This article rethinks “triviality” as a serious analytical lens within postcolonial critique. Drawing on philosophical lineages from Aristotle’s ideas on the “banal” to Lefebvre’s theory of everyday life, it argues that the marginal, the minor, and the apparently banal have long been centers of resistance in postcolonial contexts. The review traces how key theorists—including Spivak, Bhabha, Mbembe, and Glissant—implicitly attend to the everyday and subaltern “little things,” and how recent debates in affect and minor theory, such as Ngai’s “ugly feelings”, Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, Tsing’s “arts of noticing”, have renewed scholarly attention to ordinary life. In the digital age, cultural micro-forms—memes, TikTok reels, fanfiction, and webcomics—have emerged as significant sites through which postcolonial subjects articulate dissent and negotiate identity. Such trivial cultural forms blend global pop references with local commentary. Synthesizing these threads, the article proposes a “postcolonial triviality” framework, highlighting how everyday aesthetics and viral ephemera challenge dominant power by enabling micro-resistance. However, these banal forms can be co-opted or dismissed. The article calls for future work in vernacular digital humanities and transnational micro-cultural analysis. Altogether, the trivial lens expands postcolonial critique to include mundane, digital, and vernacular voices, arguing that studying minor, everyday forms is essential for decolonial scholarship.
Since the 20th century, the escalating global ecological crisis has prompted eco-linguistics to provide theoretical perspectives for interpreting ecological discourses, yet limited research has integrated Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis with the transitivity system to reveal their underlying ecological values. This study adopted explanatory sequential design combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. Using Universal Architecture for Multimodal (UAM) Corpus Tool, it statistically examines the distribution of transitivity processes in the white paper, Marine Ecological Environment Protection in China, released by the State Council Information Office in July 2024, followed by a qualitative interpretation of ecological values embedded in the transitivity system under Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. The study focuses on three core issues: (1) the distribution characteristics of the transitivity system in the description stage; (2) the interaction relationship between the transitivity system and the ecological environment; (3) the non-ecological characteristics and ecological values reflected by the transitivity system. Theoretically, this study extends Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and the transitivity system to marine ecological discourse, enriching research perspectives. Practically, it reveals ecological values in marine discourse, raises environmental awareness, and offers linguistic guidance for environmental communication.
This study investigates the translator styles of Qiao Zhigao and Wu Ningkun through the use of speech-act report verbs (SARVs) in their Chinese translations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Moving beyond qualitative discussion of isolated examples, it adopts a combined corpus-driven and corpus-based approach to examine recurrent linguistic and strategic patterns in the translators’ work. Drawing on a self-compiled English–Chinese parallel corpus, keyword analysis is first employed to identify salient SARVs in each translation. These keywords are then traced in aligned concordance data, and their translational variants are grouped and compared to reveal divergences in lexical patterning. The study further applies Nida’s (1964) techniques of adjustment—addition, subtraction, and alteration—while introducing retention as a complementary analytical category to examine the patterned use of translation techniques underlying these differences. The findings reveal recurrent differences between the two translators at both lexical and strategic levels. Lexically, the two translators display different preferences in the selection and range of SARVs. Strategically, Wu more frequently retains source-text reporting patterns and favors more standardized renderings, whereas Qiao more often employs adaptive techniques that produce more varied and context-sensitive formulations. These findings suggest distinct translational tendencies in the handling of SARVs and indicate that this linguistic feature can serve as a useful, though necessarily limited, window on translator style.
As a part of language, idioms are a concentrated manifestation of the national civilization, whose meaning and formation are intimately linked. China and England are widely different in material conditions, spiritual civilization and historical background. These disparities are also revealed in idioms. Besides, Chinese and English idioms share many resemblances, which are mainly found with idioms that deliver the life experience or express personal emotions, or those rhythmic ones. Based on the growth of Chinese and English idioms, this paper attempts to provide several efficient translation means for idioms from the viewpoint of cultural differences, hoping that these translation means can cast light on idiom translation.
This paper examines T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through the lens of social acceleration and temporal alienation, offering a new interpretation of Prufrock’s psychological paralysis. Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration, the paper argues that the fragmentation and indecision in Prufrock’s character mirror the effects of an increasingly accelerated modern world. It suggests that Prufrock’s hesitation and his obsession with time are not simply individual traits but reflections of a broader societal condition, where technological progress and the compression of time contribute to a loss of meaning and disconnection from self. By exploring Prufrock’s internal struggles that reflect temporal dislocation and alienation, the paper demonstrates the profound psychological impact of living in a world dominated by speed, technological progress, and the relentless measurement of time. Ultimately, it argues that Prufrock’s crisis is emblematic of the modern existential dilemma faced by individuals caught in a fast-moving, time-compressed society.
