Volume 8, No. 4

This review examines Koreans in Japan literature through Lee Yangji ( 李良 枝 )’s works, particularly her collection Nabi T’aryŏng and Other Stories, highlighting its educational value in literature studies. Lee Yangji was a second-generation Korean in Japan whose writing reflects the complex identity struggles of Koreans in Japan. Her works explore themes of ethnic and cultural identity, societal discrimination, and the personal conflicts Koreans in Japan experience within both Japanese and Korean contexts. Nie Zhenzhao ( 聂珍钊 )’s “ethical literary criticism” provides a framework here, viewing literature as an “art of ethics” reflecting the moral life of specific historical periods. The review discusses earlier Korean authors in Japan like Kim Saryang and Kim Dalsu, who wrote about ethical conflicts arising from colonial pressures and identity crises. Post-liberation, Koreans in Japan continued to face discrimination, using literature as a platform to assert identity and human rights. For Lee, “ethical limbo” describes her characters’ emotional and psychological conflicts in reconciling Japanese societal norms with Korean heritage. In works like Nabi T’aŏng and Yuhi, Lee’s protagonists navigate intense personal and social conflicts, exemplifying the ethical dilemmas of Koreans in Japan. By doing so, Lee’s literature portrays their identity struggles as both ethical and existential, resonating with broader themes of displacement, exclusion, and resilience.

Chinese poetics originated in the pre-Qin period, while Western poetics emerged during the Hellenistic period. Despite the lack of direct communication and influence between the two traditions due to geographical distance and chronological separation, there are notable commonalities between Sino-Western thinkers. These commonalities are particularly evident in the ethical instruction, ethical harmony, moral passion and inspiration and ethics of rhetoric that are pursued and advocated by the scholars of different cultures. Guided by Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism, this paper compares the poetics of Confucius philosophy and Mingjia School with those of Plato, Aristotle, and the Sophists. It reveals the shared ethical concerns of Chinese and Western poetics within the context of their distinct cultural backgrounds and respective historical periods.

The Uniting of Human and Divine is a companion volume of the author Chen Zhongyi previous work, As I’ve Heard It. This novel exposes and condemns the evil deeds of “Master”: Cuihua who is deceitful, manipulative, and commits all kinds of atrocities. The story tells about professor Chen under the support of the government, the ideal world she stretched her mind to build was destroyed and she was ultimately brought to justice. In The Uniting of Human and Divine, the two prevalent ethical dilemmas presented are “old age” dilemma and “intergenerational” dilemma, which are interconnected and intertwined. This study delves into the ethical reconstruction predicament in The Uniting of Human and Divine and its underlying causes. Ultimately, it criticizes the ethical choices and sinful actions of “Cuihua” from the perspective of ethical literary criticism.

From a cognitive perspective, both the semantic generation and rhetorical effects of zeugma are depend on metaphor. In the case of a zeugma construction V+N1+N2, the substructure V+N1 typically represents a conventional combination, whereas V+N2 is a relatively abnormal expression and understanding it requires identifying and interpreting the metaphors. The metaphor in a zeugma is neither a simple cross-domain mapping where V+N1 serves as the source domain and V+N2 as the target domain, nor does it fully adhere to the categorization where V is the category and N1 and N2 are its elements. The reason is that there are different degrees and types of correlations between V+N1 and V+N2 components, and the agent’s understanding of the former part will affect the construction of the cognitive framework during the understanding of the latter part, so it is a dynamic process of conceptual integration. To address this dynamic understanding process, this paper follows the basic tenet of dynamic semantics, interpreting the meaning of the statement as the context change potential, and uses situation semantics describes the contextual variations and semantic generation of such expressions based on. Here, the change of contexts is reflected in the reconstruction of situation types, while the associations between the two substructures are the conventional constraints between situation types.

With the booming development of GPT and AI technology, artificial intelligence can be trained to compose poems with the similar styles and techniques of a particular human poet. Taking an AI poetry collection by Bernstein and Balula as an example, this essay compares the AI poems and Bernstein’s poems and explores the echoes between AI poems and Bernstein’s poems. According to the analysis, AI poems demonstrate many echoes with Bernstein’s poems in terms of themes and images etc., which successfully reflects Bernstein’s poetics, whereas generally AI poems can not emulate the rich cultural and literary connotations in Bernstein’s poems. The essay continues to probe into the relationship between AI poems and human poems, and ends with the reflection of the challenges facing AI poems and human poems in future.

Sandro Jung’s Eighteenth-Century Illustration and Literary Material Culture (2023), a book in the Cambridge Elements series, is heralded as a major breakthrough in the transmedial study of literary illustrations. Research to date has generally been done either on illustrated editions or on material objects. Professor Jung selects three prestigious eighteenth-century literary works, Robinson Crusoe, The Seasons and Pamela, in the case studies, and draws a range of primary sources to study the transmedial use of the illustrations. In particular, he examines the interplay among the illustrations, the material objects, the manipulations in adapting and reusing the illustrations, and the production of new meanings. In the light of the subject of the book, the review delineates the case studies, which are central to the book, and the methodology notable for a combination of illustration studies, material culture studies and transmediation studies, and concludes that the methodological juxtaposition yields valuable insights into the study of literature in the digital age.

Poetic Life and World Reflection of Black Venus: A Study of Rita Dove makes a systematic study of the African American poet laureate Rita Dove, focusing comprehensively on her poetry, fiction and drama, and making a multi-dimensional study of growth writing, space writing, historical writing and cultural poetics from the critical perspectives of gender politics, racial politics, and cosmopolitanism. This book adopts a dual-line study of dialectical thinking and parallel promotion of construction and deconstruction, showcasing the historical and current thematic concerns of Dove’s poetry under the logic of dual dialectics, and originally proposing unique Dove-orientated critical concepts such as “cultural hybrid” and “academic poetry.” This book adheres to literarity in its critical paradigm, returning from the discussion of gender and ethnic politics to artistic aesthetics, and constructing an underlying poetics for the criticism of black female poetry.

Given the great galaxy of British plays and playwrights of the twentieth century, an urgent mission for drama scholars goes to recreating a new research paradigm. Under the guidance of Ethical Literary Criticism, the recent monograph titled British Drama of the Twentieth Century contributes to this field by unfolding the grand panorama of twentieth-century British drama and focusing on such core factors as its history, schools, playwrights, texts, criticisms, theatres, troupes and audiences of drama. It analyzes major dramatists’ writing style shaped by ethical milieu and historical context as well as major characters’ ethical dilemma and ethical choice, and highlights the choices of science in the middle and late twentieth-century drama. Based on an all-factor survey inside and outside drama, this study in the book straddles both playwrights and theatres to reconstruct a new drama ecology, incorporate the frontier studies of British drama, and elicit many new voices for Chinese scholars.