Comparative literature is innately cross-cultural and globally inclusive. With the advent of a new vision of international comparative literature, comparative literature in East Asia “connects the East and the West” by foregrounding communications between the Eastern and Western worlds that turn away from unilateralism and narrow-mindedness and actively advocating “cross-cultural scholarly practices and endeavors.” In this light, the emergence and evaluation of myriad canonical texts in the East Asian cultural circle, traditional East Asian culture, and modern and contemporary literature are no longer stagnantly defined, but instead dynamically generated. “Cross-cultural practice that bridges the East and the West” provides sound conditions for these texts to respond to issues in literature and culture, and even the clash of civilizations in the current world.

This panel seeks to address the following topics:

Theories and methods of international comparative literature and comparative literature in East Asia

Comparative literature studies and cross-cultural practice in East Asian countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Mongolia, among others

The dynamic generation of traditional East Asian literature, modern and contemporary literature, and cross-cultural practice that connects the East and the West

Comparative literature in East Asia, issues in literature and culture, and the clash of civilizations in the current world

Interrelations between East Asian cultural circle, Chinese culture and the development of 20th-century European thought

Proverbs, as universal linguistic symbols, not only encapsulate rich folk traditions but also serve as concentrated expressions of national identity, playing a crucial role in fostering cultural commonality across different societies. During the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, Westerners came to China, and their engagement with Chinese culture extended beyond mere observation. The translation of Chinese proverbs into Western languages became a significant conduit for introducing Chinese thought to Europe. At the same time, these Westerners actively studied, interpreted, and applied Chinese proverbs in their own intellectual practices. This paper examines Chinese books on Western knowledge from that period, particularly those related to proverbs, conducting an in-depth analysis of their distinctive features. From the perspective of linguistic practice, it reassesses the role of proverbs in facilitating dialogue and cultural adaptation between disparate civilizations. Ultimately, this study offers fresh insights into the pathways and depth of Sino-Western cultural exchanges during the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

The expansion of railways in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries captivated public imagination and inspired a variety of playthings across the globe. Realistic train models and advanced science toys produced by manufacturers from Germany and the United States constituted a expansion of the railway modernity in imagination of childhood. However, contrary to the notion of a sweeping replacement of local traditional toys by industrial, Westernized playthings, East Asian toys underwent a complex process of transnational cultural exchange within and beyond the region.

This study examines the intellectual discourse and cultural practices surrounding train-themed games in early twentieth-century China. Through a detailed analysis of train-themed Sugoroku—a Japanese board game with Chinese origins—and various Chinese train-themed games that didn’t incorporate physical train models, this research investigates the complex process of toy modernization. The study demonstrates the crucial role of traditional and local forms in mediating the popularization of modern technology. This research not only sheds light on the relationship between modern technology and the concept of childhood in East Asia, but also offers a transnational perspective on the region's modernization process.

Lu Xun was very fond of Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques. According to Lu Xun's diary, from November 1924 to November 1931, Lu Xun spent seven years collecting Fabre's whole set of works and various translations one after another, and this interest continued until Lu Xun's death. In Lu Xun's brother Zhou Jianren's recollection, “In the last few years of his life, when the fighting was so tense and his health was not good, he still couldn't forget that he wanted to work with me on translating French scientist Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques.

In “Late Spring Ramblings” published in 1925, Lu Xun introduced Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques , which opens with the spectacle of a fine-waisted bee catching a lacewing to be its stepchild, and uses this material to criticize the Chinese national character: content with the joy of rural life and the traditional view of nature, stubborn, and alienated from science.

What is more interesting is that, just like many works at that time, Lu Xun read Souvenirs Entomologiques not in the original French, but mainly in the Japanese version, and the complete translation in Lu Xun's collection was also the Sobunkaku（叢文閣）edition, the translations of 大杉榮and 椎名其二, which were purchased from Uchiyama Bookstore, a bridge of communication between Chinese and Japanese intellectuals at that time.

Thus, taking Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques as a slice, we observe an interesting phenomenon: how Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques was translated by the anarchists Ei Osugi and Kijiji Shiina, conveying a call for the promotion of science education, and how it arrived at Lu Xun, becoming the discursive material of his nationalism, which “profoundly altered the sensibilities of several generations of Chinese in the 20th century! ” (Liu He, “Interlingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity”). What exactly happened in the process of translating and reading Faber? How do the historical conditions of translation contribute to the production of new meanings of the text in question? And how do we construct a modern Chinese scientific culture through cross-cultural knowledge and assimilation? Beyond this, how did Japan, as the medium through which Western thought entered China at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, play an important role in the intellectual activity of Chinese intellectuals? Through the textual travel of Fabre's Souvenirs Entomologiques, we will have a concrete and practical discussion on the above questions.

As exemplary texts of modernity writing in 20th-century Chinese and Western literature, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged employ divergent yet convergent narrative strategies to reveal the structural crisis of the human spiritual ecosystem during modernity's progression. This study, grounded in comparative literature perspectives, examines both works' metaphorical critique of modernity paradoxes through dimensions including temporal dilemmas, alienation of marital ethics, war trauma memory, and intellectual symptom clusters, while elucidating the latent nature-civilization dialectical tension through eco-critical theory.

Firstly, the colonization of organic life-time by mechanical temporality constitutes the origin of spiritual alienation. Mrs. Dalloway dissects Clarissa's stream of consciousness through Big Ben's mechanical rhythm, exposing linear temporality's violent discipline over natural life rhythms. Meanwhile, Fortress Besieged employs Fang Hongjian's temporal nihilism during displacement to metaphorize the disintegration of traditional agrarian cyclical temporality in war contexts. Both works jointly critique modernity's transgression against organic temporal order, engendering rootlessness anxiety.

Secondly, marital power structures reflect pathological interpersonal ecology. The Dalloways' marriage degenerates into symbolic performance sustaining social capital, its emotional void exposing bourgeois existential alienation, whereas Fang's marital entrapment manifests semi-colonial intellectuals' fragmentation between traditional patriarchal ethics and modern individual desires, with the besieged effect mirroring materialized society.

Thirdly, war violence as modernity's ultimate manifestation breeds spiritual trauma in civilizational wilderness. Septimus' post-war PTSD deconstructs Enlightenment rationality's repression of human nature, while the collective collapse of San Lü University intellectuals reveals cultural ecosystem disorder under war's shadow.

Finally, intellectuals' pathological subjectivity unveils modernity crisis's deep logic. Clarissa's self-fragmentation and Fang's existential ennui jointly constitute post-disenchanted subjectivity ruins, their spiritual symptoms indicating modernity's dual destruction of natural humanity and cultural ecology.

This study argues that Mrs. Dalloway and Fortress Besieged reveal modernity's fundamental dilemma as instrumental rationality's systematic stripping of life's natural attributes through cross-cultural dialogue. Both works construct spiritual ecopathology specimens through literary imagination, providing critical perspectives for reflecting on technological hegemony and ecological ethics reconstruction in modern civilization.