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