Saul Bellow’s masterpiece Herzog features how mobilities essential to the urban experience revamps individual perceptions of spatial-temporal reality, exemplifies Bellow’s preoccupation with the dangling intellectuals in the modern world. Herzog’s mobile experience between Montreal, Chicago and Berkshire features a perceptually rich spatial experience. This paper adopts Yi-Fu Tuan’s “perception-attitude-value-worldview” methodology of Topophilia studies, contextualizing Herzog’s journey in American Jewish Immigration history in the 19-20 century, examining how Herzog’s urban mobility experience revolves around a complex of topophilia. Ascribing Herzog’s mobility experience to his unwitting impulse to restore topophilia complex that values rootedness and stability, this paper contends that Herzog’s topophilia contests the prevalent western ideology that equates modern mobilities with freedom, progress, and dynamism.

Herzog’s cosmopolitan trajectory originates in his Yiddish-speaking family’s migration to Montreal during the 19th century, a period marked by the mass exodus of Jews from Europe. Despite the adversities of poverty, this immigrant narrative cultivated his profound sense of rootedness, familial attachment, and enduring topophilia. His subsequent relocation to Chicago and marriage to Madeleine, a cosmopolitan Catholic, epitomized upward social mobility while simultaneously precipitating an existential crisis of identity and a pervasive sense of placelessness. Following his divorce and psychological collapse, Herzog sought refuge in Ludeyville, a rural property purchased with his inheritance from his deceased immigrant father. In the “country solitude and privacy,” he reestablished familial connections, reclaimed self-respect, and revitalized his topophilia through an intimate bond with his “American estate.” This country estate thus affords a testimony of Herzog’s withdrawal from the cosmopolitan world, and symbolizes his unwitting hope for immobility—stability and meaning—after a life-long journey of mobility.

Herzog’s experience of mobilities in the cosmopolitan world suggests that the declination of a place-based localism caused by the globalized mobility erodes topophilia, taking a toll on the modern mind. His reestablishment of topophilia under the disguise of a revamped nation-based localism—his American version of man-place attachment—reflects Bellow’s humanist thoughts about “existence” and “place.” Through Herzog’s quest for rootedness, Bellow denounces how modern mobility reduces each unique individual to a common self, leading to disorientation and alienation rather than liberation. Bellow’s ontological insights on the man-place relationship accentuates a sense of place, addressing the humanistic geographical concern of “men living in the world” over “men being in the world,” inviting readers to reassess the celebrated modern mobility and to explore alternative ways of being in the world.

The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin offers a rich narrative that intertwines science fiction with profound philosophical questions about human survival, technology, and the role of fate in a hostile universe. In this paper, I explore how the theological debate between "Faith in Christ" and "Faith of Christ" resonates within the context of the Three-Body Problem, drawing attention to the tension between human agency and the cosmic determinism of a seemingly indifferent universe. These tensions can be analyzed through the lens of cosmopolitanism and localism, two concepts that have been central to discussions of global flows and cultural exchange in the digital age.

The novel's portrayal of humanity’s struggle against the Trisolaran threat raises essential questions about the limits of human effort (faith in one’s own capabilities) versus the role of external, cosmic forces (the faithfulness of a higher power, or perhaps the universe itself). This tension mirrors the duality inherent in global flows today—where technological advances (embodied in the novel’s space-time technologies) promise unprecedented control and connection, yet also confront individuals and nations with their vulnerability to forces beyond their control.

In the context of cosmopolitanism, the Three-Body Problem presents a worldview where humanity is forced into a broader, universal struggle for survival, yet it is simultaneously constrained by the "localism" of its own understanding, culture, and limited perspective. By examining how the characters’ actions (and their reliance on both technological and philosophical solutions) reflect a theological engagement with faith, both human and divine, this paper explores how these theological questions also mirror contemporary global tensions. How does humanity navigate a world where the global is increasingly interconnected, yet local ideologies and cultural beliefs persist and resist? What does it mean to confront the unknown forces in our world, whether they are extraterrestrial or technological, through the lens of faith?

Ultimately, this paper argues that The Three-Body Problem presents a cosmopolitan narrative that also reveals the persistent undercurrents of localism, demonstrating how global and local struggles intertwine in both the political and theological dimensions of contemporary literature.

The longstanding discourse surrounding the formal boundaries of theater and cinema has persistently oscillated between self-definition and deconstruction. The advent of artificial intelligence, however, fundamentally destabilizes the foundational premises of such debates. This study proposes a tripartite theoretical and historical inquiry into the evolving relationship between theater and cinema under AI’s transformative impact:

1. Historicity

Through a longue durée perspective, the paper traces the entangled theoretical trajectories of theater and cinema, contextualizing their dialectical tensions within China’s digital transition. By examining historical paradigms—from the nationalist aesthetics of xiqu films (1950s-1970s), the modernist reinvention of cinematic language (1980s), to the enduring "shadow-play theory" (1990s-present)—the analysis reveals how shifting conceptions of artistic essence, medial specificity, and social functionality mirror evolving sociopolitical imaginaries. Crucially, it interrogates the current historical juncture: What epistemological ruptures does AI introduce to these century-old debates?

2. Crisis of Indexicality

The study confronts AI’s ontological challenges to both media. Digitalization has already fractured cinema’s indexicality—its physical bond with reality—while destabilizing theater’s foundational conventionality. With generative AI, could these art forms face an ontological severance from their material histories? How might their mechanisms for constructing realism be reconfigured? Drawing on New Cinema History methodologies, the paper further explores whether suppressed historical dimensions of theater-cinema interplay (e.g., pre-cinematic spectacles or marginalized performative traditions) might be unexpectedly reanimated through AI’s technological unconscious.

3. Theatricality as Public Praxis

At its core, the investigation centers on theatricality—the embodied publicness intrinsic to both arts. Will AI amplify theater and cinema’s capacity for cultivating communal experiences through expanded technological interfaces, or obliterate the irreducible value of embodied human encounters? Does algorithmic curation of cultural consumption signal the atrophy of public spheres, or necessitate a radical redefinition of "publicness" itself? The paper also critically examines the unexamined cultural politics embedded in AI-driven production, distribution, and reception networks, rejecting simplistic binaries of techno-optimism versus neo-Luddism.

By interweaving media archaeology, aesthetic philosophy, and critical technology studies, this research aims to recalibrate theoretical frameworks for understanding performative arts in the algorithmic age, while illuminating the dialectical interplay between technological determinism and humanistic resilience.

My paper offers a comparative analysis of erotic desire as the grounds for comparison that defined Global Modernism. By analysing the innovations that took place in the works of Velimir Khlebnikov (Russian-speaking), e.e.cummings (English-speaking), Nizar Qabbani (Arabic-speaking), I interrogate how this new poetic language helped liberate ‘Eros’, hence how it became a phenomenon that acquired the status of a global, intercultural phenomenon that can be anchored with the help of the aesthetic category I term "Erotosphere".

Within modernism, traditional notions of the continuous, the unified, the coherent, were replaced by a language of the interrupted, the plural, and the incoherent. The figurative language used, as well as wordplay, breakdown of syntax, mixture of the profane and sacred registers, allusions, parody or semantic displacement, are examined to identify how a new meaning and expression of erotic desire are constructed through the materiality of language in each of the poets’ works.

Erotic desire in the works of Khlebnikov, cummings, and Qabbani spawned a revolution in all three poetic languages. I argue that erotic desire in the works of these three poets is a precarious tension, creating a kind of linguistic-epistemological cognitive symbiosis. This symbiosis institutes a new poetic tradition that provides the basis for comparison, leading to a new approach in comparative and world literature.