings when refracted through his own changing biography and with changes in his cultural and historical milieu. This short presentation can at most allude to the various layers associated with Paz's deployment of "solitude," let alone the ways in which other Latin American intellectuals have engaged with the concept. That stated, part of my purpose here is to argue that in “My Life with a Wave” Paz probes the limits (human and beyond) of solitude.

As global ecological crises continue to escalate, the concept of scale has emerged as a pivotal focus in literary and cultural studies. James F. English and Ted Underwood assert that the intellectual history of literary studies is essentially a history of competing scales. Since 2010, ecological criticism has undergone a “scale turn,” which highlights the necessity of reimaging humanity through disparate and often incompatible scales, including human and geological dimensions (Dipesh Chakrabarty). In this context, integrating nonhuman narrators into ecological narratology becomes increasingly significant, particularly in examining their role in the expansion and transformation of scale within literary texts. Previous discussions of nonhuman narrators have primarily focused on categorizing their types and functions (Shang Biwu) or exploring their narrative roles in extending human experiences and projecting nonhuman perspectives (Lars Bernaerts et al.). This paper argues that nonhuman narrators not only create new spatiotemporal domains, thereby providing alternative possibilities for worldmaking, but also establish an array of distinct scales that diverges from the anthropocentric framework. Consequently, I propose the concept of “scale narrators” to differentiate them from anthropomorphized narrators. While both human and nonhuman narrators articulate actions involving humans and objects within human cognition, “scale narrators” serve as narrative agents that critically question, transform, and reconstruct vital quantitative aspects of the anthropocene scale. This includes dimensions of time and space in a physical sense, the historical trajectories of life, and the intricate relationships between humans and nonhumans. By foregrounding the role of “scale narrators,” this study seeks to enhance our understanding of ecological relationships and the positioning of humanity within these complex dynamics.

This study examines Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) through the lenses of nonhuman agency and nonhuman narratives, exploring the intersections between climate change, ecological crises, and the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing from Ghosh’s theoretical works The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Uncanny and Improbable Events, this paper positions Gun Island as a transnational narrative reflecting human-induced environmental degradation, ecological refugees, and critiques of colonialism and global capitalism. Unlike the traditional Cli-Fi, Gun Island focuses on the present moment through a series of improbable encounters and events. As a work of climate realism, it employs decolonial and ecocritical frameworks to critique neoliberal global capitalism, emphasizing its role in exacerbating ecological and social injustices. The novel vividly portrays nonhuman entities—especially animals, omens, and uncanny phenomena—urging readers to engage with these improbable events. The paper further scrutinizes how Ghosh introduces new aesthetic and epistemological modes in Gun Island, highlighting the agency of nonhuman entities and their relevance to addressing climate change and other global issues. By challenging anthropocentrism in the context of climate change and colonialism, Gun Island exemplifies how nonhuman narratives provide modes of perception and experience that transcend the human realm, prompting readers to connect with real-world challenges.

In the 21st century, humanity faces crises like political conflict, climate change, environmental degradation, gender inequality, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Science fiction addresses these challenges through speculative scenarios that critique existing conditions and propose solutions. Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide exemplifies this, using Silicon Isle, a fictional hub for electronic waste recycling, to explore labor exploitation, environmental justice, and human-machine relationships.

Silicon Isle is portrayed as a dystopian space dominated by global capitalism, where hazardous e-waste is processed by marginalized "waste people." These workers endure poverty, health risks, and social exclusion while clashing with the island's native inhabitants, who exploit them while retaining socio-economic power. This tension mirrors global disparities between industrialized and developing regions burdened with environmental harm.

The novel’s central figure, Mimi, a "waste girl," embodies the fusion of human and nonhuman (machine) elements. Her transformation through advanced technology symbolizes new forms of communication and connection between humans and machines. Through Mimi, Waste Tide highlights the potential for technology to bridge human and nonhuman divides, challenging anthropocentric views that isolate humanity from its technological counterparts.

However, Waste Tide also reveals ambivalence in its portrayal of nonhuman entities. While advocating for human-nonhuman co-evolution, it often frames machines as external threats requiring control. Uniquely human traits like love and morality are contrasted with the alien nature of machines, reinforcing their separation. This duality complicates the novel’s stance, oscillating between integration and exclusion of nonhuman entities.

Through the lens of nonhuman theory, this study analyzes Waste Tide’s depiction of human-machine relationships and their broader implications. It examines how the novel critiques contemporary issues like labor exploitation and environmental destruction while envisioning alternative futures of collaboration and coexistence between humans and nonhumans.

The rise of children’s fantasy novels resonates with the intellectual shift to challenging conventional assumptions of consciousness, being, and reality. Margery Williams’s famous piece The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) stands out as a compelling exploration of reality through the lens of a toy’s transformation into a real rabbit. Through a character focalization, the narrative interrogates the life experience of an agential stuff rabbit, addressing deeper ontological and epistemological concerns with regards to a becoming reality in the entanglement between materiality and affection. Also, the inconsistency between the toy and human storyworlds manifests the tension between toys’ agency and immobility – a generic textual tension in toy narratives. Furthermore, the immobility suggests not only the incapacity of toys in a human world, but also the failure and blindness of human knowledge. The narrative thus points to a nonhuman ethics that advocates for interspecies respect and caring. In this way, Williams’ novel offers a beneficial consideration on the evolving nature of reality, relationship and love, encouraging readers to embrace the inevitable bruise of life as essential to becoming “Real.”

This paper explores the intersections between Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, focusing on the non-human narrative dimensions and the treatment of androgyny as a challenge to anthropocentric paradigms and binary gender structures. Drawing on Donna Haraway's theoretical concepts, such as the "cyborg" and "situated knowledges," the study highlights how these texts destabilize traditional boundaries — human/non-human, masculine/feminine, self/other, language/speech — and create speculative spaces for rethinking relationality and agency in a more-than-human world.

In Orlando, Woolf presents a narrative that transcends time and gender, featuring a protagonist who defies fixed identities. Similarly, Le Guin imagines a society where gender is fluid and contextual, shaped by the ecology and biology of the planet Gethen. At the same time, both works reveal the limitations of human imagination, as their narratives remain partly constrained by the linguistic and cultural frameworks they seek to transcend. These narratives align with Haraway’s critique of anthropocentrism by proposing hybrid existences that embrace complexity and interconnectedness.

By situating these works within the broader context of the "non-human turn" in literature, this paper argues that both authors invite readers to reimagine the boundaries of experience and agency, using fiction as a critical tool. Thus, Woolf and Le Guin expand the scope of non-human narratives, positioning speculative and modernist literature as essential instruments for addressing ethical and ecological challenges in a more-than-human context.

Marking language as the human-nonhuman boundary negates language’s material complexity and situatedness. Derived from Latin lingua, “tongue,” language is embedded in a sustained living body: breath breaking against teeth, hands scrambling across sheets of paper, symbols morphing through ages, and myriads of things (around but other than me) I want to refer to. Beyond a boundary, a reference, can language attune us to the “significant otherness” of species, things, and existences that do not speak our tongue (Haraway)? Can it reveal a shared world of co-constituted subjects?

Inspired by ecological thinkers like Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, and Vinciane Despret, this paper explores the literary possibilities of writing co-constitution across species, relations, and assemblages. Writing during and after the existential crises of the World Wars, French authors sought new “forms” to make sense of a world in flux – internally and externally – interrogating language’s place in the collapse of (hu)man-centric ontology. Francis Ponge and Nathalie Sarraute, among others, pioneered literary interventions leading up to a distinct French ecocriticism in the 1980s and beyond. Ponge reconceives language in the shape of vegetal morphology and calcified seashells, imagining human subjects as “vibrating cords” that harmonize with nonlinguistic beings. Sarraute, dismantling conventional character-speech relations, takes apart “subject” into a constellation of “tropisms” – subtle, undercurrent movements in everyday exchanges – making these transient experiences into a legible, visible, and inhabitable body of co-constituted subjectivities.

Their approaches resonate with our current grappling with Large Language Models (LLMs) and questions of agency in human-machine interaction. In Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’or, the eponymous book in the story remains unknown to us; we only hear about Les Fruits d’or through a cacophony of reactions from its readers, mirroring the iterative, relational dynamics between machine-generated discourse and its users/co-programmers. Similarly, Ponge’s Le Parti pris des choses perceives daily life among things as a feedback loop, an interplay of human and nonhuman that resists linear causality and embraces transformation.

Al challenges our understanding of writing and real-time conversation, by also laying bare its rhizomatic existence: reference universes, iterative learning, palimpsestic algorithm overwriting, and the herculean effort in maintaining its material presence such as cooling systems, cables, data centers, and rare earth metals. Likewise, Ponge and Sarraute implicate and complicate multispecies relations, weaving our multimodal temporalities and realities into powerful narratives. As linguistic animals, we can tell stories that move beyond the self-endangering human “subject” and imagine instead “ecosophical subjectivities” (Guattari). Language means more than a prompt or a timely response to us, it is living itself (pun intended).

The video game Stray is a story based adventure game in which a stray cat finds itself in a walled city where the humans have all died from a unknown illness. Robots, Zurks and an infection roam the city. In this essay, I will analyse this video game from a post-human perspective, more specifically, this essay focuses on the relationship between the player and the bio-object, the diversity of the world left behind and its relation to the Chuthulcene, and, finally, how the power of changing the perspective of the player aided by post-humanism is represented in the video game.

“Even now hardly anyone still remembers what we meant by making the Earth live: not what you imagine, content with your dust-cloud life set down on the border between water, earth and air, (678)” says Calvino in The Complete Cosmicomics. Written during the 1960s and 1970s, this reflection on life and the cosmos parallels the current Anthropocene’s “decline narrative.” As Laura Walls notes, “the complexity of the idea of ‘cosmos’ which sought to combine ‘nature’ and culture, or matter and meaning, was lost in the last two centuries” (730). Much of contemporary ecocriticism focuses on humanity’s reflections and anti-utopian imaginings of ecology, as well as the ethical negotiation of boundaries between human and non-human species in the Anthropocene. And the frequent occurrence of crisis events has intensified ecological reflection, fueling emotional responses rooted in apocalyptic fear and existential anxiety so as to call for reimagining the intrinsic connection between humans and the environment. Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics, however, situates its stories in the aftermath of the Big Bang, at the dawn of life. These stories imagine intricate ecological worlds across diverse temporal and spatial scales, unfolding from the perspective of a non-human narrator named Qfwfq. Incorporating this non-human narrator into the framework of eco-narratology, and focusing on its scale expansion and transformation in texts, this paper re-examines how the spatial scales collage and intertwine in constant montage and how the multiplicity of human and non-human subjects is constructed within overlapping temporalities. These narratives challenge the linear, ordered conception of the world, proposing instead a pluralistic, subjective, timeless, and dynamic world of the here/now. In this world, the perception and understanding of the human subject is not absolutely reliable, thus provoking the reader to reflect on subjective experience.

Video games with central storylines create interactive storyworlds where both game designers and players collaboratively engage in worldmaking, a process that can be viewed as a new form of literary creation. This article argues that through the lens of players’ embodiment of a nonhuman player-character, the experience of video games serves as a unique form of literary reception. Using the recently released Chinese 3D video game “Black Myth: Wu Kong,” adapted from the Chinese classic The Journey to the West by Luo Guanzhong, as a case study, this article explores how players, particularly Western players, engage with the game world to develop fresh perspectives on the original novel, thereby revitalizing this Chinese classic and establishing gameplay as a contemporary medium for literary reception. Drawing on the theories of narrative worldmaking, this article first posits that players actively participate in the making of the black mythical world through their embodiment of a personalized monkey player-character. This embodiment allows players to navigate altered spatial and temporal settings while interacting with NPCs from the original novel, emphasizing the interactive and immersive nature of virtual worldmaking. The spatial worldmaking, enhanced by real-scene scanning of Chinese Buddhist architecture, facilitates a deep immersion for Western players into an ancient Chinese context. The personalized monkey character carries profound Chinese cultural significance, resonating strongly with players. In the game’s adaptation, the original novel’s theme of a collective journey serving celestial authority shifts to an individual struggle against that authority, a transformation encapsulated in the title “Black Myth.” Lastly, this article demonstrates how the game functions as a new medium for circulating and critiquing the original Chinese classic, fostering transmedia and cross-cultural remaking of the Chinese mythical world of Wu Kong.

Ian McEwan's Nutshell has garnered significant attention since its publication. While previous studies have paid little attention to the metaphorical use of the title "Nutshell" representing the female womb, McEwan's portrayal of the womb as a "nutshell" conveys a sense of unraveling and depletion, challenging the stigmatized view of the womb in Western discourse. The womb, depicted as a container in the novel, symbolizes not only its traditional role in childbearing but also embodies a sense of unproductive freedom of consumption. In the novel, the fetus-mother relationship of dependence and sustenance hints at the fetus's early anxiety of separation, symbolizing the body as an organ through which desires flow. Traditional image of motherhood as a holy, selfless and devoted organ is subverted in the novel to present a more complex and controversial figure—a licentious, lustful murderer. This reinterpretation, though destructive, also offers a sense of freedom and liberation. All in all, as a male writer, McEwan's reimagining of the autonomy of the feminized body challenges and disrupts the deep-rooted discourses of misogyny within patriarchal societies.

In her serminal monograph Narrative in the Anthropocene, Erin James develops the Anthropocene narrative theory on the basis of cognitive narratology and rhetorical narratology, fleshing out the reciprocal connection between the Anthropocene and narratives as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds by reconceptualizing narrative as worldbuilding for some purpose. Under such theoretical frame, James discusses some original narrative techniques regarding time, material, and so forth. When turning to the issue of narration, she explores inconsistent “we-narration” and the “fictional you” as forms of narrative resource that aid the project of world building for environmental purposes. These narrative modes are compared by James to the world-building arrogance of the traditional omniscient narrator who implicitly forecloses a collective perspective or action. Though significantly captures the issues of environmental justice and reader immersion, James' discussion on person narrative dispises the narrative focalization hence ignoring the scale issue brought by different person narrative.

The issue of scale in the Anthropocene is primarily an epistemological problem. Because of the existence of scale effects and scale discrepancies, ecological issues may have varying causes depending on the scale of perception, and actions that seem environmentally protective at a micro level can trigger crises at regional or planetary scales. Mitchell Thomashow advocates for “scale shift,”urging individuals to transcend their scale boundaries by shifting focus from local ecosystems to broader temporal and spatial domains, enabling a deeper understanding of global environmental changes. Drawing on cognitive linguistic research on person deixis, this paper links scale shifting to DST, arguing that shifts in person and the accordingly changing narrative perspective also alter readers’psychological deictic centers. With the changing person dexis, readers are immersed in the story world, experiencing shifts in the protagonist's observational scale and adopting corresponding stances. I term this interplay between narrative person and scale changes as “deictic scale shifting.” For example, N.K. Jemisin’s “Emergency Skin” employs this strategy, blending formal aesthetics with environmental critique and a challenge to Anthropocene capitalism. Similarly, in The Fifth Season, such technique merges “you,” “I,” and “she” into a unified narrative, revealing interconnected relationships among races and objects in an environmental apocalypse. Through these case studies, this paper expands Anthropocene narrative theory, demonstrating how deictic scale shifting bridges human-scale and more-than-human phenomena.

In an era marked by rapid advancements in techno-biological sciences, traditional approaches of humanism are increasingly questioned to be undercut by the frameworks used to conceptualize them. This evolving landscape of humanities, alongside global crises such as climate change, calls for new ways of evaluating art and humanity. One such approach involves adopting animal and interspecies perspectives to offer alternative pathways beyond humancentric worldview. Zhang Wei’s Songs from the Forest (2007) and Lin Zhao’s Tidal Atlas (2022) provide two interesting examples of this genre, with the former spotlighting Chinese social changes in early 21st-century China and the latter re-narrate 19th-century China from a 2020s perspective. Despite different geographical and temporal contexts of these two works, they both express an alternative tone in shaping animality and human-animal relationship with their unique inter-species writing and animal protagonists. In Songs from the Forest, humans and animals are described as “coexisted and even intermarried” in a town called Jiwo, where interspecies hybrids are so common that making it to claim a pure humanity and animality. In Tidal Atlas, the frog heroine is portrayed as a powerful and autonomy agent that constantly challenges the rigid hierarchy between human and animals.

Through a close reading of these two novels, this paper argues that their animal and inter-species writing not only creates an open space for rethinking animality and nature, but also intersects with cultural and political discourses, serving as a metaphor to reflect the emerging context of China in the 21st century. On one hand, these novels challenge the anthropocentric view of nature by attributing active autonomy to it in various ways. On the other hand, both novels use animals to reflect the authors' different contemplations on topics such as localism, politics, cultural identity, and Chinese international relations, based on the changing temporal contexts. In Zhang's inter-species writing, the gradual retreat of animality is metaphorized as a critique of early 21st-century economic policies and globalization, and as a call for a return to indigenous cultural roots, specifically Qi culture. Conversely, Lin's animal writing employs the continual geographical transgression of the frog heroine's body to question fixed cultural roots and explore the complex relationship between China and the world through a cosmopolitan lens. The juxtaposition of these two texts not only illustrates the development of non-human writing as a literary strategy but also highlights its complex interaction with varying 21st-century Chinese contexts.

This presentation examines the poetry of Gu Cheng (1956–1993) as a profound engagement with nonhuman narratives, rooted in Daoist philosophy and framed by the crises of modernity. In his works, Gu Cheng challenges anthropocentric perspectives by emphasizing a nonhuman, cosmic narrative that dissolves the boundaries between human and nonhuman entities. His poetry offers a compelling exploration of how literature can reimagine the relationship between humans and their environment, moving toward a unified understanding of existence.

Gu Cheng’s poetic vision, informed by the Daoist concept of qi (vital energy), portrays the cosmos as a dynamic and interconnected whole, where nonhuman forces—rivers, clouds, birds, and even the essence of energy itself—participate as active agents in the unfolding narrative of life. His mystical synesthetic perception provides a framework for accessing the nonhuman world, presenting it not as an “other” to be subdued or mastered but as an intrinsic part of the self. Poems such as River and Life Fantasy illustrate how Gu Cheng develops a narrative of nonhuman vitality that resists the alienation imposed by modern technological and symbolic systems.

Through an analysis of Gu Cheng’s poetic techniques and philosophical underpinnings, this paper argues that his work redefines narrative as a medium of cosmic attunement, where language transcends its anthropocentric roots to bridge the gap between human and nonhuman realms. By situating Gu Cheng’s poetics within the broader discourse of world literature, this study highlights the role of nonhuman narratives in challenging modern assumptions about subjectivity and agency.

Ultimately, this presentation contributes to the understanding of nonhuman narratives by showing how Gu Cheng’s Daoist poetics offer a model for integrating human and nonhuman perspectives, encouraging a reimagining of literature as a space for ecological and cosmological reflection in the face of global modernity.

Since the publication of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, storytelling has become a major narrative device in Chinese American literature. While some critics emphasize the importance of storytelling in the articulation of identity and in the examination of acculturation and cultural dislocation, others question its limitations and unreliability which seem to be recognized by some Chinese American women writers, such as Amy Tan and Lisa See. To supplement the limited knowledge of first-person narrators, Tan employs bones as narrative devices in The Bonesetter’s Daughter and See chooses tea in The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. In addition, these novels include written texts that supplement first person narration. A new-materialist perspective reveals that non-human things narrate or act. When both Amy Tan and Lisa See endow non-human things with narrative power, they are no longer inert objects but storied matter. Drawing on new materialism, this paper will address how non-human narratives and written texts can compensate for the limits of human narrators and play active roles in shaping the text’s narrative and aesthetic expressions.

This article argues that The Lives of Animals approaches the human and non-human relationship through narrative form, which is different from most of the narratives dealing with non-human issues by means of thematic engagements. Coetzee’s rhetorical experience in this fiction pushes novelist form to its limit, opening new possibilities for ways of discussing animality. For Coetzee, fictional narrative form possesses unique and irreplaceable advantage in representing the living conditions of the non-human entities, thereby helping readers to get into the interiority of them. Specifically, by free imagination and textual dialogism, fictional discourse presents animals as free individuals with subjectivity and constructs a kind of “ethics of otherness”, which in turn facilitates readers’ understanding of the non-human world and multiplies the chance for them to empathize. Novelistic writing then becomes an ethical action, through which the novelists are expected to fully exploit novel’s formal resources to promote the discussions of social issues.

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) not only impressively addresses the Fermi Paradox about where alien civilizations are, but also delves deeper into a more profound inquiry: How are they? Through shaping alien images, Liu offers unique nonhuman viewpoints to expose and critique the limits of human perceptions. This article examines Liu’s exploration of three fundamental questions within his science fiction: How do aliens comprehend the existence of humans? How do aliens perceive human material civilization? And how do aliens regard human spiritual civilization? By analyzing Death’s End (2010), “The Micro-Era” (2001), and “Cloud of Poems” (2003), this article contends that Liu critically reflects upon Chinese epistemology with particular features of moral epistemology, relational epistemology and onto-epistemology to grapple with human cognitive limitations from alien perspectives. Liu challenges the validity of moral epistemology in the context of unfathomable “dark forest,” yet draws insights from relational and onto-epistemology to envision pathways for advancing human civilization. This article situates Liu’s science fiction within a broader discussion of alien narratives and Chinese epistemology, highlighting his distinctive contribution to world science fiction beyond conventional discussions about his responses to the Fermi Paradox.

David Foster Wallace’s famous essay Consider the Lobster makes a meticulous analysis of the ethics of boiling a lobster alive, which also emphasizes the irresolvable dilemma between satisfying human needs and reducing animal cruelty. To be more general, it represents the dilemma about whether human should sacrifice more in exchange for the benefit of the nonhuman animal, which is also an innate dilemma that almost all animal narratives are faced with. Based on three major items of zoocriticism initiated by Anna Barcz, this article investigates three innate dilemmas between human and the nonhuman animal within animal narratives, namely (1) anthropocentric nature of narrative versus animal autonomy of the animal agent, (2) anthropomorphizing the animal agent versus restoration of its animality, and (3) the understanding versus misunderstanding of animals as the effect of reading animal narratives. The article claims that even though the above dilemmas will exist for now and future works, we can see through these dilemmas and focus on the special characteristics of animal narratives. Meanwhile, such dilemmatic traits are also the carriers of the distinctive aesthetic values of animal narratives.

As artificial intelligence(AI) continues to advance, the boundaries between human and AI are becoming increasingly blurred, raising profound questions about the nature of consciousness, emotion, and identity. Against this backdrop, Shang Biwu (2021) proposed that the narrative of artificial humans belonged to a type of nonhuman narrative, including narratives with robots, clones, and AI as protagonists, which is particularly prominent in the science fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) unfolds a story about love, loneliness, sacrifice, and the radiance of humanity through the perspective of an artificial intelligence girl named Klara.This study aims to elucidate the affect embodiment of Klara, an Artificial Friend ( AF) and to analyze their implications for our understanding of consciousness, empathy, and ethical considerations in a world prevalent with AI.

To be specific, this study focuses on the emotional development of the protagonist designed for human companionship.We find that Klara exhibits a profound capacity for love, loyalty, and self-sacrifice, challenging the boundaries between artificial intelligence and human emotional experiences. Furthermore, Klara demonstrates empathy and compassion, not only towards her human charge, Josie, but also towards other humans and even inanimate objects, suggesting a unique form of emotional intelligence that transcends traditional human limitations. This nuanced portrayal of posthuman emotions raises critical questions about the nature of consciousness, the potential for artificial beings to experience genuine feelings, and the ethical implications of creating emotionally capable AI.

The findings above poses challenging questions for humans to redefine the boundaries between humans and AI. These also encourage humans to reconsider questions about the rights and moral status of emotionally capable artificial beings, the potential exploitation of AI in care-giving roles.

By examining themes of love, identity, and self-awareness in posthuman contexts, this study demonstrates how Ishiguro's work contributes to broader discussions on the future of human-AI relationships and the evolving definition of humanity in a world with high speed development of AI. In this sense, our research provides new insights into the literary representation of posthuman emotions and offers a novel framework for analyzing emotional narratives in science fiction of posthumans, ultimately challenging us to expand our understanding of what it means to feel and to be human.

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

Robots and their existential space provide a platform for in-depth reflection on the relationship between humans and technology in science fiction literature. In literary works, robots are often portrayed as entities possessing human intelligence and emotions, thus triggering a series of moral and ethical challenges. Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel published after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel explores the proposition of “human heart” under the shell of science fiction, and the author skillfully utilizes delicate descriptions, complex narrative techniques, and surreal interpretations of daily life to construct a world of robots and human beings that is full of philosophical depth and emotional tension. The novel depicts the emotional connection between Artificial Friend Klara and Josie's family, as well as how this emotional connection reflects humanity's longing for technology and the reality of loneliness. Through the non-human character of Klara, the novel presents an objective and dispassionate perspective, making it easier for readers to glimpse and contemplate the vulnerability of the human heart. This revelation not only reveals the social phenomena brought about by technological progress, but also delves deeper into the possible mutation and struggle of human nature in the torrent of technology.

This paper explores the profound impact of technological progress on human society and its individual life from three dimensions: the redrawing of the boundary between robots and humans inside and outside the window, the substitution and continuation of human roles by robots, and the mirror of the future of human group loneliness in the age of technology. First, it analyzes the window as a symbolic boundary to explore the emerging relationship dynamics between robots and humans, revealing the essence of their interaction and the evolution of the boundary. Second, it delves into how technology gradually replaces traditional human roles and reshapes our lives and social structures in the process, while provoking profound reflections on ethics and human nature. Finally, it focuses on the growing sense of personal loneliness and social isolation in the context of technological advancement, reflecting the lack of authentic emotional connection in modern society. By systematically exploring key topics such as the symbiotic evolution of humans and technology, the expansion of the ethical boundaries of artificial intelligence, and the ethical paradoxes brought about by life sciences, Kazuo Ishiguro successfully guides readers to reflect deeply on the possible subtle impact of technological progress on human behavior patterns and values. Thus, in the framework of science fiction literature, the deep integration and dialectical dialogue between technological and humanistic concerns are realized.

David Foster Wallace’s famous essay Consider the Lobster makes a meticulous analysis of the ethics of boiling a lobster alive, which also emphasizes the irresolvable dilemma between satisfying human needs and reducing animal cruelty. To be more general, it represents the dilemma about whether human should sacrifice more in exchange for the benefit of the nonhuman animal, which is also an innate dilemma that almost all animal narratives are faced with. Based on three major items of zoocriticism initiated by Anna Barcz, this article investigates three innate dilemmas between human and the nonhuman animal within animal narratives, namely (1) anthropocentric nature of narrative versus animal autonomy of the animal agent, (2) anthropomorphizing the animal agent versus restoration of its animality, and (3) the understanding versus misunderstanding of animals as the effect of reading animal narratives. The article claims that even though the above dilemmas will exist for now and future works, we can see through these dilemmas and focus on the special characteristics of animal narratives. Meanwhile, such dilemmatic traits are also the carriers of the distinctive aesthetic values of animal narratives.

The concept of “corpse” as “thing” is essential in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The corpses in these narratives act as both “ontological objects,” each with its distinct trajectory and nature, and “agentic objects,” which actively intervene in the course of the story. This paper analyzes Poe’s three short stories---“Ligeia” (1838), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), and “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845) ---each representing his Gothic, detective, and science fiction genres. The focus is on the notion of “thingness,” referring to the ontology and agency of the corpses within these texts. This analysis provides a fresh interpretation through the lens of thing narrative, particularly utilizing object-oriented narratology. From the Gothic corpse entwined between life and death, which are both real and surreal in “Ligeia,” to the suspenseful corpse that displays phenomena and obscures the truth in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and then to the science fiction corpse able to communicate across time and space in “Some Words with a Mummy,” the corpses in these three works demonstrate how the “corpse” as a “thing” gets entangled with spirit and competes with “the will”, how it constructs and deconstructs the “truth” each individual has discovered, or how it fuses technology and humanity together to create a new form of being. Through imaginative exploration in his different types of stories, Poe highlights the diverse aspects of corpses’ agency and “lures” readers to reflect on their profound ontological nature, which Graham Harman has termed “withdrawn” real objects. Poe’s exploration of “thingness” in these narratives sets the stage for his later prose poem, “Eureka,” allowing him to express the inexplicable and engage with what Quentin Meillassoux calls “The Great Outdoors.” The thing narrative surrounding corpses also aids Poe in pioneering, developing, and enriching various short story genres. More importantly, Poe uses corpses to depict “life,” which, in his view, encompasses not just human existence but also the life of nonhuman objects. He portrays these objects as “animate,” “sentient,” and “intelligent,” suggesting that they are always wielding thing power by the force of attraction and repulsion. For Poe, there is no fundamental ontological difference between humans and nonhuman objects, and the agency of things enables them to have power and affect other things in their own ways. Thus, humans and human life cannot be considered the focal point of the universe, and “life” takes many forms among all things. The three short stories mark different stages of Poe’s exploration of corporeal existence and demonstrate how the author articulates life through death, as noted by Gaston Bachelard, culminating in his ultimate reconciliation with mortality.

This article analyzes the narrative of nonhuman elements in the American cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson, and its Chinese counterpart, Waste Tide (2013), by Chen Qiufan, in the context of world literature, aiming to explore the way they configure the connections and networks of the world system. It argues that, similar to the role of literary forms and contents in Franco Moretti’s research and artificial sites in David Damrosch’s world literature theory, the artificial humans in both novels are narrated as a centre of calculation which connects different classes, cultures, and domains both inside and outside their home countries, forming a network resembling the star-shaped typology. Meanwhile, the technical products in these narratives act as conduits for transporting the presence of the ancient, distant and current systems in the world into one another, showcasing a mesh global network that directly connects individual sites and domains in different countries and cultures. These agencies of nonhuman narrative in the East and West not only reveals a new episteme to reassemble the connections between the literary, social, cultural and economic structures in both developed and developing countries, but also help address the recent concerns of multiculturalism by breaking down cultural boundaries and incorporating nonhuman objects as part of the material basis of the “form” of different cultures.

The mimetic turn in posthuman studies has gradually developed into what can be termed mimetic posthumanism. The mimetic paradigm not only provides theoretical support for the loosening of human boundaries within the posthuman framework, but also facilitates the construction of desires under the imagination of the posthuman. If we recognize transhuman medical technologies’ shaping of human desires in the pursuit of human enhancement, what standard should we adopt? How can we prevent this process from aligning with capitalism to reshape social structures that treat ordinary people as sacrificial victims? This paper navigates between the two foundational pillars of instinct views and the mimetic paradigm in the archetypal writing of desire. It explores two works that rewrite the mythological themes of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: the modern novella “The Beast in the Jungle” and the contemporary science fiction film The Beast. These three works reflect the dynamic relationship between instinct and mimesis in the formation of desire, oscillating between the binary framework of gender and the distinction between “human” and “beast” (non-human). In pre-modern theological societies, heterosexual desire was primarily presented as an inescapable, instinctual fate, with mimesis hovering as a potentiality in the background. In modern humanist societies, social constructions of heterosexual desire heavily rely on mimesis, though the instinct persists, albeit faintly. In posthuman, technologically integrated societies, mimesis serves as a paradigm for creating “transhumans” in the realm of life sciences, where purified emotional desires are manufactured, driving out instinct, yet failing to fully fulfill the promise of “human enhancement.”

In early Western political cartoons, China is often depicted as an evil and ugly dragon threatening Western civilization. Such a negative image is rewritten in contemporary graphic novels among which The Night Eaters deserves special attention. The Night Eaters is a graphic novel horror trilogy by the extraordinary collaboration of Eisner Award-winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda. It depicts the life of a Chinese American family in the United States. In the book, the stereotypical image of China as the demonic dragon is subverted cleverly. Instead of reconfirming the positive connotations of the dragon in Chinese culture, such as divinity, power, prosperity, and good fortune, which would have been another form of simplification of the image, Liu and Takeda complicate the dragon image and deconstruct the dichotomous conceptions of the dragon through its innovative narrative and art form. This article attempts to address the three key methods employed to this end. First, though the story is inserted with flashbacks about the mother’s past, her real identity is kept initially as a secret and only gradually revealed to be a demon eater in Book 1. Yet the reader does not know that she is not only a demon eater but also a dragon until the end of Book 2, which may evoke different emotional reactions from readers of Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds and change their previous cognitive frames in various ways. Second, this information gap and the consequent narrative surprise are accentuated by the visual depiction of the mother as a normal human being who is both terrifying and awkwardly adorable. The reader is only told but not shown what the mother is, which differs from the outright visual depiction of the dragon in early Western political cartoons. Third, the tension that exists between the Western and the Chinese images of the dragon is also embodied in the book’s visual style which is both poetic and horrifying, beautiful and disturbing. Via the detailed reading of the book’s content, narrative discourse, medium specificity, as well as cultural contexts, the article hopes to not only show the intricate relationship between nonhuman narratives and racial narratives, but also shed light on how the graphic novel in general contributes to the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective images of certain groups or communities.

In Chapter 17 of James Joyce's Ulysses, there is a multitude of list fragments. For a long time, these list fragments concerning things were dismissed as inexplicable digressions or unnecessary descriptions. However, with "Turn to Things" influencing the domain of narratology, the focus of literary narratological research has undergone a shift over the past decade. Things, once relegated to the silent background in traditional narratology, have now moved to the forefront, and the theoretical paradigm of Thing Narrative gradually took shape. When the ontological meaning of things is increasingly emphasized, the thing narrative revolution may offer us a new interpretive framework for understanding of the unique literary form of the list in Ulysses. In what sense does the use of lists in literature, as a representational medium, allow readers to transcend the cage of representation and confront things directly? This paper focuses on the intersection of list writing and Thing Narrative and analyzes several list passages in Joyce's Ulysses, examining how Joyce's list writing becomes a field for the self-manifestation of things and how it evokes reader’s mental experiences to perceive "thing-in-itself".

In the narrative of Chapter 17, the progression of Stephen and Bloom's actions is initially sustained and subtly advanced through the Q&A format. However, Joyce frequently interrupts this flow by inserting extensive lists of things into the text. These lengthy, exhaustive lists disrupt the ongoing human narrative, creating a stark visual contrast and imposing obstacles to the reading process. Readers are compelled to shift their attention away from the plot centered on the two protagonists, Bloom and Stephen, and instead focus on a world dominated by the overwhelming presence of things in the lists. Among these, the list of everyday things exposes the weird thingness through defamiliarizing the details of things; the list of natural things, with its chaos and disorder, escapes the constraints of Western rationalism; Bloom's associative list of celestial bodies and ancient fossils shows us "the Great Outdoors"; and the list of wedding gifts on the mantelpiece, which exchange gazes with Bloom, excavates the complex emotions he has long suppressed through a bidirectional interaction, subverting traditional subject-object relationships. In summary, as a high-density assemblage of things, these lists, through Joyce's experimental writing, offer readers a literary opportunity to glimpse the thingsness and demonstrate a heterogeneous power capable of destroying anthropocentric narratives and re-examining the essence of things.

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

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

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

“The Ghost Bride” is a translated work by Zhou Shoujuan, which was first published in the 18th issue of Saturday Magazine on 3 October 1914, with a note next to the title of the translation, “By James Hogg, England”, and was later included in the European and American Famous Writers' Short Stories Series. “The Ghost Bride” was originally written as James Hogg's short story “The Mysterious Bride”. Hogg's original was a gothic-inspired tale of vengeance by a mysterious, nonhuman bride, which ends with an assertion of intent: “The wicked people of the great muckle village have got a lesson on divine justice written to them in lines of blood.” While Zhou Shoujuan's translation of this nonhuman narrative text has made many changes, such as changing the narrative perspective, simplifying many gothic elements in the original (deleting the prophetic omens of others, the mysterious bride's appearances in reality and dreams, etc.), mistranslating the key information, and altering the main theme of the story ...... It makes the translation similar to the traditional Chinese novels of the mystery and the supernatural. This paper attempts to clarify the background of the translation of “The Ghost Bride”, comparing the original text of James Hogg's “The Mysterious Bride” with Zhou Shoujuan's translation of “The Ghost Bride”, and by comprehensively examining the biography of the writer written by the translator, other translations of the same period of time, and other related materials, in order to investigate Zhou's changes to the original style and genre, and to examine how Zhou Shoujuan's translation produced “The Ghost Bride”, a translation work which synthesises the Western Gothic style and the Chinese ghost and spirit genre. Combined with the cultural environment and the translator's own factors, this paper further discusses the acceptance and creative adaptation of western nonhuman narration by translators represented by Zhou Shoujuan in the early period of the Republic of China, and probes into the academic circle's understanding of the meaning of nonhuman narratives in this period.

This paper centers on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," Mark Twain's "Cannibalism in the Cars," and Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" to investigate how the taboo act of cannibalism is transformed into a literary representation of biopolitics through unnatural narrative strategies. By examining issues of narrator reliability, narrative temporal focus, and political representation within these texts, the study finds that the manipulation of narrator reliability and the refocusing of the timeframes associated with cannibalistic acts alter the traditional aesthetic implications of horror and suspense in cannibalism narratives, achieving effects of absurdity, humor, and satire. Through these unnatural narratives, the texts critique the Irish Parliament, the U.S. Congress, and Chinese feudal ethics. Consequently, cannibalism transitions from a terrifying unnatural event to a symbolic act imbued with significant political meaning, generating cross-cultural biopolitical aesthetic effects and ideological implications, thereby achieving an activist effect in literature.

In ZhiYin culture, the "echo" of the Guqin, a traditional Chinese musical instrument, plays an important role between soulmates in traditional Chinese culture. According to a legendary story dated around BC 350 described in Lushi History, two characters became close friends through a mutual appreciation for music. The characters were Boya, an accomplished Guqin musician and high-level court official and Ziqi, an ordinary woodsman, and their friendship demonstrates how ZhiYi culture could break through the class hierarchy. T

Among the many works that demonstrate the relationship between Guqin music and ZhiYin culture, the animation work "Feelings of Mountains and Waters" (ShanShuiQing), created in China in the late 1980s, is a unique artistic monument. In the cross-cultural context, this animated work in a Chinese ink painting style, which gained international acclaim, has visualized and highlighted its deep understanding of ZhiYin culture, and it presents the multi-dimension of the Guqin music heritage, as well as the powerful "echo" of cultural memory in China.

This visual masterpiece with a splendid soundscape provided by the Guqin was created by the "art confidantes", Te Wei and Ma Kexuan, as directors at Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Through the art form of animation, the partners also expressed their deep regret about the loss of young contemporary artistic talents amid the transformations of planned socialist economy into the new market economy via reforms in China since the beginnings of 1980s.

ShanShuiQing expresses Zhiyin culture as the interweaving and embodiment of the physical aesthetics of the act of playing instruments, and it further analyzes how the ancient ZhiYin legend reproduces this new “echo” in contemporary China.

I am a Cat is a novel written by celebrated Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki, who is also regarded as an author with an extensive background in British literature, particularly the British novel. Scholars such as Christopher C. Douglas have established how Sōseki draws from the British tradition of the “Novel of Circulation” or the “it-narrative” in writing I am a Cat. Building on such work, in this paper, I argue that Sōseki’s use of the anthropomorphized figure of the animal and the it-narrative structure creates a platform via which he is able to highlight the Anglo-Japanese confluences present in Japanese society in the early twentieth century. Additionally, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, I demonstrate how Sōseki’s employment of the narrative figure of the cat gives rise to what I call “the return gaze,” which destabilizes the Anglo-Western conception of the “Orient,” and challenges some of the colonial binaries that had become commonplace in colonial discourse. The feline gaze and narrative voice in Sōseki’s novel complicate and challenge the Anglo-colonial gaze popularized by, for instance, the East India Company (consider the diaries of Richard Cocks), which invariably presented Japan as an exoticized and inferior other as opposed to the Anglo-West that was presumed to be unquestionably superior, more civilized, scientific, coherent, objective, and intrinsically more valuable in the hierarchy of civilizations. The narrative voice of I am a Cat challenges the fetishized appeal for Japanoiseries (despite establishing Japan as an exotic and inferior other) during Sōseki’s time by providing a gritty critique of Japanese society that goes beyond the superficial appropriation of woodblock prints and garden styles, and helps to develop a more complex understanding of Anglo-Japanese exchanges during the author’s time.

The past decade has witnessed a “nonhuman turn” as a challenge to prevailing anthropocentric notions, with nonhuman narratives assuming a pivotal role. The narrative about artificial humans or, “new humans” in contemporary Chinese science fiction, stands as an important category of nonhuman narrative, probing the dilemmas encountered at the intersection of technology and ethics. As a representative work of “new human” narrative, Wang Jinkang’s The Artificial Human depicts various types of “new human” narrators in both physical and digital forms, through whose observations, actions, and ethical choices readers are invited to reexamine the limitations of human existence, reflect upon the unthought-of of humanity, and explore the in-depth meaning of being human. By drawing inspiration from Chinese wisdom that transcends the either-or logic, the ethical choice made by “new humans” in the novel anticipates a harmonious coexistence of humans and artificial humans, which also provides valuable insights for reflecting on the challenges brought about by technological advancements in today’s world.

Hopkins's poetry after 1880 has been criticized for abandoning his original celebration of the diversity of nature in favor of a monolithic religious discourse and negative apocalyptic writings. These criticisms, however, ignore the scientific elements and realistic implications behind this shift. Hopkins followed the Victorian trend of meteorological observation, recording weather conditions in journals through visual perception and physical sensation. His later poems took this approach and combined it with the religious discourse of incarnation known as "sacramentalism," depicting the energy systems that include the intra-action between climate and body. The often criticized apocalyptic discourse in his late poems reveals and dramatizes the slow violence of the consequences of climate change in industrial society. These consequences, as Hopkins noted in his journals, are more often borne by poor workers, which is also reflected in his late poems, revealing the demands of environmental justice. Thus, rather than lapsing into negative apocalyptic discourse with a monolithic tone, Hopkins's late poems boldly confront climate issues in a critical realistic way, combining scientific method with aesthetic and religious imagination. His critical apocalyptic discourse also speaks to the current "soft denialism" of anthropogenic climate change, providing an embedded and embodied imagination for demonstrating climate change in the Anthropocene.

This chapter attempts to revisit Lawrence’s plant writings. Drawing on ideas and theories from vegetal ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies and environmental humanities, this article proposes a vegetal poetics of Lawrence by addressing the following questions: first, how can Lawrence’s vegetal poetics be distinguished from traditional Western ideas on plants? Secondly, what are the ecological messages Lawrence intends to convey in his vegetal poetics? Thirdly, to what extent is Lawrence’s vegetal poetics relevant to current ecological crises, particularly floral extinction? Ideas such as the agency of plants, the interconnected relationships between humans and plants, and Lawrence’s criticism of industrialisation examined under the lens of the Anthropocene can help us better comprehend the rich meanings of Lawrence’s plants in his poetic works, both aesthetically and ecologically.

Kierkegaard's critiques of Romanticism in both his early and later periods involve the image of plant. In his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard criticizes " plant life" as the highest pursuit in Lucinde, arguing that it leads to a static and negative state of "aesthetic numbness." However, the botanical image cited in Lucinde actually points to the organic unity of spiritual life behind the fragmented pieces. Referring to Schlegel’s texts, this study further analyzes the relationship between individuality—which Schlegel considers impossible to classify using Linnaean taxonomy—and aggregation. This desire for unity among individuals constitutes what Schlegel describes as the religion of love.

In his later work, What We Learn from the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air, Kierkegaard continues to differentiate between the two ideals and their reconciliation with reality, criticizing poets for their sentimental alleviation of the pain caused by the division between the eternal and the finite world, which he sees as false and insincere. He urges poets to learn from the lily, which represents nature, embracing seriousness, silence, obedience, and joy.

Examining Friedrich Schlegel's use of images related to the plant life cycle in On the Study of Greek Poetry and the fragments of the proposed continuation of Lucinde, it becomes clear that Schlegel, while valuing nature represented by plants as a critique of the division and utilitarianism brought about by intellect, actually acknowledges the potential for infinite human freedom and establishes a subtle connection between human freedom and nature.

Marshalling critical animal studies as its primary theoretical framework, this paper examines and compares the representation of animals and human-nonhuman relationships in Julio Cortázar’s and Guadalupe Nettel’s short stories. Placing “Axolotl” and “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” in Cortázar’s Blow-up and Other Stories (1967) and Nettel’s “The Marriage of the Red Fish” and “War in the Trash Cans” from Natural Histories (2014) in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s, Donna Haraway’s, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s relevant theories, I look into each story by first examining the animal figures in relation to their encounters with the human, highlighting the sites of eyes and mouth. Then, I explore how the complexity of interspecies interactions is presented via parallel narratives and portrayal of traumatic experiences. I suggest that, through identification and dis-identification between humans and animals, both authors go beyond conventional bestiary writing and challenge the inherent boundaries between species.

Philosopher Bernard Stiegler invoked the concept of the noetic necromass, a concept akin to biological necromass—cell detritus, dead biomass, and organic matter—but reinterpreted it within the histories of intelligence and tekhnē. For Stiegler, this represents a deadening of the cultural and intellectual processes central to individual and collective thought. Literature or at least access to literature is not except from this. In Technics and Time 3, Stiegler describes traditional institutions such as libraries, news agencies, and universities as retentional dispositifs, systems that shaped collective memory (retentions) and future anticipation (protentions). These institutions formed the noetic humus, the history of collective intelligence as such. However, Stiegler warns that digital platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Alibaba have usurped these roles. These platforms, driven by "functional sovereignty," prioritise algorithmic efficiency over hermeneutic interpretation, exploiting Big Data to influence behavior in ways that extend beyond consumerism into governance and academia. This dominance of algorithmic systems has precipitated a fundamental ‘disruption’, undermining the reflective capacities necessary for individuation—the process of becoming oneself—and noesis, the generative development of thought.

Stiegler’s later work draws on thinkers like Vladimir Vernadsky, Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred J. Lotka to engage with the concept of the noosphere, a "mindsphere" encompassing life’s terrestrial evolution and its transformation of the biosphere. The noosphere represents humanity's collective intelligence and its potential to resist entropy, a process Stiegler reframes as the neganthropocene—a counterforce to the Anthropocene’s destructive tendencies. He connects this to an "ecology of the spirit," inspired by Paul Valéry, as a positive framework for addressing the existential and psychical crises of the Anthropocene.

Stiegler critiques how platform capitalism and algorithmic governance erode creativity and difference, fostering homogeneity in thought. The global mnemotechnical system, akin to a toxic World Brain, exemplifies this crisis by standardizing knowledge through algorithms while eroding the pedagogical and curative care traditionally offered by the humanities. For Stiegler, without such curation, the result is collective amnesia—a forgetting of the noetic necromass and a crisis of memory (mnemosyne).

The humanities have historically safeguarded the production of knowledge (savoirs). Yet Stiegler emphasizes the urgent need for universities to reclaim their mission of fostering deep attention through digital technologies, transforming the mnemotechnical system from a source of toxicity into a medium for curative and negentropic possibilities. He warns that, left unchecked, the reliance on algorithmic decision-making risks not only a loss of knowledge but the diminishment of the improbable and the "unhoped-for," echoing Heraclitus's fragment of the anelpiston.

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which dystopian speculative novels register how labor, technology and surveillance shape, and are shaped by, the structures of exploitation and value extraction in capitalist modernity. Drawing on Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor and Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, this article reads Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Phillips’ Hum as a critique of the ways in which human and non-human female protagonists like Klara and May perform undervalued, yet crucial, work within capitalist economies. In this sense, the dehumanization of May parallels the objectification of Klara: both are exploited for their ability to perform immaterial labor. The shifting of women’s role, particularly as mother figures, in a world that becomes increasingly dominated by technology, I argue, is recurrent in contemporary dystopian speculative fictions. The novels offer a critique of the replacement of human labor with AI, particularly in roles that involve emotional intelligence and caregiving. Ishiguro and Phillips invite their readers to reimagine worlds where technology plays a crucial role in shaping human lives in contemporary capitalist modernity.

Artificial intelligence is redefining all aspects of knowledge dissemination. Human interaction is reduced to formulating prompts for AI inquiries. In the current era, human presence is idealized, or perhaps "idolized," while simultaneously technologizing all possible human interventions. The Fourth Industrial Revolution heralds the integration of scientific algorithms into the processing of text as data. Text mining and data mining are now used interchangeably, further emphasizing the essentialization of text as a database. However, machine reading undermines the original act of human reading. Georges Poulet's ‘Phenomenology of Reading’ highlights the subjective-objective duality inherent in this act. Close reading inherits this crucial aspect of textual engagement, one that cannot be replicated by digital interfaces.

This paper explores the contextualization of texts within the fluid space of reality. Textual reading leverages the reader's capacity to observe, evaluate, and interpret. Thus, text becomes a unique space accessible only through the reader's active participation. Close reading emerges as the ideal form of reading at this juncture, as it suspends all realities external to the text itself. The paper further examines how modernity, with its emphasis on technology, defines text as simply another entity, akin to a machine. While concerns may arise regarding the modernization of text, the inherent uniqueness of text is thereby universally reinforced. Finally, the study investigates modern interventions in close reading through major intellectual movements, including Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. It reasserts the necessity of close reading for textualizing reality in our technology-driven world.

À partir d’une lecture critique, commentée et comparée des romans, pratiquement contemporains l’un de l’autre, Les Liens artificiels du philosophe et écrivain Nathan Devers et Les tout-puissants du musicien, compositeur, chanteur et producteur français Mirwais Ahmadzai Les Tout-puissants, il s’agira, dans cette proposition de communication, de dégager, tout en faisant converger, la fiction et la réflexion que deux romans véhiculent sur la technologie, ses ambivalences et ses dangers. Si, pour Nathan Devers, la fiction interroge la manière dont les technologies, et en particulier les mondes virtuels comme le Metavers, redéfinissent nos interactions et nos liens sociaux en les rendant définitivement « artificiels », chez Mirwais Ahmadzai, artiste français d’origine afghane, produit une violente critique de la société mercantile qu’il décrit asphyxié par le soupçon généralisé et l’omniprésence technologique. Dans les deux cas, nous avons affaire à des fictions (utopiques et / ou dystopiques) dont les auteurs ne sont pas, au départ, « écrivains », mais respectivement philosophe et musicien, ce qui pointe un souci transdisciplinaire et intermédial. Par ailleurs, les deux auteurs se sont signalés par un discours paratextuel réflexif sur la technologie, et plus spécifiquement sur l’intelligence artificielle et ses apories.

Nous entendons mettre en perspective et comparer ces approches, tant fictionnelles que réflexives, en en dégageant des convergences de vues et des interrogations sur l’ambivalence de nos rapports personnels et collectifs à la technologie dans ses différentes manifestations et conséquences.

Il apparaîtra que toute une mouvance de la fiction française contemporaine, et certains de ses auteurs, ont non seulement pris conscience des enjeux de l’impact d’une généralisation de l’emprise technologique sur l’existence et le social, mais y ont également et parallèlement réfléchi au point de s’interroger sur les conséquences de l’intelligence artificielle sur le processus créatif d’écriture littéraire.

This paper tries to show the cross cultural reception between Bengali Baul Geet and the Blues Music. The Blues became a way for these people to express their emotions. It was not until the emergence of Blues Rock that we see much heavy instruments. In Blues Rock the residual seems to be the generic markers like the melancholy while because of the dominance of the upcoming new instruments, the emergent was the Blues songs while with hard metal musics. While the Bauls were primarily influenced by two things which are Bhakti and Sufism. The Bhati was seen to be emerging during the time of Chaitanya while Sufi came in contact with this as Islam started to spread. During the 13th century we see the presence of Baktiyar Khalji conquering the western and northern part of bengal. One of the most important features of Blues music is that they don’t necessarily tell stories but rather express emotions (mainly of sadness because of oppression or love). The lyrics of one of the earliest recorded blues showed different struggles of life. While on the other hand Baul also showed a very same nature of living in which they brought up topics like caste and class which kept people oppressed and away as the “other”. The idea of hope and its loss through love or any other act is quite common in Baul as well. I will try to read through the music in both these style of two different culture and language systems as well. I will show a cultural traction in these two. The transaction happens in the contemporary modern singers who are seen to have been influenced by the Baul and the blues.

This session explores literature's engagement with historical trauma, memory, and authoritarianism across diverse cultural and historical contexts. Through comparative analysis of works from South Korea, Japan, Ireland, and the United States, we examine representations of colonial aftermath, political oppression, and intergenerational healing. Featuring four presentations, this session highlights the ways in which literary narratives bear witness to trauma, challenge historical erasure, and serve as sites of resistance and remembrance.

Oh aims to compare James Joyce's *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* and Yang Yong-hi's *A Tale of Korea University* to examine the aftermaths of (post)colonialism by analyzing the anguish of artists living under British and Japanese imperialism respectively. As both James Joyce, an Irish novelist, and Yang Yong-hi, a Zainichi filmmaker and novelist, deal with the dilemma of colonized artists, this study examines the similarities and differences between the two Bildungsromans in terms of history, language, and identity. This presentation argues that both Joyce and Yang yearn for harmonious relationships between the colonized and the colonizers while portraying the aftermaths of colonialism.

Park and Han examines generational trauma and healing in *Comfort Woman* by Nora Okja Keller and *We Do Not Part* by Han Kang. Both texts portray mothers and daughters bearing trauma as marginalized Asian women. Nature motifs, such as rivers and snow, symbolize pain for the mothers but serve as a path to healing for the daughters. Keller highlights intergenerational healing among women, while Han explores healing through horizontal relationships. Ultimately, this presentation shows that confronting pain rather than suppressing it offers hope for healing.

BAE examines how George Orwell’s *Nineteen Eighty-Four* and Han Kang’s *Human Acts* portray dehumanization and the impossibility of grievability through Judith Butler’s theory of ‘grievable life.’ Despite differences in genre and historical context, both novels depict authoritarian regimes that render human life precarious. *Nineteen Eighty-Four* illustrates how the Party erases dissenters, controlling life and death through surveillance and repression. Similarly, *Human Acts* portrays government-sponsored violence during the Gwangju Uprising, where grieving for the dead is systematically silenced. By applying Butler’s framework, this study explores how oppressive regimes deny individuals the right to mourn, further devaluing human life.

Son examines examines the relationship between socio-political conditions and immigration patterns through a comparative analysis of Nancy Jooyoun Kim's *The Last Story of Mina Lee* and Jeanine Cummins's *American Dirt*. This presentation explores how the suppression of painful memories from Korean history creates a generational divide between parents and their children. Furthermore, it critically explores whether literary themes—such as the Korean War, war orphans, drug cartels, and illegal immigration—have been reconstructed into simplified narratives to suit white tastes in mainstream American publishing.

This panel, featuring four scholars, examines how body, representation, and narrative transcend the boundaries between East and West, shedding light on the intricate cultural, historical, and geographical interplay within the contemporary globalized world.

In “The Vietnamese-American Body in Motion: Diasporic Identity and Embodiment in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Kai-su Wu, using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, analyzes the narrator’s body as a metaphor for diasporic dislocation and identity navigation. Wu examines how the narrator adopts embodied communication to connect his lived experience in the U.S. with the enduring, haunting memories of his family’s past in Vietnam.

Liying Wang, in her presentation titled “When Mulan Crosses the Pacific Ocean: The Chances and Challenges,” discusses several Mulan-themed adaptations in the post-Disney era (since 1998), investigating how American cultural imperialism both blessed and cursed the story of this Chinese heroine. While globalization transformed Mulan’s legend from Chinese national literature into world literature, it also posed a challenge for China to reclaim her by initiating a series of ideological, generic, transmedial, and narratological modifications.

Lijun Wang’s paper, “Shangri-La in American Apocalypse: Toward a Contemporary Tibetan Orientalism,” aims to renew and complicate our understanding of how Tibet is reimagined in contemporary American apocalyptic fantasies. By focusing on disaster films and science fiction such as 2012 (2009), The Creator (2023), and Zero K (2016), Wang argues that while the Western convention of romanticizing Tibet continues to permeate, the patterns observed by Donald Lopez Jr. have notably evolved. Although Tibet remains idealized as a utopia, the West is now portrayed as a dystopia, with Westerners depicted as destroyers of the world while Tibetans emerge as saviors.

In “The Western Tentacles and the Chinese Great Serpent: Cthulhu Literature in China,” Jingyun Xiao traces how Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos was introduced into China and gave birth to a genre that might be called “Chinese Cthulhu literature” over the last few decades. By comparing four Chinese Cthulhu tales with Lovecraft’s original works, Xiao argues that Cthulhu, the evil god originating from Western modernism, has intertwined with Chinese mythology, history and culture, contributing to transnational circulations within the globalized mediascape of Cthulhu.

Together, these four panelists engage with border-crossings of the body, representation, and narrative between the East and the West, offering rich insights into the globalized nature of comparative literature and culture.

The large-scale release of Chinese women’s book series in the 1990s, is often regarded as a sign of the prosperity of local women’s literature. Yet from most critics’ perspective, gender, as a cultural capital, was possibly named, interpreted and manipulated by the cultural market, undermining the radicality of its representations and hindering the generation of gender politics. Firstly, this paper sorts out the representative women’s book series published during this period. By focusing on the related cultural producers(female authors and editors) and their texts, this paper then outlines their differentiated ways of articulating western feminism and local femininity, as well as their ambivalent attitudes towards cultural consumption.

Thereafter, the “Red Poppy” series, one of the largest book series of female authors edited by male, serves as the main case. The “red poppy” imagery which denotes threat, seduction and revolution in western culture and Chinese experiences of modernity, seemingly empowers female discourse, but might once again stereotype women as the mystic and heterogeneous other. The second volume of this series initiates the “yingji” form, which extensively displays female authors’ own photographs. Through the innovative text-image interplay(laying out and describing these photos), the female authors tentatively construct their self-image, identity and private history. During this process, women are not always in the passive position of “being edited/watched”; their everyday interpretations unveil and even rebel against the disciplines of body imposed by national ideologies in the Chinese visual and textual tradition. The practice, to some extent, adjusts the deviating representations about femininity and its cultural potentials primarily manifested by “red poppy”. And its trans-media trait, has henceforth become common in Chinese female authors’ strive for their discourse resources.

This paper examines the auto-orientalizing discourse articulated by the eroticized Chinese female body in Shan Sa’s novel Les Conspirateurs and Angelin Preljocaj’s choreographic work The Fresco, both of which depict inter-racial love stories that navigate between East and West, Self and Other. Les Conspirateurs unfolds as a psychological and political thriller where an American spy and a Chinese spy engage in a complex game of disguise, deception, and seduction. Their encounter blurs the boundaries between lies and realities, and layers of identity intersect and dissolve. In The Fresco, inspired by a traditional Chinese legend, Preljocaj reimagines the motif of the "journey to the Orient." The story follows two British travelers who become mesmerized by a woman depicted on a fresco and are drawn into an illusory, fantastical realm where imagination and desire intertwine.

Both works traverse the cultural and emotional complexities of cross-cultural encounters, depicting the Chinese female body as a contested site for external gaze, desire, and agency. Despite reflecting contradictions generated by orientalist discourse, these bodies also become spaces for negotiation and transformation.

Addressing a key research gap, this study explores how the legacy of orientalist representations continues to shape modern intercultural narratives across literature and dance. While much scholarship focuses on 19th and 20th-century dichotomies of orientalism, there is limited attention to how these dynamics endure and evolve in contemporary contexts. By employing postcolonial theories, including Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and Édouard Glissant’s chaos-monde, the paper argues that these works represent a shift from rigid dichotomies to fluid hybridization. The Chinese female body emerges not only as a symbol of contradiction but as a locus of creative potential, articulating a vision of cultural intermixing where identities blend, disrupt, and reimagine themselves in a globalized artistic landscape.

In 1928, Japanese art historians began the reconstruction of the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum, which had been damaged in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. A restoration committee was established with the aim of building the “greatest Oriental museum.” Conventionally at the museum, the notion of the “Orient” encompassed China, Korea, and India. However, during the reconstruction, the committee decided to broaden this scope to include regions extending as far as Persia.

This paper examines the Keimeikai 10th Anniversary Exhibition of Oriental Art, held in September 1928, and argues that the representation of “Persian art” in this exhibition is pivotal in understanding the redefinition of the “Orient” within Japan’s art scene. By analyzing the categorization of “Persian art” and the lectures delivered by art historians, this paper explores how this event contributed to shifting Japan’s art historical discourses and expanding the boundaries of the “Orient” in the early 20th century.

Ruth St. Denis is recognized as a pioneer of modern dance in the early twentieth century. Raised in New Jersey, she had only indirect exposure to India and Japan, and her work has attracted criticism for its supposed Orientalism. Nevertheless, it can be argued that by incorporating an "Oriental" setting into her work, St. Denis created a dance-centric stage that transcended traditional narratives and musical constraints. A recurring theme emerges from her works, such as "Radha" (1906), which is centered around the Indian deity Krishna’s lover and "Omika" (1913), which focuses on a Japanese courtesan, where a woman initially perceived as profane ultimately transforms into a divine figure. During her press tours in Asia (1925-1926), Japanese audiences found the depictions of their own culture somewhat puzzling while still being captivated by dances that related to Eastern themes from outside Japan. It would suggest that St. Denis’s interpretation of the "Orient" likely aligns with theosophical meditation, which has fostered an interest in the concept of cosmic rhythm within her choreography.

The founder of macrobiotics, George Ohsawa (1893–1966), is also known as Sakurazawa Nyoiti. Rather than being recognised as a nutritionist, he is acknowledged as an important figure in the introduction of Far Eastern and Japanese cultures. His publication Principe unique de la Philosophie et de la Science d'Extrême-Orient in 1931 elucidated the distinctive origins of Asian thought in a readily comprehensible manner, attracting a considerable following of devoted French-speaking readers. Subsequent to the favourable reception of this publication, he proceeded to release le Livre des fleurs, which elucidates Japanese aesthetics through flowers. Far Eastern and Japanese cultures have hitherto been exclusively understood from a Western point of view in Europe. Sakurazawa employed French as a means of entering into and engaging with French discourse and endeavoured to transform the discourse of Japonisme, which expanded throughout France in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The concepts of modern Japanese art, such as ‘Japanese painting’, were introduced via contact with the ‘Occident’ in the early Meiji period. In the Taisho period (1912-1926), when such trends had somewhat settled down, discourses on Japanese art focusing on the ‘Orient’ began to flourish. The magazine Shirakaba (1910-1923), which was at the forefront of introducing 'Occidental' art into Japan, was interested in the art of the ‘Orient’ and later developed the ‘folk art movement’ using Asia as its starting point. Also, Toa Geijutsu (1914) was launched as the only magazine which specialize in ‘Oriental’ art, with the consciousness of ‘Occident’. By examining discourses on ‘Oriental’ art in these magazines, this study aims to examine how Japanese art around 1920 perceived and utilized the ‘Orient(s)’ and to understand how the concepts of the ‘Orient(s)’ were developed in Japan and Asia, in relation to the ‘Occident’, regarding the political, social and cultural context of the time.

Based on a recent peer-reviewed monograph titled Miedo y caos: Teoría y transformación de los géneros literarios (2024) [Fear and chaos: Theory and transformation of literary genres], this paper introduces a multidisciplinary theoretical framework for analyzing novelistic literary genres grounded in classical traditions and contemporary scientific models, particularly chaos theory and string theory. It mentions the rigidity of prior genre classifications, such as those by Todorov (1970) and structuralists, emphasizing the fluidity and evolution of genres across time and cultural contexts. The text advocates a broader inclusion of non-Western literary traditions.

The proposed "Universal chaotic model" leverages the concept of chaotic attractors to represent genres, treating them as dynamic systems rather than static categories. This model aligns genres with astrophysical and mathematical phenomena, likening their interactions to representations of galaxies and solar systems. It suggests that no genre disappears but instead transforms, evolving through cultural and temporal shifts.

The framework integrates classical philology, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and sociology, underscoring the centrality of chaotic attractors such as Fear as a defined structural literary element. The model aspires to offer a versatile and innovative tool for a global non-synchronic classification and understanding of literary genres.

Un nouvel outil numérique de visualisation est proposé pour l’analyse des textes littéraires dans une perspective comparative, à partir d’une approche novatrice. Il offre une lecture à distance particulière dans la mesure où il ne s’applique ni à une grande masse de données ni à un large corpus de textes à la fois, mais à un seul texte, dont il ne retient que la dimension visuelle, indépendamment de sa mise en page. Cette forme visuelle du texte est façonnée par les paragraphes et les chapitres, qui rythment le texte en fonction de leur longueur respective.

Un logiciel, Narra 2.0, a été développé afin de mesurer ces longueurs textuelles successives et générer un tableau de mesures, donc une suite numérique à partir de laquelle sont produites des données statistiques et, grâce à des algorithmes, des visualisations. Ces dernières montrent ainsi le rythme du texte en fonction de la longueur de ses paragraphes ou de ses chapitres, soit la fréquence des changements – et de locuteurs et de thèmes – dans le texte, une dynamique propre à l’écrit.

Cette méthodologie offre la possibilité de comparer les textes dans le temps (au fil des éditions), dans l’espace (de diverses régions géographiques) et pour un même auteur ou courant littéraire. Elle permet également d’appliquer la méthode éprouvée des atlas – stellaires du XIXe et XXe siècles –, aux recherches comparatives. À titre d’exemple, Un Atlas des spectres de textes littéraires, a confirmé l’existence d’une corrélation entre la longueur des paragraphes et le genre littéraire ou la période d’écriture.

At the turn of the 20th century, thousands of Central Europeans had left their “native realm” and travelled to South Africa – mostly, to escape oppression and discrimination imposed upon them by Central and Eastern European imperial and colonial powers. However, the move from one colonial context to another (i.e. South Africa) did not mean that the colonial ties and relationships that for centuries formed the basis of social, economic, political, and ethnic inequalities in the subjects’ Central European homelands either completely disappeared, or were replaced by a newly discovered sense of solidarity and kinship, or were replaced by new mechanisms of imperial politics (e.g. apartheid). On the contrary, it could be argued that the old forms of colonial entanglement and violence survived and continued to haunt the very subjects in their new environment. The aim of the present paper is thus to address the very transnationalism and longevity of one’s implication in the history of Central European violence, as well as various modes of oppression generated by colonial practices that originated in Central and Eastern Europe. Special attention will be paid to the works of two Central European migrant writers: Dan Jacobson (second-generation South African Jew) and Włodzimierz Ledóchowski (first-generation South African Pole) – especially to the way their writings reveal the on-going implication of (once)Central European / (now)South African subjects in Central European traumatic “bloodlands”, as well as the very migration of traumatic colonial history and memory from the European core to South Africa. Also, the paper will show how their works unearth a potential history of Central European violence (particularly, Polish anti-Semitism) in South African literature.

Facing the global ecological and environmental crisis, literature has made the most direct and critical response creatively. Looking at the literary histories of China and the United States, both William Faulkner and Jia Pingwa have been dedicated to writing about nature and humanistic ecology, exploring the social roots of ecological crises, and seeking solutions to ecological problems for over half a century. Their writings reflect the insights and reflections of the East and the West on ecological civilization, providing typical research texts for systematically studying ecological views in different cultures. Under the guidance of ecological criticism theories from both China and the West, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the two writers’ works in terms of ecological literature themes, ecological images, and ecological thoughts, outlining the similarities and differences in their ecological literary expressions. Furthermore, under the model of mutual interpretation of ecological thoughts between China and the West, and in the context of social history, it differentiates and interprets the “similarities within differences” and “differences within similarities” in their ecological writings, building a bridge for the exchange and communication of ecological thoughts between China and the West, and exploring new paths for mutual recognition and learning of ecological thoughts between the two cultures.