外国语言与文化

Agency of Thing and Perspective Transformation: A Study on the “Material Turn” Ecological Poetics in Flight Behavior

Weisheng Tang, Qi Ai    3-11

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)

Abstract：The “material turn” represented by “flat ontology” holds that the thing has its own agency and is independent of human beings, and there is no ontological difference between them, so it requires human beings to imagine the being of things correctly. In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behavior, the author traces the protagonist Dellarobia’s evolving perception of the monarch butterflies’ extraordinary migration. From initially viewing it as “divine revelation” to gradually recognizing its intrinsic value and material agency, the narrative demonstrates her shift from anthropocentric perspective to non-anthropocentric one, ultimately forming an ecological perspective of equality with all things. This ...

Dietary Preferences and Identity Performances in Clock Without Hands

Ruoyi Huang, Mingwen Xiao    13-21

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)

Abstract：After the American Civil War, the South underwent profound structural transformations, which were further accelerated by the Second World War. The traditional hierarchy came into conflict with the emergent democracy in terms of race, gender, and class, leading to identity dilemmas and subjectivity crises among Southerners. In Clock Without Hands, McCullers illustrates the historical changes and people’s identity performances through food narratives: Under the shadow of “the Southern family romance,” Malone clings to the old culture through anorexia and selective eating; the old Judge seeks solace in gluttony, while his identity is shattered by the impossibility of restoring the old order ...

9/11 as a Hyperobject: A Rereading of Falling Man

Heping Qi, Zeming Hu    22-31

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)

Abstract：The 9/11 terrorist attack in the United States, an unexpected and urgent political event, can be taken as the hyperobject ontologically. In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the fractured sense of time experienced by Alzheimer’s disease patients reflects human’s failure of temporal perception, embodying the temporal undulation of the...

Rethinking Chinese Literary Critical Discourse within Object-Oriented Narratology

Xiaohong Peng, Xiang Chen    32-40

Column：Western Object Narrative Studies (Column for Achievements of Major Projects Supported by the National Social Science Fund of China)

Abstract：Tang Weisheng’s A Study on Narrative of Thingness is the first monograph that provides a theoretical framework for and concrete demonstration of the Thingness section within the Object-Oriented Narratology. It also offers new perspectives, concepts, frameworks, and methods for literary studies. It is a work that “awaits Chinese interpretation.” Its reflections possess the potential to reinterpret Chinese literary works and theory, while also presenting a Chinese approach to mutual learning among civilizations from a Narratological perspective.

The Writing of Daily Life and the Construction of the Western Community in Joseph Conrad’s Colonial Fiction

Qiuyu Li    41-51

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature

Abstract：In his colonial fiction, Conrad constructs a Western community by uniting Westerners and excluding Asians and Africans through the writing of daily life. Although such a community contains discordant elements within itself, it remains relatively idealized compared to reality, reflecting Conrad’s conservative tendency on racial issues. Conrad had personally traveled to Africa and witnessed the greed and brutality of imperial colonization, yet he still portrayed in his works a Western community characterized more by warmth than by conflict. This reveals the...

The Dilemmas of Modernity in the Local Narrative of Jon Fosse’s Vaim

Rui Kong, Xinhua Xing    52-59

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature

Abstract：The “Vaim trilogy,” recently published by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse who was laureated with the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, takes the Norwegian fishing village of Vaim as its shared narrative space and reflects the dilemmas of modernity through a mode of local narrative. As the first part of the trilogy published in 2025, Vaim depicts three interrelated predicaments faced by the modern individual in relation to society, others, and the self. First, the rupture between the individual and society is manifested in the alienation of the hometown and the experience of urban estrangement generated by the solidification of local spatial structures. Second, the impasse between the self and others...

Dialectics of Mobility: Spatial Politics and Resistance in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Yueling Ma    60-68

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature

Abstract：Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl stands not only as a canonical text of African American women’s literature but also as a politically charged work that lays bare the spatial logic of slavery’s domination. Reexamined through the new mobilities paradigm, slavery emerges as a paradoxical mechanism in which “coerced circulation” and “spatial confinement” operate in tandem, subjecting Black women to a racialized spatial order of surveillance and intrusion through the differential allocation of mobility. Brent’s seven-year concealment in the garret constitutes a resistance practice centered on strategic immobility, generating a form of “stillness-as-mobility” through architectural...

The Loss and Reconstruction of the Innocent American National Identity in the Post-Vietnam Era in Tree of Smoke

Jingwen Xu    69-78

Column：Spatial and Identity Studies in Literature

Abstract：Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam War novel by the contemporary American novelist Denis Johnson, is a representation of the Americans’ consideration of and longing for the innocent national identity after the Vietnam War. Firstly, the novel depicts the Americans’ loss of innocence in the Vietnam War, and the confusion after the deconstruction of the innocent national identity. Secondly, the Vietnamese, with their disclosure of the war as a colonial war, and their adherence to cultural uniqueness, are not the others contributing to the innocence myth, therefore destructing the cultural hierarchy between Americans and the non-whites in the myth. Thirdly, the novel casts doubt on whether the innocent national...

Oil Narratives in William Faulkner’s Novels

Bixiao Bai    79-88

Column：Literary Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract：In recent years, with the rise of Energy Humanities, oil narratives has emerged as a new subject in literary studies. This paper puts Faulkner’s four stories published between 1930 and 1940—“Fox Hunt,” “Carcassonne,” “Black Music,” and The Hamlet—under the framework of petroculture, and combines the social and historical cont...

Soundscape Writing in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Yizhen Hong    89-97

Column：Literary Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract：As the concluding work of Toni Morrison’s “trilogy on the African American experience,” Paradise presents the historical memory and spiritual trauma of African Americans through rich auditory narratives. While existing scholarship has largely focused on spatial politics and female communities in the novel, the soundscape and its...

The “Unfamiliar Objects” in Marie Howe’s Poems and the Cultivation of Community Consciousness

Haoran Chen    98-106

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies

Abstract：With her collection What the Earth Seemed to Say, the American poet Marie Howe was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The more than twenty newly included eco-themed poems in this volume mark a major shift in her creative trajectory. Departing from a lyric tradition that treats elements of nature as mere backdrop or imagery, Howe places the earth, animals, plants, and everyday objects on an equal footing with human beings, highlighting their irreducible strangeness and agency and thereby creating a lived landscape that is both intimately entangled and constantly tense. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of “dark ecology,” this article focuses on the structures of co-presence—“you in me, ...

Dislocation, Alienation, and Transcendence: “Despairing Courage” in E. A. Robinson’s Poetry

Juan Wang    107-116

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies

Abstract：E. A. Robinson was an important poet of American Naturalism. His work not only expresses the despair of Naturalist thought but also conveys a spiritual strength that transcends despair. Through close readings of his representative poems, this article reexamines Robinson’s seemingly contradictory worldview, arguing that his poetry is structured around a thematic trajectory of “dislocation, alienation, and transcendence.” Caught between reality and ideal, self and society, his characters gradually descend into alienation, yet ultimately achieve a form of spiritual transcendence through their direct confrontation with suffering....

Irony and Post-Enlightenment Poetics in John Banville's The Newton Letter

Shuang Zhang    117-125

Column：Poetry and Poetics Studies

Abstract：In The Newton Letter, contemporary Irish novelist John Banville employs irony as a narrative strategy to explore subjectivity, the efficacy of language, and temporal experience. Isaac Newton’s “letters,” as “a text within the text,” establish a parallel narrative structure that is continually being deconstructed. In the quest for Newton’s spirit of rationality, the narrator’s pursuit of self-realization instead falls into a cycle of irony. Irony is not merely a linguistic posture but an intrinsic structure of how human beings experience and perceive history. The work transforms ...

On Ethical Aberration and the Presentation of Aesthetic Ugliness in Outer Dark

Xiaoping Zhang    126-134

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies

Abstract：Outer Dark, one of the postmodern Southern novels by Cormac McCarthy, revisits and reinterprets the important literary motif of ethical aberration. While depicting its ugly manifestations, the novel also endows them with new implications. The abstractness of the novel’s setting and characterization, its rewriting and parody of religious archetype, and its employment of double and the trope of doubleness not only endow McCarthy’s presentation of ethical aberration with a culturally inflected uniqueness of aesthetic ugliness, but also foreground the work with ...

Reconsidering the “Culture of Order”: Power, Revolution and Slave Trade in Enlightenment’s Aesthetics of the Sublime

Shixian Liu    135-145

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies

Abstract：Latest historical archives of the 18th-century Atlantic world reveal that the aesthetics of the sublime during the Enlightenment is deeply intertwined with the colonial networks of European empires. European democratic revolutions and overseas trade give rise to extreme exploitative practices including imperial colonial expansion and racial slavery. Against this historical backdrop, intellectual elites such as Burke and Kant redefine the concept of the sublime, embedding human transcendence within the aesthetic-political coding of the Enlightenment’s “Culture of Order.” Nevertheless, this alienated abstract “aesthetic consecration” embodies profound anxieties and compromises regarding regime shifts...

Exploring the "Joy of the Benevolent" in Yulgok's Gosan Gugokga

Chengri Piao, Qianru Ding    146-156

Column：Literary Ethics and Aesthetic Studies

Abstract：Within the intellectual context of Joseon Confucianism and the tradition of Neo-Confucian poetry, Yulgok Yi I’s Gosan Gugokga has often been regarded as a poetic articulation of the “joy of the benevolent” central to Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism. Existing scholarship has largely emphasized its continuity with Zhu Xi’s legacy, with less attention paid to how the “joy of the benevolent” is generatively enacted through poetic structure and aesthetic practice. This study situates Gosan Gugokga within the contexts of Confucian ethics of benevolence and Neo-Confucianism, and systematically investigates the poem’s articulation of the “joy of the benevolent.” It proposes an internal progressive structure: “shared joy-joy in following principle-joy in propagating the Way.” Yulgok does not confine the “joy of the benevolent” to an inner state attained ...

The Writing of Double Games in “The Man Who Lived Underground”

Yue Ma    3-12

Column：Order and Transgression in Literature: Narrative Experimentation and Echoes of History

Abstract：Richard Wright’s short story “The Man Who Lived Underground,” is full of the elements of game writing, which has yet received limited studies. The paper argues that Wright employs a “duable-game writing” strategy to deeply integrate the pleasure of gameplay with critical purpose. By constructing a parodic game based on the internal logic of colonialism and a mimic game with the order of racism, Wright establishes a progressive procedure of “spatial construction—the ironic rules and rule imitations —the judgment of the ending.” This approach not only metaphorically reflects the marginalized living conditions of Black communities and exposes the historical roots of American racial issues, but also transforms the theme of race into a perceptible bodily and psychological experience, as well...

Scientific Fantasy and Historical Bearing: Plant Writing in The Time Machine and the Boom of Horticulture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Dingying Wang    13-21

Column：Order and Transgression in Literature: Narrative Experimentation and Echoes of History

Abstract：Facing the scientific fantasy in The Time Machine, scholars have attempted to trace its intellectual roots in the nineteenth century. The correspondence between plant writing and the boom of horticulture in nineteenth-century Britain provides new evidence to support the view that the novel is rooted in the Victorian era. In the discourse of the nineteenth-century “Botanical Renaissance,” Wells draws on his botanical interests since his childhood to form an exotic botanical world in his novel. In this world, the future garden, characterized by abundant fruits, strange appearance of plants and so on, echoes the development of cultivation techniques in the nineteenth century. In the context of colonization, the backlash of the exotic plants reveals the internal tension between the “national garden” and the...

Collage and Mobility: The Visual Writing in If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Yingjie Duan    22-30

Column：Order and Transgression in Literature: Narrative Experimentation and Echoes of History

Abstract：In If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, the rising British novelist Jon McGregor draws on the postmodern collage to delineate the daily trifles of the anonymous residents in an unnamed urban street over the course of one day. Instead of regurgitating the motif of interpersonal alienation in modern urban space, McGregor attempts to uncover the latent visual interactions and emotional bonds between individual residents who are otherwise strangers. He employs the technique of “repetitive collage,” which allows the residents to achieve a wordless, intersubjective interaction through their fragmented yet overlapping visual observations. The movement of the gaze, aligning with the individual mobility, reinforces the unity and connectivity of “the street neighbourhood as the nearby.” The reside...

The Self-Shaping of England's Image as a Maritime Nation: Diplomatic Imagination in Queen Elizabeth I's Royal Letters to the Emperor of China

Wei Li, Wenran Hou    31-39

Column：Order and Transgression in Literature: Narrative Experimentation and Echoes of History

Abstract：As an early English textual practice that constructed national identity through rhetorical discourse, Elizabeth I’s three royal letters to the Wanli Emperor of the Ming Dynasty employed diplomatic rhetoric to negotiate sovereign equality, while legitimizing appeals for commercial access by invoking reciprocity in trade and narratives of exploration. In so doing, they shaped an image of England as a maritime nation that was “sovereign and independent,” “venturesome in exploration,” and “secular as well as pragmatic.” Although none of the three letters ever reached China, they became a “site of memory” in the history of Sino-British relations, providing a discursive resource that could later be inherited in support of Britain’s aggression against China. It was through this imagined interaction with ...