This essay studies the ethical anxiety found in Chinese suspension and riddle games, a popular subgenre of adventure electronic games that have gained growing attention in recent years. Through an analysis of contemporary Chinese electronic games such as Paper Wedding Dress, Back to School, and Fireworks, the essay reveals how these games adapt existing and contemporary legends and folklore, so as to express broader social and ethical concerns. The ethical anxiety presented in these games stems from multiple sources, such as the tension between modernity and tradition, the conflicts between individual desires and social norms, and the struggle between superstitious beliefs and everyday practices.

The essay argues that by employing horrific and the supernatural elements, Chinese suspension and riddle games not only provide players with thrilling gaming experiences but also help them have reflections on ethical issues such as social justice, morality, and humanity. These games often focus on marginalized groups and individuals of low status, revealing the ethical dilemmas they face in contemporary society. By doing so, the games engage players in a process of ethical inquiry, encouraging them to consider the broader implications of their choices and actions in the virtual world.

Moreover, the essay discusses the ways in which these games challenge and renegotiate traditional ethical norms. By presenting alternative narratives and perspectives, they invite players to question established beliefs and values. However, the essay also warns against the potential pitfalls of such games, such as the reinforcement of stereotypes of serious ethical issues. Ultimately, the ethical anxiety in Chinese suspension and riddle games provides a unique perspective through which to explore contemporary Chinese society and its complex ethical landscape.

British novelist Ian McEwan breaks down the traditional binary opposition between humans and machines, engaging in a profound discussion on how “artificial life” intervenes and participates in human life, and how its individual emotions intertwine and construct with human emotions, thereby reflecting the negative emotional tendencies inherent in humanity. The novel not only reveals the complex dilemmas faced by human-machine emotional interconnectivity in the posthuman era but also deeply analyzes the possibility of individual emotional degeneration in dissolving the boundaries of human-machine symbiosis and altering the overall emotional structure. Against the grand backdrop of the “digital revolution,” the utopian vision of transhumanism explored in the work provides an inspiring imaginative path for exploring the mechanisms of human-machine emotional connectivity in the posthuman era and establishing an emotionally interconnected human-machine community.

Contemporary British and American fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go, mainly depict a similar image of robots and highlight how the ethical parameters and values embedded in them at their inception reflect human ideals, particularly liberal humanism. However, these robots often act in a plethora of ways that go beyond human expectations and control, begging a number of unforeseen challenges and problems. Moreover, the paper contends that these authors subtly critique the perils of post-humanism and nostalgically aspire to evoke the positive values of the past, with a conscious recognition of the impossibility of reverting to such an era. By juxtaposing a futuristic lens with critical reflections on humanity’s ethical framework, these fictions underscore the enduring necessity of humanistic values in the age of technological innovation. Therefore, this study offers insights into the humanistic concern of the present human existence, and engages in the discussion on cultural and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence in literature, bridging the gap between the “two cultures.”

The rise of reader-response criticism has shifted focus from the author to the reader, emphasizing the reader’s active role in creating meaning. This shift challenges the traditional authority of the author and proposed a more dynamic interaction between the text and the reader. The ethics of reading involves the responsibilities and moral considerations that readers engage with when interpreting texts. This includes how readers approach texts, the interpretive choices they make, and how they apply the insights gained to the broader social and cultural context. With the emergence of AI-authored texts and the challenges they pose to traditional notions of creativity and authorship, AI’s capability to generating text has sparked a debate about the nature of creativity and the role of the author. The article examines whether AI can truly replicate the human qualities traditionally associated with literary creation, such as emotion and intentionality, and what this means for the future of literature. It questions the exclusivity of human authorship and considers the potential of AI to participate in literary creation, not merely as a tool but as an active agent capable of shaping literary aesthetics.

Against the macro backdrop of digital intelligence and globalization, world literature is experiencing profound disciplinary transformation and methodological reshaping. The rise of online platforms, new media forms, and AI technologies (such as ChatGPT and Sora) has not only revolutionized how texts are generated, disseminated, and consumed but also accelerated literature’s global circulation across linguistic, cultural, and media boundaries. The “disciplinary crisis” noted by comparative literature scholars Bassnett and Spivak reflects anxieties triggered by the blurring of research boundaries and objects in the digital age; however, this crisis also ushers in new interdisciplinary and cross-media opportunities.

In this technology-driven context, big data analysis and AI-based writing provide researchers with new ways to uncover the cultural, social, and aesthetic threads behind massive corpora, expanding both the depth and breadth of world literature studies. Yet, as issues like algorithmic recommendation and copyright disputes come to the fore, digital platforms—despite overcoming geographical and linguistic barriers—risk undermining marginalized narratives and diverse cultural expressions under the influence of commercial logic and traffic-based algorithms. Furthermore, the tension between machine-generated content and humanistic concerns has prompted renewed scholarly reflection on the “originality” of literature and its “humanistic spirit.”

Focusing on three dimensions—interdisciplinary, cross-media, and cross-cultural—this paper explores the opportunities and challenges facing world literature in the era of digital intelligence. Through the deep coupling of technology and the humanities, traditional literary research models can gain fresh momentum in convergence and innovation, while continuing to flourish in the broader landscape of multiple narratives and disciplinary intersections. A survey of literature’s resilience and creativity across historical transformations reveals its enduring vitality and potential for renewal in the age of digital intelligence.

In the pre-information age, the contingency of the external world means that individuals often rely on the embodied experience of the body to form an interpretative picture of the world, which is essentially an illusion world formed by different individuals based on their own life experience. At the same time, in a certain space-time environment, the similar embodied experience between individuals and the emotional and cultural consensus formed on this basis, such as ethics, religion, and family life, enable effective dialogue between the illusion worlds of different individuals to form an embodied community. These real communities are the basis of literary empathy, and all widely recognized literary works embody some kind of physical or emotional embodied community model to a certain extent. However, cybernetics and artificial intelligence in the information age are completely changing the generation mode of this illusion world. With the combination of cybernetics, capitalist production mode and coercive national community, the embodied illusion world is replaced by the illusion world created by the cybernetics mode. On the one hand, the virtual world seems to simulate the individual 's embodied experience, but on the other hand, the underlying logic and access mechanism of the network mode are inducing and even castrating our emotional experience and expression, which is manifested as a tendency of re-tribalization and even re-feudalization in literature, and gradually loses the potential to construct a broad community. This has become a dominant representation of the post-human era and a problem that contemporary community construction has to respond to.