Author：Lu LI

Abstract: Don DeLillo’s White Noise is on the surface a representation of the everyday life of an ordinary American family in the 1980s, yet it actually refers to the death culture and symbolic politics of television. The novel not only examines how television intrudes on the everyday life of the Gladneys by shaping and intensifying children and adults’s consciousness of death, but also shows how the narrator Jack utilizes televised narratives to resist the fear of death and to retell the everyday life. However, this resistance does not restrain the televisual transfiguration of domesticity through virtualization, aestheticization and commercialization. ...

Column：Literature and Media   132-144   Details

Author：Jiayi KANG, Zhongming BAO

Abstract: The Sympathizer written by the Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen breaks away from the singular perspective of the American narrative of the Vietnam War, deconstructing the memory of the war as scripted by American ideology with a focus on Vietnam. The references to various media within the novel reveal how the United States employs mimetic strategies of media discourse to manipulate reality. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the novel’s emotional sequences in musical discourse, the narrative structure and visual representation in filmic discourse, and irony that serves as an underlying narrative in journalistic discourse. Through these analyses, this paper seeks to explore how Viet Thanh Nguyen resists and subverts the mimetic nature of American media discourse. This is not only a call for readers ...

Column：Literature and Media   145-156   Details

Author：Qihe LIN

Abstract: Frank Churchill in Jane Austen’s Emma is a complex and contradictory character. He remains loyal to a secret engagement, yet he also enjoys amusement and devious schemes, which reflects the novel’s ethical struggle: it seeks to accommodate cross-class marriages based on affection while upholding the 18th-century practice of intra-class unions and the moral philosophy that advocates honesty. To achieve this balance, the novel portrays Frank as one who unreasonably conceals his secret and even resorts to deliberate deception, ...

Column：Literature and Culture Studies   123-131   Details

Author：Xuefei Min

Abstract: Clarice Lispector has long been regarded as a writer preoccupied with introspective themes, yet her final work, A Hora da Estrela, marks a notable shift in her writing, emerging as her sole text which engages directly with social critique. This paper argues that such a literary turn does not merely stem from a late-life inclination toward memoir writing, nor does it represent an abrupt transformation. Rather, it synthesizes her lifelong conviction—rooted in her youth—of using literature to pursue justice with the thematic representation of “hunger” as both contemporary anxiety and national issue. In truth, the social critique in A Hora da Estrela does not dissolve the existentialist philosophical core that permeates Clarice’s oeuvre. Instead, it elevates a societal problem into a profound philosophical inquiry into the essence of human existence.

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   3-13   Details

Author：Xiaorui Chu

Abstract: As a central figure in 20th-century Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade uses his literary works to explore the cultural tensions inherent in Brazil’s modernization. In Macunaíma, he draws on foreign mythological figures recorded by German anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg to create an unconventional national hero marked by contradictions. By giving the hero a “non-national” character, Mário challenges the romanticization and symbolic appropriation of indigenous culture found in traditional nationalist allegories. At the same time, he subverts the dominant narrative frameworks through Macunaíma’s magical journey. ...

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   14-27   Details

Author：Lin Ma

Abstract: In 1908, the first group of Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil. Over the following decades, they were accepted by Brazilian society due to their outstanding achievements in agriculture and were hailed as a model of immigrant integration. Japanese culture also permeated Brazilian daily life to some extent. On the surface, Japanese descendants in Brazil enjoy a high degree of social acceptance and recognition. However, this appearance conceals identity struggles faced by Japanese immigrants and their descendants. The novel Nihonjin by the Japanese-Brazilian writer Oscar Nakasato tells the story of a Japanese family’s journey in Brazil from the perspective of a third-generation immigrant....

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies   28-37   Details

Author：Xiaodong Xu

Abstract: Cruentation received official approval as solid judicial proof against potential murders throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practical value of this strange custom is to make decision-making process externalized and efficacious as well. After being dramatized and represented both in family tragedies an...

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   38-58   Details

Author：Yifan Meng

Abstract: As one of the most significant contemporary novelists in British literature, Julian Barnes’s fictional works epitomize the historical turn in 1990s British fiction. His profound engagement with language, literature, and philosophy has fostered a heightened historical consciousness and acute sensitivity to litera...

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   59-68   Details

Author：Yi Liu

Abstract: As the most complex work in Günter Grass’ “Danzig Trilogy,” Hundejahre centers on the human history. The spatialization of time is staged on both a structural and thematic level. On the one hand, through the “strategy of simultaneity,” the temporal narrative is endowed with a spatial structure, where linear, unidirectional time loses its continuity and orientation. History, as a collective representation of the passage of time and imagined future trends, is embodied in the Vistula River. On the other hand, the scarecrows, dogs, and mines, recalled through the Vistula River, portray the eternal recurrence and absurdity of history. Humanity cannot make history; human history makes no progress. Humanity’s “self-domestication” ultimately leads to hell. Hundejahre reflects Grass’ historical perspective during the 1960s, while also questioning and critically reflecting on the concept of progress.

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   69-77   Details

Author：Zhaofang Cao

Abstract: The short story “María Concepción” by Katherine Anne Porter is centered around an indigenous Indian woman in the Mexican Revolution who denies her own tradition but believes in Catholicism. It refracts the purpose of national identity construction of American archaeological project in the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, as well as the complex colonial relationships in Mexico. The female protagonist, María Concepción, though of Native American descent, tries to become an “inheritor” of white civilization. However, she can never be fully accepted into the white system and thus becomes merely a “substitute” for “civilization.” While Porter critiques the cultural colonial project of American imperialism, she cannot escape the influence of the hierarchy of civilizations. Her writings of Indian civilization ultimately succumb to the trope of “primitivism.”

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology   78-87   Details