Abstract：

Marshall McLuhan said that media are the extensions of human senses. In the era of electronic media, media technology not only extends human senses and magnifies sensory perception, but also shapes the natural environment into a sensualized aesthetic environment. The extension of the senses and the sensualization of the environment become the prerequisites for the aesthetic turn in the field of literature.

Sensory aesthetics in the stage of electronic media is different from the linear narrative in the stage of print media, which focuses on the growth of characters and the processes of event and thus has a mode of meaning generation that emphasizes the goal of an ending as well as a central idea. Language centers around reason, and the aesthetics of literature functions towards society, forming the integration mode of truth, goodness, and beauty; what is good and true is beautiful, and the aesthetics must go through the transformation mechanism of social significance.

However, the sensory aesthetics developed in the stage of electronic media is direct, intuition-based aesthetics, highlighting the intuitive image while diluting ideological significance. The sensualization of electronic media arouses the aesthetics of intuitive image in the following three dimensions:

Firstly, it directly shapes the spatial dimension of sensory perception, which departs from the linear overall diachronic continuity narrative, manifesting itself as a non-centralized, non-logical or non-rational language, forming a discontinuous spatial narrative.

Secondly, technology and electronic media directly fuse out the urban landscape environment, which directly become aesthetic objects in literature, as well as the medium that triggers the presentation of people and objects in memory, which, as a result, becomes a concomitant form of sensory images aroused by the electronic media.

Thirdly, electronic media bring in the world of objects and the world of the ordinary life, and creates a perspective of “seeing”. Marshall McLuhan pointed out, satellites provide a perspective of “seeing” from outside the Earth, the world is transformed into a stage, and “seeing” is prominently portrayed. Furthermore, electronic media magnify visual sense and make “seeing” a way of giving form to space, to objects and to daily life. Under the lens of technology, under the basic sensory perception in the sight of “seeing”, objects and daily life, which used to be excluded from literature, has now become the content of literature.

Electronic media technology has not only shaped the threshold and new forms of literature, but also fundamentally shifted the paradigm of literature from being close to philosophy and history in the past linguistic era to being close to art and aesthetics.

In the twentieth century, the rise of the Mandarin movement and the evolution of modern Chinese literature unfolded within the dual context of the interplay between Eastern and Western cultures and the broader transformation of China's modernization. Based on an analysis of various newspaper and magazine texts documenting gramophones and gramophone records during the Republican period (1911–1927), this article seeks to reconstruct the field and boundaries of the integration between media technology and linguistic transformation within the context of the Mandarin movement, drawing on the methodological framework of media archaeology. It explores how the gramophone sparked curiosity and imagination, generated sensory experiences of modernity, and was eventually co-opted by official powers for its capacity to reproduce “real” sounds. This transition saw the gramophone move from private spaces to public domains, where it became intertwined with the dissemination of the national language and the promotion of new literature. The article examines how media technology, through its interaction with statism and nationalism, facilitated the adaptation of modern knowledge production and established a new type of discourse network. At the same time, it exposes the challenges posed by the homogenization of knowledge production, the erosion of subjectivity, and the intricate cultural and political implications embedded within this evolving discourse network.

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

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

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

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