Volume 9, No. 2

This article examines the Spanish dystopian film The Platform as a narrative allegory of global food inequality and structural injustice. Grounded in Nie Zhenzhao’s Ethical Literary Criticism, the analysis explores how the film constructs a moral system through its institutional design-one that removes private ownership, disconnects entitlement from labor, and subjects access to arbitrary mechanisms of control. Rather than portraying scarcity as a natural condition, the film frames hunger as a consequence of ethical failure embedded in systemic design. By juxtaposing the narrative’s spatial and institutional architecture with real-world food systems, the study clarifies how dystopian storytelling can reflect and strategically invert global structures of inequality. Through this approach, this article demonstrates the capacity of ethical literary analysis to critically engage with cinematic texts and illuminate how fictional narratives can function as frameworks for examining the moral architecture of contemporary global systems.

The ancient Greek myth of Epimetheus, as a metaphor for revealing the “mutual invention” of humans and technology, has ushered in a new variant in the cyberspace era-digital mnemonics, based on various digital “prosthétique,” which not only empower human memory practices but also have the potential to dissolve human subjectivity. William Gibson incorporates this dilemma in the philosophy of technology into his science fiction writing. At the intersection of cyber aesthetics and the dilemma of digital mnemonics, Gibson explores the ways in which digital mnemonics dissolve human subjectivity, including “emotional manipulation” and “cultural implantation”; examines different situations and reasons for the success or failure of human resistance; and questions the contemporary cultural symptoms of relying on digital mnemonics. This study argues that not relying excessively on digital mnemonics, embracing the transience of memory, and upholding individual differences are essential principles for memory practices in the cyberspace era.

The encounter between A. S. Byatt and Shen Congwen, though seemingly serendipitous, is rooted in their integration of “heliotropism” with life, nature, art, and culture in their journeys of reading imagination and geographic discoveries. This integration formed a “heliotropic life aesthetics” that resists individual existential anxieties and national survival crises. However, while existing scholarship has examined their “heliotropic imagination” or “life poetics” respectively, it has largely overlooked their convergences as a whole and neglected the crucial ethical dimension. By looking into their shared “heliotropism,” the present paper seeks to explore the core characteristics and narrative forms of their life aesthetics, specifically revealing its inherent ethical concern. It is through their enquiries into such paradoxical issues as life and death, light and shadow, stillness and flux, home-leaving and home-coming, that the two writers achieve the transposition of self and the other, thus forging a profound connection with the outside world. Drawing strength from their “heliotropic odyssey” across intersecting cultures and ideas, they offer rich intellectual resources and artistic paradigms for reconstructing an open and diversified “heliotropic metaphor.”

In the context of closely aligning Translation Studies and sustainability discourse within the interdisciplinary framework of Environmental Humanities, this article argues for translation as sustainability, which can be manifested by the two notions of “translatable sustainability” and “sustainable translation.” Meanwhile, it aims to establish a Daoist sustainable translation framework by embedding core Daoist eco-ethical principles such as buzheng, zipu, xin, and mei into existing sustainability tenets, in guiding translation behaviours. The case revolving around the British and American reception of Daodejing demonstrates the conduciveness of integrating sustainability considerations into translation practices to preserving and disseminating the ecological wisdom of the source-language text. Ultimately, the sustainability of Daodejing rests upon its inherent sustainable ecological vision that uniquely and continuously enchants Western readers, and this enduring appeal is also enhanced by the diverse range of translations that continually revitalize the source text and facilitate its broader dissemination. The conceptualization of translation as a sustainable practice facilitates the transfer and cross-pollination of ecological ideas across different cultures and informs translators’ better engagement with the Anthropocene’s ecological quandaries, encouraging their dutiful pursuit of a sustainable Earth via translation.

Prof. Song Binghui’s Studies of Literature from Marginalized Nations in Modern China, with a Focus on Eastern European Literature was published in 2024 jointly by Peking University Press and Springer. With both clarity and thoroughness, the book highlights the long-neglected topic of the translation and reception of literature from marginalized nations in China, proposes an effective approach to the complex and multi-layered literary relations via historical exploration of translated literature, and contributes to the supplement and specification of the term “weak (culture/nation)” that is one of the most frequently occurring notion in translation theories and cross-cultural studies. In terms of the research methodology, the author has combined diachronic survey and synchronic case analyses. While such combination is now a common practice by the scholars dealing with the history of translated literature, what’s special about this book is the author’s concentrated perspective of observation through multi-faceted prism, i.e., viewing the translation of Eastern European literature as an indispensable aspect of the construction of Chinese national consciousness and modern Chinese literature and thus encompassing the diversified topics and scenarios under discussion as the integral constituents of the research. The accomplishment of the study with high maturity is due to the author’s rich experiences in both comparative literature and translation studies and his superb mastery of the research methods. A significant advancement in both fields, it sets a model for the composition of critical histories of translated literature of extreme “richness and complexity.”

This essay revisits the intertwined relationship of nation-state to empire in the time of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Liang Zhan’s wide-ranging and penetrative monography, Empire’s Imagination: Civilization, Ethnicity, and Unfinished Community. Liang’s interdisciplinary analysis sketches a panorama of the world. It reveals a vexed situation in which the emergence of the nation-state was simultaneously the betrayal of and the loyalty to the empire. Confined by the intellectual, social-political conditions of the historical moment, rebuilding or strengthening a strong national unity, either imagined or practiced, was doomed to be hard and unfinished. In a transcendental sense, humans, regardless of race, ethnicity, or culture, intrinsically long for an ideal community to maximize the guarantee of security and prosperity. Both historical and present practices illuminate that building a human community benefiting the whole world requires highly intellectual wisdom to avoid being spoiled by colonialist and imperialist ideas.

A History of American Women’s Literature (2023), published by The Commercial Press, is a systematic study of American Women’s Literature, covering 388 female writers across 370 years-from the North American colonial period to the 21st century. Based on the genealogy of gender politics, combining literary historiography with literary criticism, the book offers a panoramic view of American women’s literary history. Besides, it is a study of the evolution of American women’s literature and its historical transformations from the perspective of Chinese scholars. Undoubtedly, this study will further enhance the understanding of American women and their literature in China, and exert a profound influence on the writing and study of American literary history, and even world literary history.

Spatial Literary Criticism is a prime collection of Professor Fang Ying’s achievements in the spatial literary studies over the last decade. This new monograph focuses mainly on exploring the cutting-edge subjects in the western spatial literary studies and major spatial types in literature, including such scopes or issues as the space and power, space and existence, space and ideology, space and gender, and space and ethics, etc.. Furthermore, the author also attempts to probe into some related issues of the Marxist spatial criticism in the book. From the unique perspective and mission of a Chinese scholar, the monograph delves into the research paradigm and problematic domains of the spatial literary criticism in a concise and comprehensive manner, exploring possible paths for contemporary literary criticism. It reflects the author’s academic spirit of extensive observation and concise selection, as well as her unremitting pursuit of truth. At the same time, it also represents the cutting-edge achievements and significant breakthroughs in China. In view of its academic values and practical significance mentioned above, the new monograph by professor Fang Ying is worthy of attention and study.

In his new book Breaking Boundaries and “Making It New”: Oriental Elements in Western Modernism, Qian Zhaoming offers a systematic reconstruction of the developmental logic of Western modernism. Challenging conventional views from both spatial and temporal dimensions, he convincingly demonstrates the trajectory of modernism’s evolution-from high modernism in the early 20th century, through its decline by the mid-century, to two significant revivals in the 1960s and the early 21st century. At the same time, the book shifts the perspective on modernist studies from a purely “Western-centric” framework to a more nuanced context of East-West cultural interaction. Moving beyond the traditional literary scope, Qian extends his analysis to a wide array of art forms, including visual arts, music, dance, theatre, film, and architecture. The book pays particular attention to individuals with Chinese cultural background and their contributions to the creation and shaping of modernist classics. Thus by combining cutting-edge theoretical interpretation with detailed readings of specific works, and by uncovering the lesser-known Chinese cultural narratives behind iconic pieces, this work provides valuable insights for scholars of modernism, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as general readers interested in the cultural histories behind great artistic achievements.