外国语言与文化

Airplane in Auden's Poetry and the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression

Lingli HUANG, Qiang HU    3-14

Column：Literature and Art of the Global Anti-Fascist War

Abstract：Airplanes serve as a unique thread to understand Auden’s writings about the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. During the First World War, the strategic significance demonstrated by airplanes led the British government to resolve to build a “new world order.” The “air-mindedness” vigorously promoted by the government coincided with Auden’s passion for airplanes. The bird’s-eye view from flying not only directly inspired Auden’s poetic imagination but also gave rise to his poetic idea of “maintaining a distance from the times and society.” Together, these two aspects shaped the unique perspective from which...

Kyrgyz Women in the Home Front of World War II in Mother-Earth from the Perspective of Eco-Feminism

Jinmiao GUO, Yuquan WU    15-24

Column：Literature and Art of the Global Anti-Fascist War

Abstract：The novel Mother-Earth by the famous Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov takes the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union as the background. Through the female perspective of first-person narrator, it takes the female groups engaged in productive labor behind the war as main images, showing the tough, hard-working and heroic aspects of women and the earth in light of eco-feminism. They endure hardship and rise up together, and finally achieve harmonious coexistence. Aitmatov’s female writing is a rebellion against traditional war literature. He pays attention to the real plight of women under war, ...

War "Beyond the Battlefield": A Study of War Spectacle in Christopher Nolan's Films

Qi ZHANG    25-35

Column：Literature and Art of the Global Anti-Fascist War

Abstract：This paper takes Christopher Nolan’s war-themed films Dunkirk and Oppenheimer as its subjects of study, deconstructing their visual strategies that subvert traditional representations of warfare. By creatively adopting a “non-battlefield” approach, the films deliberately avoid the graphic combat scenes typical of war cinema. Instead, they anchor their depiction in highly aestheticized, indirect elements—such as sonic symbols, confined spaces, and individual micro-experiences—to construct a universal psychological landscape of war and nuclear threat. Viewed through the lens of postmodern theories, ...

Emerging from the Dust: Materiality of the Digital Changelings in Greg Egan's Permutation City

Guangzhao LYU    38-51

Column：Digital Reincarnation, Immortality, and Resurrection

Abstract：In Permutation City, Greg Egan’s “Dust Theory” presents a process where matter and information interweave and continually emerge. N. Katherine Hayles takes this into serious consideration, critiquing Hans Moravec’s “teleology of disembodiment” in his vision of digital resurrection. She argues that Moravec simplifies digital resurrection to a mere physical reproduction by transferring consciousness to a digital medium, neglecting the more complex mechanisms of information flow and generation behind it. Through concepts like “pattern/randomness” and the “computational universe,” Hayles emphasizes that ...

The Reality and Illusion of Digital Immortality: The Ethical Dilemma of Mind Uploading in Greg Egan's Science Fiction

Yinghe NIU    52-61

Column：Digital Reincarnation, Immortality, and Resurrection

Abstract：With the advent of the data age, mind uploading has become a prominent theme in science fiction narratives. While offering the tantalizing prospect of digital immortality, it also raises a host of thorny ethical issues. Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan explores the ethical dilemmas brought about by mind uploading in many of his works. In Egan’s literary imagination, this technology disrupts the personal identity by challenging the continuity and identity of the self, and undermines traditional intersubjective relationships. Moreover, mind uploading may give rise to new forms of inequality and social stratification,...

Voluntary Heterization and Mechanical Rebirth in Videogame Literature: A Case Study of Hollow Knight

Yan YU    62-71

Column：Digital Reincarnation, Immortality, and Resurrection

Abstract：Videogame literature inherits the tradition of defining life through narratives of mourning in print literature. While classic literary works advocate for natural humanity, creators and readers (i.e. gamers) of videogames tend to embrace life-forms of unnatural birth. This gives rise to a new concept of life which features voluntary heterization and mechanical rebirth. Metroidvania and Soulsborne/Souls-like games treat virtual life respectively as digital projection of real life and as teaching aids for spiritual growth. Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight combines both genres on the imagistic and narrative basis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” ...

The Turn of Chinoiserie: On the Thriving of the Discourse of Chinese Antique Connoisseurship and Collection in England from the Second Half of the 19th Century to the Early 20th Century

Jiajun TAO    72-87

Column：Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract：In the perspective of global history Chinoiserie in England experienced a turn from the vogue of Chinese cultural material consumption to the thriving of the discourse of Chinese antique connoisseurship and collection from the second half of the 19th century to the early 20th century. In the global network of Chinese antique sales, connoisseurship and collection polarized between China and England, the discourse of Chinese antique connoisseurship and collection involves three major sections such as the migration of antiques and knowledge, the museumification of antiques and the reconstruction of knowledge in site,...

The African American Narrative and the Historical Reconstruction in John Henry Days

Yudi LI    88-97

Column：Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract：The novel John Henry Days, written by the African American writer Colson Whitehead, revolves around the celebration of the stamp issuance of the legendary African American figure John Henry. Through multi-dimensional narratives spanning oral history interviews, ceremony proceedings, and railroad tunnel construction across different temporal and spatial contexts, the novel presents John Henry’s ambiguous, multifaceted, and even self-contradictory image. This legendary black figure, reduced to simplistic stereotypes and commercialized commodities within mainstream white narratives, is, in contrast, imbued with ...

The True Realm of Love: An Interpretation of Three Symbolic Groups in Tristan und Isolde

Wang ZHANG    98-111

Column：Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract：As one of the greatest works in the history of opera, Tristan und Isolde is an obscure philosophical drama. Wagner fused Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Buddhist thought, Feuerbach’s ideas, and the Young Germany’s view on love into his own unique philosophy of love, and then expressed it in a dramatic poem through a series of recurring symbols. This paper categorizes the central symbols in the work into three thematic groups and interprets the meaning of these groups to explore the central philosophical themes of Tristan und Isolde. The three symbolic groups are: (1) the love potion; (2) night,...

"Love Shall be Lord of All": Love and Marriage in Anthony Trollope's Lady Anna

Ni HU, Sufen WU    112-122

Column：Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract：In his novel Lady Anna, Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope deconstructs traditional class notions through a love triangle among Anna (earl’s daughter), Daniel (a tailor), and Frederic (earl’s heir). An analysis of the novel from both the story and discourse levels reveals that the novelist complicates romantic choices through intricate issues of property inheritance, thereby exposing the evolving notions of marriage: “marriage for affect” triumphs over “marriage for interest.” In addition, the novelist dexterously chooses dual voices and utilizes an authorial narrator to invite readers to encode and decode the novel....

The Narrative of Death and Critique of Television Culture in White Noise

Lu LI    132-144

Column：Literature and Media

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. ...

Mimetic Strategies of Media Discourse and Resistance Writing in The Sympathizer

Jiayi KANG, Zhongming BAO    145-156

Column：Literature and Media

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 ...

The Mysterious Frank: Dilemma of Secrets in Jane Austen's Emma

Qihe LIN    123-131

Column：Literature and Culture Studies

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, ...

Public Disaster and Existential Consciousness: On the Depiction of Hunger in A Hora da Estrela

Xuefei Min    3-13

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies

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.

Sketching the Non-Hero of the Brazilian Nation: Tension between Nationalism and Non-nationalism in Macunaíma

Xiaorui Chu    14-27

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies

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. ...

The Identity Dilemma of Japanese Brazilians: Cultural Dislocation and Integration in Nihonjin

Lin Ma    28-37

Column：Brazilian Literature Studies

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....

Cruentation and Imagination in the Context of Renaissance

Xiaodong Xu    38-58

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology

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...

The Evolution of Historical Perspective in Julian Barnes’s Novels

Yifan Meng    59-68

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology

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...

"Eternal Dance of the Scarecrows": On the Conception of History in Günter Grass' Hundejahre

Yi Liu    69-77

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology

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.

A "Substitute" for "Civilization": Indian Archaeology and Colonization in Porter's "María Concepción"

Zhaofang Cao    78-87

Column：Literature, History, and Archaeology

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.”