Han Kang’s literary works use the body as a prism to reflect the systemic violence imposed by East Asian patriarchy and authoritarian regimes. Centering on texts such as The Vegetarian, Human Acts, Greek Lessons, The Fruit of My Woman, and The Boy Is Coming, this paper draws on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of “cultural trauma” to explore how Han employs bodily narratives and ghostly presences to interrogate patriarchal structures and state violence. In The Vegetarian, “meat” functions as a metaphor for sexuality, and sex becomes a tool of patriarchal control over the female body. The father, a Vietnam War veteran, symbolizes the oppressive state other, while the sister's complicity underscores the tragic impossibility of solidarity among women. Han’s turn to nature, plants, and animals reflects a cultural feminist impulse to summon a primal feminine resistance, though it often ends in the self-destruction of the “mad woman.”In contrast, Human Acts and Greek Lessons commemorate the “unspeakable” traumas of the Gwangju Uprising and the Jeju April 3 Incident through poetic language and transcendent structure. Ghosts in her narratives are not mere symbols but vessels of collective trauma, allowing history to be reactivated through embodied, sensory experience. Her use of stream-of-consciousness and near-death states produces an eerie power, giving voice to the silenced and forgotten in the fissures of history. This preoccupation with “refusing farewell” forms an intertextual dialogue with Lee Chang-dong’s film Burning, where spectral gazes and silent dances evoke suppressed class pain and collective rage, together revealing the obscured strata of trauma beneath East Asia’s modernization myth.Han Kang subverts Alexander’s discursive model of cultural trauma by inscribing trauma into nerve endings and muscle memory, making the body itself a battleground of memory politics. While the protagonist in Burning sinks into existential nihilism amid class immobility, Han’s female characters carve out subterranean paths of feminine resistance—through womb (The Vegetarian), vegetative consciousness (The Fruit of My Woman), and silence (Greek Lessons). Elevating bodily experience to an ontological level, Han re-maps the emotional landscape of Korea’s democratization and crafts a cultural poetics of trauma unique to the East Asian context—where unspoken historical violence continues to burn within flesh and blood.

In contemporary science fiction, the digital self born through mind uploading frequently appears as a distinct type of disembodied posthuman. These entities retain consciousness while being severed from their biological bodies, leaving their status as “life” ambiguous. This paper focuses on such uploaded individuals and examines their life potential and paradoxes from a posthumanist perspective. It argues that the continuity of memory, emotional responsiveness, and social functionality grants these uploaded beings a semblance of life. However, due to their radical state of disembodiment, they lack embodied perception, self-sustaining capacity, and the potential for growth—traits typically essential to living beings. This tension reveals a shifting ontological boundary of life under technological transformation and challenges the embodied premise embedded in classical life definitions. Drawing on posthumanist discourse and embodied cognition theory, the paper conceptualizes these uploaded minds as a form of “simulated life”: neither fully organic nor entirely artificial, but a novel mode of existence that urges us to rethink the boundaries of both life and humanity in the posthuman era.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, space-themed science fiction(SF) flourished amid the US-Soviet space race and technological advancement, with pioneers like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein exploring themes of human space exploration and contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. These narratives not only shaped the genre but also inspired future Chinese SF writers. In recent decades, as China’s space technology and global influence grow, those writers such as Liu Cixin, Wang Jinkang, and He Xi have gained increasing international recognition. This paper examines how these Chinese authors build on the legacy of their predecessors, incorporating features such as scientific imagination, menacing others, and ephemeral humans in their creation. Furthermore, it explores how they infuse their works with unique Chinese cultural elements, including mythological tales, philosophical doctrines, and lyrical verses. In a word, Chinese space-themed SF is poised to delve into deeper existential themes, fostering global cultural exchange and expanding the scope of future environmental humanity studies and the imaginative possibilities for humanity’s future in space.