Kantatare Projapati stands at the cross roads of biofiction and left social historical fiction which has a long tradition in Bengal. It is set in the period of the final bid for freedom from British colonial rule, the partition, and the massive peasant movement in Bengal known as the tebhaga movement. While novels by Sabitri Roy (Paka Dhaner Gaan /Harvest Song) and Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas (Khwabnamah) cover broadly the same terrain, Kantatare Projapati is distinctive because the central figure, Ila Mitra, was a historical figure, a leader of the tebhaga movement in Nachol in East Bengal, subsequently a leader of the Communist Party of India, multiple times Member of the Legislative Assembly in West Bengal. This has given rise to an almost inevitable misconception. As Michael Lackey points out, biographical novelists do not see the paper person and the real person as one and the same. But readers have sometimes assumed differently. Jaya Bhattacharya reviewing a work on gendered dimensions of the partition of Bengal (Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003) unselfconsciously refers to Kantatare Projapati as "evidence" of the nature of violence on women. This paper will argue that the political and historical context (both sides of Bengal had a strong left) put some pressure on authors writing about those historical persons and periods to conform to the ‘historical truth’, yet given the contested nature of that truth one need not take a completely agnostic stance, nor accept Lukacs’ strictures about the weaknesses of biographical novels. It is possible, instead, to read the novel, at one level in conjunction with those by Roy or Ilyas mentioned earlier, and at another level as the image of Ila Mitra that developed among the poor peasants of Nachol as well as the left leaning intelligentsia, rather than as an archival image of Ila Mitra.

Colm Tóibín’s The Master is a richly textured biofiction that interrogates the complexities of Henry James’s inner life, offering a nuanced portrayal of identity as a dialectical process shaped by experience, reflection, and artistic creation. This paper situates Tóibín’s novel within John Dewey’s pragmatist framework, particularly his concepts of experience, identity, and the reconstruction of self, to argue that James’s life and work exemplify Dewey’s assertion that the self is not a static entity but a dynamic, ever-evolving construct. Dewey’s Art as Experience posits that identity emerges through the interplay of lived experience and reflective engagement, a process mirrored in Tóibín’s depiction of James’s struggles with intimacy, creativity, and self-understanding.

Tóibín’s James is a figure perpetually in flux, his identity reconstructed through a series of existential and artistic negotiations. The novel’s episodic structure, which mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and experience, brings new light to Dewey’s emphasis on how a continuity of experience can be constructed as the basis for selfhood. James’s relationships—with figures such as Constance Fenimore Woolson and his family—are not merely biographical details but sites of existential reckoning, where his sense of self is continually challenged and reconfigured. Tóibín’s portrayal of James’s creative process further underscores this Deweyan dynamic: writing becomes a means of synthesizing disparate experiences into a coherent, though provisional, sense of self.

This paper will offer a close reading of key scenes in The Master—such as James’s haunting reflections on failure, his ambivalent relationships, and his meticulous crafting of narrative—to illuminate how Tóibín’s biofiction aligns with Dewey’s philosophy. It will argue that Tóibín’s James embodies Dewey’s vision of the self as a work in progress, perpetually reconstructed through the interplay of experience, reflection, and artistic expression. By framing The Master within Dewey’s pragmatist lens, this analysis seeks to deepen our understanding of both Tóibín’s novel and the philosophical underpinnings of identity as a lived, experiential process. Ultimately, the paper contends that Tóibín’s biofiction not only reimagines James’s life but also enacts a profound meditation on the dialectics of selfhood, resonating with Dewey’s assertion that the self is always in the process of formation.

Introduction

The “Catkin LuXun” sketches a decentered, universal world of Southeast Asian literature via the agency of LuXun’s literary tradition. This transcultural project aims to transcend the existing regional patterns of Sinophone literature by presenting a diverse and complex cultural-political dynamics of LuXun’s literature flowing in the contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

The term“catkin (荑tí)” addresses a specific methodology, which is a“creative transformation” of Professor David Der-wei Wang’s“post-loyalist”(後遺民) theory. In Chinese, “catkin (荑tí)” is derived from the character 「艸」, which originally meant to be “growth and development”. On one hand, it echoes the idea of 「後夷民」, which is used by scholars as means of transforming the barbarians「夷」 into ethnic Chinese「華」. On the other hand, it symbolises a literary way to “rise from the dead” in works of the three selected writers in East-Asian literature, Lee Waiyi, Nieh Hualing, and Chia Joo Ming. They should not only be regarded as the“others”in relation to Greater China, but also critical challengers to the orthodoxy of Chineseness through writing “from memory to history” rather than “from history to memory”. These writers use literary language to express remembrance as new forms of reality that penetrates the blind spots obscured by political discourse, as well as the way to carry on the redemptive nature of LuXun’s literature in the contemporary.

The world of "catkin LuXun" is constructed on the basis of Goethe's concept of “cosmopolitan literature,” while specifically following on the concept of "Chinese cosmopolitanism” by Leo Ou-fan Lee and Pheng Cheah's theory of "cosmopolitan literature". The idea of “heterotopia” is an organic compound of the above concepts, redefining reality by transgressing the heterogeneous and intertwined liminal space of “fiction” and “reality”, “freedom” and “order”. This paper aims to put Foucault's blueprint of "heterotopia" into practice by constructing the world of "Catkin Lu Xun" as a “reflexive mirror” for regional literature, so that historical memories from different places can be compared and contrasted, as well as jointly performing the “disturbing potentials” of literary space in relation to Reality and Western colonial utopia: using language to express one's own history as a kind of existence, in order to challenge the status quo, the irrational political situation; and to bring into play the “Messianism” of literature. The writing of ‘memory-history’ transcends the dichotomy of "colonial/post-colonial", "marginal/centre", thereby fundamentally revolutionizes the worldview of "Sinophone", then continues the tradition of literary revolutions (鼎革以文), from Zhang Taiyan to Lu Xun. Therefore, Lu Xun's heterotopia is not only a literary unit, but also a“prototype of a new form of governance” which have been constructed through literature. By interpreting Li, Zhu, and Zhang's post-descendants “memory-history” narratives as a form of “creationism” (Jacques Lacan), and to discuss how “post-descendants” writings create a “heterotopia” that is intermingled with reality, fiction and “extraterritoriality.” This is a literary-political revolution to reconstruct memory and redeem history through words.

3.1 The Return of the Soul in “Dark Tradition”（幽傳統）: Li Weiyi's “Selfless” Heterotopia

If LuXun’s Old Tales Retold has initiated the “dark tradition” through rewriting folktales from a “post-May Fourth” standpoint, then, the “word cultivator,”（文字耕作者） Weiyi Li, has inherited LuXun's “literary-social” dual identities in the “post-1997” context. She intervenes in social issues via novel, cultivates history with words, explores the possibilities and specific forms of “memory-politics” through a combination of realism and magical literary devices.

“A Trying Journey”（《行路難》） and “Chen Xiang”（《沉香》） point out that the new experience of enlightenment comes from the people, and the novels are mostly written from the perspective of ghosts and small histories that are “full of the breath of people's life” , in which ghosts and phantoms are used to create a postulate of writing that goes beyond one's own experience and subjectivity, a “selfless” postulate of “stand by and watch” . Through the creative transformation of LuXun's dark tradition, Lee Wai-yee established a literary heterotopia of “do-it-yourself” based on the centerless ideology constructed between the two post-colonial ideologies of “the crevice theory”（夾縫論） and “the theory of imagining Hong Kong moving North”（北進論） in post-1997 Hong Kong. By doing so, she liberates Hong Kong from the dilemma of self/other dichotomy induced by nationalism and utilizes the constructive function of literary devices to reconstruct Hong Kong's historical memory. The “selfless” heterotopia of “Chen Xiang” illustrates that when one’s free will is imprisoned by the language of power, literature can loosen the fetters by symbolically cutting down the reality/truth, so that historical memory of the community can be spared from the current time and be retained in the heterotopia of literature. This is undoubtedly a localization of Lu Xun's “Moroism” （摩羅主義） and his Philosophy of life（生命哲學）, which emphasizes the truthfulness of visceral feelings. However, in the eyes of the word cultivator, life is not only about truths, but the imagination of literature can also change one's “conception of the individual self and the world outside”, making a “better world” comes true.

 

3.2 History, Memory, and Cultural Politics: Zhu Tianxin's Imagination of Communities in the context of post-diaspora.

In the midst of social contradiction and incompatibility of provincial and local communities, Zhu Tianxin strives to find the local positioning for the provincials and to rewrite Taiwan history. Like Lu Xun, the “old soul” （「老靈魂」，指朱天心） style of memory-history writing, is in fact an ethnic politics of history.

The nostalgic narrative of The Old Capital（古都） restores the beautiful “ruins”（Walter Benjamin’s allegory of history） of Old Taipei（老台北） by reversing the past and the present, the documentary and the fictional. It is an imagined community constructed by the writer with the historical memories condensed from their personal experiences. Among them, Zhu summarizes and transforms Taiwan's national experience in the form of “spatialization of history,” demonstrating the historical energy of Meta-historical poetics that assembles freedom of thought, skepticism, intellectual curiosity to transform and elevate. Zhu maps Taipei amid memory and fiction. In The Old Capital, she had dialogues with the past self, the fading era, and the dwindling community, exemplifying the spirit of “post-modern witch”（後現代巫者） who creates a sacred space for daily life, an open habitat for Taiwanese diasporas in the contemporary. This cultural heterotopia is a result of “Horizontverschmelzung” between the provincial and local communities through the second-person narrative, which has the meaning of universality, and utilizes the “plurality and universality” to form “community without community”. True communion is composed of differentiation.

3.3 Affective Narrative History of “Post-humanity”: Zhang Guixing's Association and Circulation from Human to Non-human

Zhang Guixing's imagination of primitive ecological history and his writing of cultural memories is a remix that projects anti-colonial consciousness. This essay interprets Zhang’s writing as an alternative politics of time and memory. Zhang's Wild Boars has crossed is in fact the long river of history that has emphasized enlightenment and rationality since the May Fourth Movement, in which he has inherited part of Lu Xun's dark consciousness and the avant-garde thinking of the madman's（「狂人」） to the times and history, as well as the part that has been creatively transformed and subverted against the spirit of Lu Xun's “Cultivation of people”（「立人」精神）. Zhang has no intention of enlightenment, but he reveals the possibility of practicing Enlightenment in a reverse way: to return animal nature from humanism, and to reassess human civilization in the heterotopia of literature by means of the non-human affect This contributes the possibility for Zhang Guixing to surpass Lu Xun.

The “post-human affective narrative” in Wild Boars Cross the River（《野豬渡河》） demonstrates a new perspective to enter the world of post-colonial literature, which helps to respond to related political, ethical and ecological problems. Both Zhang and his wild boars “transcend” the boundaries of colonial/post-colonial and local/dissociated identities and politics, demonstrating the “desire to cut off language from ethnicity and nation,” shattering the illusion of self-certainty for human beings. From “object” to “thing”, Zhang invites us to reflect on the inhumanities that historians have overlooked, revealing the “lost hell”——- the human condition in which subject coexists with the other. Zhang's post-human affective narrative is precisely a literary reconstruction of the relationship between the subject and the coexistence of the other. At a literal and symbolic level, Zhang uses objects to induce emotions and to spark off a tendency by reintroducing affect into rationalized political space, using narrative to reconstruct reader's political perception and war memory of Malaysia. Zhang transforms repressed wilderness into first-hand historical materials that recall human inwardness, reconstructing a historical world that transcends the dichotomy of humans and non-humans, thereby diconstructing the colonial hegemony and Malay cultural hegemonic blockage of Chinese history. In his novel, Zhang constructs Borneo as a heterotopia where multiple ethnicities, subjectivities (human and non-human), reflexive history narrative collaborates, calling out the world through literature. Through literature, he roars upon the world to return to the natural status of life, to associate with animals, and to regain the true experience of living. This is not only a continuation of Lu Xun's “fire on the eternal life” of retelling ancient history/nation’s history from memories, but also a political ecology of “thing-power”: by transforming the experience of survival in the rainforest into an ecological-political resource that evokes emotions, he re-interprets the “universa humanity” in a series of dialectical interactions between humans and objects, nature and civilization, colonialism and post-colonialism, also between memory and history. On the ground of these, Zhang transcends the regional boundaries of Mahua Literature and Taiwanese Literature; beyond dispersion and naturalization, he strikes a chord with the universality of World Literature, opening up the liminal space of Sinophone literature. Since the history told in Wild Boars Cross the River is the history of anti-Japanese resistance shared by Chinese people all over the world, it is a traumatic complex of history. Therefore, the memory-history writing of “direct, existential, and physical engagement” not only breaks through Lu Xun's dark tradition, but also revolt as a political spirituality to construct a heterotopia in Chinese history.

Conclusion

To summarize, the emotion-based, virtual-real world of Chinese catkins, is precisely the literary heterotopia that this paper ultimately seeks to create. The construction of a heterotopia must be centered on the life-based historical emotions, and through literature, emotions can be summoned to transform the virtual into the real, constructing a place-based historical community. In this paper, we believe that this is a possible way out of the theoretical deadlock in Sinophone studies. The light that leads the way in dark, is the“fire on the eternal life” inherited from Zhang Taiyan, Lu Xun, to the Chinese catkins: Lee Waiyi, Zhu Tianxin and Zhang Guixing.

The functioning of ekphrasis, the description of an object of art in the text of a literary work has been the subject of research by scholars, especially in the field of interdisciplinary studies. The question of the functioning of ekphrasis in the text of travel literature seems interesting in terms of the functions and qualities that ekphrasis acquires in such texts. Ekphrasis is a symbol of material culture, a bearer of the signs of national culture. In time and space, ekphrasis becomes an element of aesthetic transit between peoples and eras.

In the literature of travel, from an interdisciplinary point of view, ekphrasis can fulfil distinct functions. The object of material culture can be a point of orientation for the journey. For example, in the case of pilgrimage, for François-René de Chateaubriand it is the journey to sacred places, for Theophile Gautier it is a quest for new cultural experiences, for Jules Verne, it is the creation of new worlds. This, in turn, breaks down into a number of more descriptive elements of both contemporary and antique art for the traveller. One could say that one can observe an aesthetic change in the way ekphrasis works, depending on the place and time of the journey.

Ekphrasis as a point of reference between eras and cultures has an amalgam nature, which in turn gives it the power to transform the description of an art object for the reader into an element of travel. Journeys of an abstract nature for the more educated reader will reveal ekphrasis in its full force. A text presented to a person from another reality will not be as effective as the author originally intended. But it may lead to an entirely different creation of reality in the matter of acceptance of aesthetic criteria.

The study of ekphrasis in the text of French travel literature is a necessary element in understanding the interdisciplinarity of the work in terms of the modification of aesthetic criteria across time and space.

Under the context of AI as compounded in the form of Large Language Models (hereinafter referred to as LLMs), there have resulted in the decreased translation rates and work volumes in respect to the consequences of issues related to translation ethics. In the age of AI, translation ethics have re-emerged as an issue that is worthy of researching in order to improve the performance and effectiveness of the industry. Now with the convergence of AI and LLMs, as well as the exceedingly and ever-increasingly fierce competition amongst all translation companies and linguists, those professionals and entities in the translation industry cannot compromise the issue of the new translation ethics. The paper discusses the aforesaid issues and provides solutions to the problem of the new translation ethics in the age of AI and LLMs. The new translation ethics comprises integrity; originality, efficiency, and the respect for IP protection, which are considered as the effective translation training and practice for a win-win situation accomplished amongst translators, the translation companies, and clients.