This paper examines how F. Scott Fitzgerald adapted Charlie Chaplin’s innovative film techniques in his short story “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles” (1940), demonstrating the profound influence of early film technology on modernist literary practices. Through a close comparative analysis of Chaplin’s Pay Day (1922) and Fitzgerald’s text, this study reveals how film techniques were transformed into literary devices, particularly focusing on doubling and substitution techniques.

The research demonstrates that Fitzgerald deliberately referenced Chaplin’s work, specifically citing a streetcar scene from Pay Day within his story. This explicit connection provides a unique opportunity to examine how film technology offered new narrative possibilities for literature. The study analyzes how Chaplin’s film techniques—including the strategic use of props, choreographed movements, and character substitutions—were ingeniously translated into literary devices by Fitzgerald through carefully constructed parallel scenes, symbolic props, and character doublings.

By tracing how Fitzgerald adapted these film techniques into written form, this paper illuminates the complex intermedial relationship between early film technology and modernist literature. The analysis reveals that Fitzgerald not only borrowed surface-level plot devices but also developed sophisticated literary equivalents for film’s visual language.

This paper examines how Tian Han (China) and Mohan Rakesh (India) reimagined classical playwrights—Guan Hanqing and Kalidasa—to navigate the ideological minefields of 1950s cultural politics. Through textual analysis and historical research, the paper reveals three interlocking dimensions of intellectual negotiation: (1) the protagonists’ artistic struggles within the dramatic texts, representing the conflict between literature/artistic creation and politics; (2)the playwrights’ own dilemmas emerge through production histories, reflecting the existential crises of intellectuals in newly independent nation-states; and (3) the global contexts the writers grappled with, i.e. the ideological tensions between "freedom" and "peace"—key discursive battlegrounds in the US-USSR Cold War cultural rivalry—which profoundly shaped competing visions of literary autonomy and political commitment in their creative praxis. The paper concludes that these plays exemplify a “Southern metadrama” paradigm, which reconfigures classical heritage not as static tradition but as dynamic, contested terrain for postcolonial identity formation. This comparative framework challenges Eurocentric models of intertextuality and offers new methodologies for global South literary studies.

Decision to Leave by Park Chan-wook is a densely literary film, in the sense that it contains multiple layers of rich poetic language. For this Korean film to be accessible to English-speaking audiences, subtitles are essential. However, since the film’s subtitles prioritize the conveyance of meaning, a certain loss of the film’s poetic dimension is inevitable. Based on Walter Benjamin’s translation theory, this article analyses the language and images intertwined within the film by exploring literal translations of Korean into English. Specifically, ‘heart’, a key word that permeates the film, is divided into three modes – doubt, connection, and cut – which relate to three dimensions or states respectively – aerial, liquid, and solid – inextricably linked to the various senses of sight, hearing, smell and touch. Based on these, and after analysing the intermingling of boundaries within the film, its use of poetic language renders its content and images opaque, prompting the audience to actively read its images and languages.

“What, don’t you know that a Pole is ready both for dancing and for the rosary?” (pol. być do tańca i do różańca, said of someone who is both serious and easy-going, depending on the situation) asks one of Gombrowicz’s characters in his famous avant-garde novel exposing the Polish complexes, Trans-Atlantyk (1953). Until his death in 1969, the writer, known for his harsh assessment of the Polish nation, his inclination toward abstract humour and his creativity for neologisms, did not live to see his novels published in the Polish People’s Republic. Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of Kultura Paryska ran by Jerzy Giedroyć, an émigré paper publishing censored Polish authors, Gombrowicz rose to fame in Western Europe, with his plays staged all over the French capital, accompanied by speculations about his nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

How did an author who based his literary enterprise on criticising Polish ‘martyrologic’ national spirit and mocking the pompous tradition of Polish Romanticism gain such widespread popularity among the French audience? Despite apparent untranslatability of Gombrowicz’s works, given the author’s play with the Polish language, as well as frequent references to Polish heritage and historical context, his most important novels and dramas have been translated into French, and some adapted as theatrical plays, effectively making him a European writer at a time when almost no writers from the ‘Other Europe’ had similar aspirations.

The paper examines Gombrowicz’s success in the Parisian theatre as a case study for debating postnational narration and the cultural mobility of nation-specific literature. It focuses particularly on the role of theatrical adaptations in enabling a global reading of an oeuvre deeply embedded in national heritage. Special attention is given to universalisation of national humour and the challenges of translating it and detaching it from its country of origin. The paper explores how theatrical directors navigate the risk of ‘flattening’ the complexity of nation-specific literature, ensuring that foreign audiences are encouraged to look beyond the play’s universal themes. Ultimately, it is argued that, despite globalisation’s efforts to make nation-specific literature more accessible worldwide, a postnational reading does not diminish meaning but rather multiplies its interpretations.