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.