Discussions on whether Mandarin Chinese can become a or the global language in both popular and scholarly publications have largely focused on the global macroeconomic, socio-political, and geostrategic factors to ascertain this linguistic possibility. By contrast, this paper analyzes the issue from a narrower perspective using linguistic and sociolinguistic theories. It offers linguistic perspectives on the politically-loaded and power-driven terms “global language” and “global lingua franca,” the potentialities of Mandarin Chinese as a global lingua franca, and the global linguistic community that is described as multilingual and multiglossic.
The aristocratic gentleman in Shakespearean romantic comedy and the witty trickster in Jonsonian satirical comedy represent the dual traditions of English Renaissance comedy, yet both are flawed: the former lacks agency in resolving conflicts, while the latter exhibits uncivility. In The Way of the World, William Congreve transcends these models by creating Mirabell as a Lockean gentleman—a synthesis of the aristocratic protagonist’s grace and the trickster’s resourcefulness. Inspired by John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Mirabell embodies rational self-governance, moral discipline, and contractual pragmatism. His victory over the antagonist through legal ingenuity (rather than violence) symbolizes the triumph of Lockean social order over Hobbesian absolutism, reflecting the play’s innovative engagement with post-1688 political philosophy.
Given its direct borrowings from and intertextual relations to other similar texts, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” has often been accused of flagrant plagiarism or lack of originality. Such a simple assertion ignores not only Poe’s deviation from these sources but also his rationale for such initiatives. While duly recognizing Poe’s indebtedness to his predecessors and contemporaries, this paper proposes to examine Poe’s literary re-creation and parody by concentrating on his subtle treatment of these borrowed texts, and in so doing, look also at his subversive approach to colonialist discourses. It suggests that in recounting Bedloe’s encounters with “Indians” in America and Asia, the tale actually creates a world of doubles to connect the present with the past, the imperial with the exotic, and the self with the other. In this regard, Dr. Templeton’s mesmeric treatment of Bedloe is both a reenactment and purgation of haunting colonial memories. The so-called medical accident at the end of the tale, therefore, registers Poe’s reflection on and warning against the imperial mindset.
Professor Deidre Lynch from the Department of English at Harvard University published a chapter entitled “Love of Literature” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory in 2022. During the author’s visiting scholarship at the Department of English at Harvard from 2022 to 2023, an interview was conducted with Professor Lynch focusing on this chapter, exploring the role of “love of literature” in literary studies. Lynch discusses the continuity between her 2015 book Loving Literature: A Cultural History and her 2022 chapter in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, emphasizing her long-term focus on the historical evolution of literary affections, which originated from classroom interactions, particularly teaching Jane Austen. She critiques the misleading dichotomy between literary theorists and “literature lovers,” arguing that affective engagement has always been central to literary scholarship and teaching. The interview delves into the “affective turn,” “return to aesthetics,” and their connections to the “ethical turn” in Western literary theory in the 21st century, noting parallels with developments in Chinese literary theory. Lynch highlights how literary affections intersect with intersectional politics, enabling social changes through shared literary experiences. Through tracing back to the 18th-century structural transformation in reader-text relationships, which privatized literary intimacy, Lynch offers insights on the value of literary studies in contemporary education of humanities amid global challenges.
In the first thirty years of contemporary Chinese literature, the approach to Western classical literature was complex. On the one hand, the translation and research of Western literary works before the 20th century saw significant progress. On the other hand, interpretation was marked by caution and high vigilance: there was a persistent focus on class and socio-historical criticism to identify the “limitations” of the times and class depicted in the works, in order to guard against the “negative factors” potentially hindering the cultivation of a new socialist people and new literature. In 1964, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth was commemorated with events around the world. During the Cold War, different countries marked the occasion in various ways, and critics from different political and cultural backgrounds provided distinctly different interpretations of Shakespeare. This highlighted the close relationship between this global cultural event and the international and domestic political situations, as well as differing political ideologies.
This essay traces the complex trajectory of socialist realism as both a creation principle and a critical framework in modern Chinese literary history. Beginning with the transmission of Soviet literary theory, particularly through the 1950s reception of Ivanov S. Pidakov’s An Introduction to Literary Theory, the paper examines how Chinese intellectuals struggled with the interpretive enigma of socialist realism, oscillating between its official programmatic definition and its contradictory literary practice. By revisiting the roles of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Zhdanov, and other Soviet writers and literary critics, the essay highlights the entanglement of realism, naturalism, and romanticism in shaping the aesthetic and ideological imperatives of Chinese literature. It argues that the genealogy of realism in China, stretching from naturalism and critical realism to socialist realism and beyond, cannot be understood without accounting for this transnational circulation of theory and its selective adaptation. Moreover, the study foregrounds the tensions between ideological prescription and artistic autonomy, demonstrating how socialist realism operated less as a stable method than as an “invisible code” structuring both creation and criticism. In doing so, it reconsiders the fate of naturalism in Chinese literary discourse and calls for a renewed dialectical approach to realism, romanticism, and their afterlives in the post-socialist era.
While studies exploring the emotions experienced by translators have recently proliferated, few of these have focused on literary translators’ emotions by taking into account the defining features of literary texts, and examinations of the influence of the translator’s emotions on the translated text and its reception are rare. The present study focuses on literary translators’ emotions, taking as a case study Gladys Yang and her translation of the Chinese short story “Love Must Not Be Forgotten.” It draws on the distinction between fiction emotion and artefact emotion proposed by the film scholar Ed Tan and subsequently developed by literary scholars. This paper explores the emotions that Gladys Yang experienced most strongly as a translator-cum-reader and their influence on her translation and the work’s subsequent reception. It emerges that Yang’s response to the source text is dominated by fiction emotion rather than artefact emotion, in contrast to findings reported in previous scholarship on common literary readers. The dominant fiction emotion, on the one hand, manifests in the translated text as the highlighted thematic idea via the translator’s rewriting of characters’ speech and repetition of the thematic concept. On the other hand, it leads to the underrepresentation of formal features, such as metaphor, particularly those that are offensive. This study also finds that the translator’s dominant fiction emotion, in both translation and paratext, may influence the work’s reception among its target readers, who exhibit emotional responses that are similar to those of the translator upon reading the work.
This study explores the phenomenon of “despair” in South Korea through a situational analysis of media reports. Despite economic growth, South Korea faces severe social issues including one of the world’s lowest birth rates, highest suicide rates, and significant wealth inequality. Drawing parallels to the “deaths of despair” observed in the United States, this research investigates how socio-cultural factors contribute to widespread despair in South Korea. Using Big Kinds, a Korean news big data system, the study analyzes 1,091 despair-related news articles from 2009 to 2024. Through situational, relational, and positional mapping, the research identifies key themes such as unemployment, non-regular employment, and suicide as major contributors to despair. The findings reveal that despair in South Korea is deeply intertwined with structural issues like meritocracy, inequality, and the lack of social safety nets. The study concludes that addressing despair requires comprehensive policies to foster hope, ensure job stability, and strengthen social support systems, alongside addressing individual psychological factors.
If our focus is only applied to Western countries, then the concept of “mobility” may bear on such areas as social phenomena, cultural ideas, and literary themes; hence the possibility to examine what the concept contains and how it has evolved in the past from different perspectives, especially with regard to how different authors represent it in their works. With an expansion of our horizon, we may revisit the ideological elements pertinent to “mobility” that mark the dawning moments in Western modernity, such as ideas related to the Protestant Reformation and the rise of the middle class. A further expansion of our view may lead to a longer historical period of Western culture and literature, informed with other elements of mobility. This may enable an interaction between our topic and age-old literary themes, the Ulysses theme as a case in point. Thoughts evolving from such examinations may also enliven our awareness of some obvious differences between Chinese and Western literatures.
In assessing the quality of poetry, George Santayana advanced a graded criterion that may be termed a “trilevel theory.” Although this conception originally emerged from his reflections on poetry, it came to serve as an overarching framework for his broader literary vision, mirroring his views on some literary elements such as form, matter, and theme. What is especially compelling is the latent unity of Santayana’s diverse intellectual roles—philosopher, aesthetician, and literary critic—within this literary structure. His pursuit of aesthetic excellence, advocacy of realism and literary tradition, philosophical commitment to naturalism and rationalism, and his sense of responsibility as an intellectual are all organically integrated within this idea.
This article examines Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People through the intersecting frameworks of grotesque realism and unnatural narrativity to explore how form and language mediate subaltern experience. Set in the aftermath of a fictionalized Bhopal disaster, the novel defies conventional narrative structures through a posthuman narrator, Animal, whose grotesque hybrid identity challenges anthropocentric and neoliberal paradigms. The analysis foregrounds how Sinha employs bodily imagery, obscenity, and narrative fragmentation to critique dominant institutions such as law, medicine, and global capitalism. Particular emphasis is placed on scenes of defecation, self-cannibalism, and grotesque sexuality, which serve as symbolic acts of resistance and protest. Drawing on theorists such as Bakhtin, Fludernik, and Richardson, among several others, the article interrogates the novel’s narrative inconsistencies, polyphonic structure, and the limits of representability for marginalized subjects. It argues that Animal’s People redefines narrative voice by merging the abject with the comic, the human with the animal, and the real with the unnatural. Ultimately, the study contributes to broader scholarly conversations in posthumanism, ecocriticism, and subaltern studies by illustrating how grotesque and unnatural elements challenge established boundaries of genre, voice, and power.
This interview was conducted between Yves Gambier and Wang Yili in February 2024 in Turku, Finland, in order to give an overview of audiovisual translation (AVT) in the context of modern technology. In this interview, the current status of AVT in translation studies was discussed first, followed by the impact of technology on emerging issues such as cloning of voice, manipulation of images, and the changes of roles of audiences in AVT. The subsequent discussion focused on the difficulty in investigating audience receptions and possible solutions. The last part was an analysis of the future development of AVT.
This article explores the intricate relation between translation and the Nobel Prize in Literature through the lens of a special case: the 1939 award to Finnish novelist Frans Eemil Sillanpää. The discussions in the Nobel committee, and the decision of the Swedish Academy to select Sillanpää for the prize, were deeply affected by the long and complicated political and cultural history of neighbors Sweden and Finland, as well as the Soviet bombings of several Finnish cities in the autumn of 1939. This article argues, however, that the translations of Sillanpää’s novels into Swedish were just as important, and what mattered was not only that they were translated but also how and by whom they had been made accessible for Swedish-speaking readers. The 1939 Nobel Prize to Frans Eemil Sillanpää is a case of two neighboring nations with a common colonial past, two close and overlapping cultural and political positions, and two very dissimilar languages.
The relation between the three basic genres—epic, poetry, drama—is often characterized through comparative descriptions of form, themes, plot, and characters. Despite their multiple variations and subgenres, the overarching genres are grosso modo recognizable across periods and cultures. Yet, when the problem of translation is introduced in the genre description a fundamental difference comes to the surface. While epic and poetry may or may not be translated without losing their genre status or their value, a dramatic text must be translated from text to stage. The text itself may or may not be translated; but being only a pre-text for a performance, its status as a dramatic text, rather than just a text, requires a multidimensional translation for every performance. This constitutive translation—in a broad understanding of translation—and its relation to the dramatic text, itself subject to a verbal translation or not, provides the dramatic text with a unique dynamic cultural significance. With a focus on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s and Lorenzo da Ponte’s recreation of Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais’s French comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (1783) as the Italian opera Le nozze di Figaro (1786), the article discusses constitutive translation.
This article shows how collaboration reshapes literary processes of retelling and reads activist rewritings of refugee stories against the backdrop of the frame tale, which constitutes one of the main genres for narrating someone else's story in literary history. Focusing on Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee, Marie Cosnay's Des îles, and Matthieu Aikins's The Naked Don't Fear the Water, I argue that collaboration redefines the vertical relationship and spatiotemporal division that characterize the dynamics between storyteller and protagonist, between frame narrative and inner story in literary traditions of retelling. However, by engaging with the paradoxes of (in)visibility in processes of translation, the article also points to the asymmetries that emerge when Aikins, Cosnay, and Nayeri, take on more agency in their role as activist retellers and translators, unveiling the reverberations that the latent structures of the frame tale have in texts that, at first sight, do not classify as such. The source of this tension, I contend, is a reconfigured relationship between literature and politics that challenges the idea that writing, in and of itself, is already a humanizing act that can be detached from political action.
This paper examines intra-national translation flows in Belgium over a 50-year period (1970–2020), focusing on how books circulate between two of the country’s official languages, Dutch and French, within a plurilingual literary space. By applying a “Big Translation History” approach, the study reveals the influence of language status, location, genre, actor roles, and publishing practices on translation dynamics. Notably, Belgian publishers control a significant portion of the market for comics and children’s literature, demonstrating a distinct national production culture for these genres, whereas a prestigious genre like the novel is to a large extent in the hands of dominant neighboring states that share the same language (France and the Netherlands). The paper nuances the traditional center-periphery model in Translation Studies and suggests that intra-national translation flows are influenced not only by global language hierarchies but also by other factors such as genre and publishing location, providing a richer understanding of cultural exchange in multilingual states.
In semi-peripheral and peripheral cultures, where the status of literary translation tends to be high, respectable poets with significant institutional prestige produce many translations. The purpose can be twofold: to mediate foreign literature to a domestic audience, and to develop the vernacular poetic diction through experimenting with the various ways of expressing alien literariness. Both parts of this description of the purpose of translation are target oriented, but the selection of what to translate is also important. Hungarian modernist poets of the 20th century undertook several major translation projects, and also published collections of poetic translations. Volumes of translations by a single translator practically appear as world literature anthologies, even if the translators tend to deny such ambitions in paratexts. Most of the important Hungarian modernists published such volumes, displaying a rich variety of ideas about world literature.
This article proposes that the translation violence of the colonizing process—in terms of the confrontation between oral languages and ones with written grammars—coupled with the institutionalization of a given language as the national one, contains both a memory of the silencing of indigenous languages and cultures, and of transculturation. The latter, in turn, manifests itself, among other ways, through books that in different ways deal with the relationship between the West and descendants of the first-nation peoples of South America (especially in Circum-Roraima, the triple-border region between Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana) and those of African descent (particularly in discussions about the use of the colonizer’s language or the indigenous languages by writers from former colonies).
This paper compares the linguistic revolutions of Russian Cubo-Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov and the American avant-garde poet and publisher Eugene Jolas in terms of their translatability. These two are prime examples for comparison because both were not only avid poets, but also renegade theorists engaged in apotropaic linguistic revolutions, desperately striving to stave off (or at least delay) the looming apocalypse via their words. While Khlebnikov strives to recreate a primeval language of transparency based on an exoteric mathematical structure, Eugene Jolas intentionally mixes languages to reflect more about their relations than mere words. Both strategies render the poetry of Khlebnikov and Jolas practically untranslatable but for very divergent reasons.
In my article, I base myself on 19 different translations into English of Li Bai’s well-known poem “Jing Ye Si” (静夜思). These translations were published between 1898 and 2019, and I comment on how the ways of converting “Jing Ye Si” into a poem in English have changed over time. But first and foremost, I look at how various translators have dealt with some specific translation problems in the poem and with the overall challenge of recreating “Jing Ye Si” in English as an artistic whole. I conclude with some more general reflections on texts, meanings, and translations.
