Author：Haiyan Cai, Minmin Luo

Abstract: William Faulkner’s “Snopes Trilogy” presents the dilemma of justice in the transitional period of Southern American society through a dialectical narrative of law and morality. This paper focuses on the key legal cases and the “literary trial” of Flem Snopes, the manipulator of the law in the trilogy. From the dual perspectives of Posner’s “legal pragmatism” and Nussbaum’s “poetic justice,” it reveals the trilogy’s exposure and criticism of judicial alienation and moral crisis. Faulkner deconstructs the singular standard of...

Column：Literary Interdisciplinary Studies   106-115   Details

Author：Zhenghua Hu

Abstract: With regard to redemption in the final scene of Goethe’s Faust, there are three distinct interpretative paths: the secular-humanistic striving thesis, the Protestant doctrine of grace, and the Catholic theory of intercession. Based on their respective epistemological backgrounds and confessional stances, scholars draw upon different textual evidences to substantiate their specific interpretations of redemption. However, these conclusions frequently contradict one another, precluding a coherent and unified interpretation. The present paper attempts to transcend the Protestant and Catholic theological interpretative paradigms by referencing the early pantheism and alchemical concepts that Goethe articulates in Dichtung und Wahrheit, in order to examine the notion of “Privatreligion” manifested in the final scene of Faust.

Column：Literature and Culture Studies   116-124   Details

Author：Qiaorong Fei

Abstract: In her work Live Fast, contemporary French writer Brigitte Giraud constructs a narrative of time centered on the concept of acceleration, through the rewriting and retracing of her partner’s accidental death. Guided by an inquiry into individual fate, this narrative develops along a dual trajectory: inwardly, it examines how desire-driven acceleration within intimate relationships culminates in tragedy; outwardly, it investigates how the social acceleration characteristic of the 1990s shaped inescapable temporal rhythms for the individual. Through this two-way exploration of causality, fate is interpreted as a temporal-ethical dilemma arising from the interlocking of personal choice and the structures of the era, while the narrative act itself becomes a practice of ethical reflection. Giraud’s writing thus transcends personal mourning, offering profound literary introspection for the critique of temporality in modernity.

Column：   125-135   Details

Author：Viet Hoan Ngo

Abstract: This study examines the transformation of Vietnam’s literary field since Đổi Mới (Renovation) and develops an analytical framework of discursive modernity, institutional mediation, and endogenous dynamics. It argues that the defining shift in post-Đổi Mới literature is not simply the individual displacing the collective, but a reconfiguration of literary subjectivity: from a totalizing subject subordinated to a singular historical telos to a relational subject embedded in historical memory, familial ethics, market relations, and identity difference....

Column：Literature and Culture Studies   136-146   Details

Author：Jinxian Wu

Abstract: The late Victorian British writer Henry Rider Haggard is world-famous for his African adventure novels. His Allan Quatermain depicts Africa as a countryside imbued with nostalgic overtones, linking colonial adventure with British rural nostalgia. The novel portrays the adventure as an escape from England into the past. With fictionalized nature, it turns two African settlements into “enclaves” of the English countryside, creating a rural utopia free of commerce and industry. Backed by rural discourse, the novel rejects the early Victorian colonial discourse of “trade and Christianity,” thus both whitewashing colonial activity and renewing colonial discourse.

Column：Literature and Culture Studies   147-156   Details