In view of the salient characteristics of technological innovation and human-machine symbiosis in the era of artificial intelligence, Chinese literary circles have purveyed a productive exploration of "literary study in the era of artificial intelligence." Chinese scholars' innovation of literary theory consists of three characteristics. First, they have established the original theory of "brain text," systematically analyzed the definition, formation mechanism, and relationship between "brain text" and literature, language, text, and cognition, and applied this theory to literary criticism. Second, on the basis of sorting out and summarizing the core viewpoints of Western digital humanities theory, Chinese scholars have carried out indigenized innovations, promoted the research of machine reading in digital humanities, and proposed the paradigm of online literary criticism. Third, Chinese scholars have accepted and promoted the posthuman theory of Western academic circles, thereupon formulating independent critical discourses by means of classification, distinction, and selection. Chinese scholars' innovation of literary criticism is reflected in the following aspects. They continue to promote ethical literary criticism, paying closer attention to environmental ethics, biotechnology ethics, and robot ethics. At the same time, they have expanded the issues of literary criticism from the dimensions of body and emotion, focusing on such novel topics as virtual body, new subject, artificial emotion, and non-human narrative. They have also explored the generative mechanism, nature, limitations, and potentials of AI literature.

ABSTRACT The Chinese poetic concept qiyun shengdong (气韵生动), often translated as “Rhythmic Vitality,” exerted an inspirational influence on the novelistic innovations of British writer Virginia Woolf through translation and reinterpretation. In the early twentieth century, British sinologists and art critics not only translated Xie He’s concept of qiyun shengdong from classical Chinese aesthetics but also integrated its core ideas into the English literary concept of “rhythm,” thereby transcending its technical connotations and elevating it to the level of inner spiritual vitality. By synthesizing her understanding of Chinese painting and Eastern fiction with the interpretations of qiyun shengdong proposed by Laurence Binyon and Roger Fry, Woolf redefined the essence of “rhythm” and implemented this reimagined concept in her novel To the Lighthouse. In the work, qi manifests as a life force that fuses things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity into a harmonious whole; yun is embodied in the plastic structure and narrative fluidity; and shengdong unfolds through the dialectical unity of the complex relationships among world, life, and art. Woolf’s creative experimentation illuminates the innovative vigor born from the collision and fusion of Chinese and Western intellectual traditions.

Harper Lee portrays racial conflicts in the southern United States through her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which is based on the "Scottsboro Boys" case and has been celebrated as the "moral Bible" of the United States. However, scrutinizing the novel from the perspective of the ethical literary criticism, we may discover that the work reflects an ethical stance which pins hope of resolving racial conflicts on the high morality of the upper-middle-class whites. This stance is apparent in Harper Lee's rewriting strategies of vulgarizing the underclass whites, muting the collective voice of black individuals, and constructing a "moral myth" of the white mainstream. This ethical position not only reflects the widespread belief among the southern middle and upper classes that a few degenerate poor whites are responsible for racial conflicts, but also aligns with the public opinion in the South during the Civil Rights Movement and the political needs of the United States to resolve the crisis of "Americanness" during the Cold War.

钱兆明教授的《跨越与创新:西方现代主义的东方元素》是国家社会科学基金后期资助项目的最终成果,2023年由北京大学出版社出版.这是一部关于西方现代主义文学与东方文化交触关系的最新学术专著,是钱兆明数十年学术研究的再一次拓展与创新.

Amy C. Smith’s Virginia Woolf’s Mythical Method is a multiperspective monograph, promoting Virginia Woolf’s mythic study through an organic combination of mythical, political, feministic, and aesthetic analyses. Smith intends to revive “the study of myth in Woolf’s work by showing that Woolf mythic method is a primary aesthetic vehicle for expressing critical views about the role of modern epistemological and metaphysical assumptions in social structure” (3), and makes possible a revealing of Woolf’s distinctive mythic method, aesthetic structure, feminist innovation, and political critique. It reframes its arguments in the contexts of the latest mythic and feminist scholarship and helps deepen our understanding of Virginia Woolf.Unlike some other Woolf mythic studies, which merely focus on myth in Woolf fiction or influence of Jane Harrison’s scholarship on Woolf, Smith takes a feminist-based mythic-political critical approach, full of challenging thinking. Smith clarifies in the “Introduction” that Woolf’s mythic method is “paratactic” (4), and she analyzes its connotations from several different perspectives. Firstly, Woolf’s paratactic mythic method reflects her feminist vision, which regards myth as “a powerful disordered and disordering influence and to prioritize the indeterminate style of oral literature” (2), and it is absolutely different from T. S. Eliot’s “controlling and ordering” (2) mythical method. Secondly, it fits modernist aesthetics, which emphasizes the disruption of hierarchy, fragmentation, and the reader’s active construction of meaning, presenting ideas, and events in equilibrium without providing logical connections. Thirdly, it resists one-to-one correspondences between characters and figures from myth, and its mythic allusions are not singular or linear, but multiple and contradictory. Fourthly, it reveals Woolf’s critique of rational materialism prevailing at the time and Woolf’s political vision, through her adaption and revision of Greek myth and her intersection and disordering of mythic structures. All these connotations are discussed in five chapters in detail, focusing on the characters in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts and their allusive association with three groups of mythic figures, namely the Mother Goddess, deities associated with the Thesmophoria and Eleusinian mysteries and myth, and vegetation gods including Dionysus. The structure of the monograph itself is paratactic, similar to Woolf’s mythic method, which parallels Woolf’s mythic vision with her political vision in each chapter, displaying both Woolf’s aesthetic innovation and humanistic critique.In her first chapter, “Clarissa’s Eleusinian Desires,” Smith analyzes Woolf’s two revisions of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Thesmophoria and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Mrs. Dalloway. Smith holds that Woolf is aware of the difficulties of replanting archaic values and social structure into the modern world; she, therefore, revises the Homeric Hymn in two ways. Firstly, she changes the Hymn’s portrayal of female community and their emotionally intimate relationships into a spiritual women’s community organized around lesbian relationships by focusing on Artemis, a minor character in the Hymn. Secondly, she changes the Hymn’s portrayal of female community as cooperative and ethical in comparison to a violent and dominating patriarchal presence into a mature woman’s (Mrs. Dalloway) “critique of patriarchy, Empire and the class structure that led to the war” (26). To Smith, Woolf creates a kaleidoscopic allusion to the Hymn and its accompanying rituals, rather than a one-to-one correspondence between Woolf’s characters and the Eleusinian figures, and she destabilizes her mythic references by alluding to both Persephone and Artemis, goddesses who combine death with fertility in different ways. Smith believes that through revising the mythic figures and emphasizing paradox and inconsistency in matrifocal material, Woolf forms a paratactic presentation of archaic myth, which not only develops a complex understanding of the relationship between feminism and archaic myth, but also provides a powerful critique of imperialist, capitalist, and patriarchal modes of relation.In the second chapter, “Septimus’s Dionysian Sacrifice,” Smith argues that Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway is described not as a figure of insanity but a symbol associated with Dionysus and other vegetation gods, who embodies “irrationality in a broader sense that poses deeper challenges to modernity” (51). Woolf presents her mythic vision through allusions to the dying and reborn vegetation god in Septimus, demonstrating the conflicted interdependence of rationality and irrationality in modernity and the dangers of attempting to diminish the irrational. Smith believes that Woolf establishes her vision through revising the motif of dying and reborn vegetation god theorized by Harrison and Frazer, as she does with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, to emphasize in Septimus “a Nietzschean vision of unity with nature, sacrifice and culture renewal that specifically targets modern rationality” (56). To Smith, what is important is that Woolf balances a respect for the mythic cognition with a critical perspective on naïve celebrations of the archaic irrational, and her critique of modernity, rationalism, and anti-rationalism recalls an appropriate view that “civilization requires the interweaving dance of rational and irrational to develop” (67). In general, Woolf’s allusions to Dionysus and Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle in Septimus are paratactic, which suggests “both the promise of a return to the archaic irrational and the limits of such a return” (68).The third chapter, “Peter Walsh’s Primitivist Odyssey,” examines the mythic realm of Peter Walsh in his primitivist fantasies of goddesses in Mrs. Dalloway. In the novel, Peter Walsh’s journey across London resembles Odysseus’s voyage home in his primitivist fantasies of women and preoccupation with British civilization, and by linking Peter with Odysseus Woolf highlights the mutual dependence of imperialism and primitivism. The mythic paratactic vision is presented through paralleling Peter’s primitivist fantasies of women into supernatural fullness and exotic relief with Peter’s explicit critiques of British imperialism and militarism. Smith illustrates that Woolf satirizes Peter’s “unwillingness to recognize that feminine domesticity and primitivism he celebrates support the masculine imperialism he criticizes” (23), which arouses our attention to the fascination of some Western artists “with non-Western cultures as a lost paradise in contrast to repressive European modernity” (74). In contrast to some avant-garde primitivists, who appropriate primitive cultures to reinforce Western superiority, Woolf understands the primitive myths as something exceeding, which may help bring real change.The fourth chapter “The Goddess in the Lighthouse” further discusses Woolf’s mythic method in To the Lighthouse, with shifting and competing visions of the Great Goddess as the core. Smith indicates that Woolf’s paratactic mythic method in To the Lighthouse is presented through “a tension within feminism regarding matrifocal societies and the Great Goddess” (91). Woolf disorders her portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay by arranging divergent mythic figures so that at times Mrs. Ramsay suggesting Demeter, and at others Artemis, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, or even Persephone, and each goddess associated with Mrs. Ramsay is multifaceted. This unstable paratactic structure of allusion in the characterization of Mrs. Ramsay reflects both the structure of myth generally and Harrison’s theory of a common ancestress that lies behind several of the goddesses in the Greek pantheon. Smith argues that “the most accurate mythic parallel to Mrs. Ramsay is not any particular goddess but rather the broader Great Goddess” (99), and Woolf’s critical application of Harrison’s theory highlights the problematic historical links between the nineteenth century Victorian rational theories of matriarchy and feminism. Smith emphasizes that Woolf calls into question the wisdom of adopting Victorian idealization of femininity as a source of feminist liberation, and Woolf’s mythic irruption in the projection of goddess imagery “both supports and challenges rationalist modernity” (23).The final chapter, “Harmonious Discord in Between the Acts” offers a discussion of Woolf’s “mythic resistance to fascist structures of thought” (23) in her novel Between the Acts. Smith argues that Woolf fully implements her paratactic mythic method in this novel and links it closely to her political critique. Woolf’s paratactic method particularly presents in her adaptation of the choral passage from Greek tragedy and her indirect, piecemeal, and contradictory allusions to archaic myth in the novel, and these adaptations play an effective role in destabilizing meaning of the novel. Such a destabilized expressive style indicates Woolf’s challenge to the hegemony characteristic of fascism, and Woolf’s refusal to resolve the tension between unity and dispersal constitutes her powerful critique of exclusionary and oppressive social identities, which merely offer a tentative and ostensible vision of harmony and integration.Virginia Woolf’s Mythical Method is profound and valuable. Its profoundness is reflected in the fact that it does not confine its mythic study to limited analysis of mythic influence, method, structure, and thought, but goes deep into the conflict, fusion, and reconstruction of mythical, feminist, and patriarchal thoughts in Woolf’s novels. It is a multiple-perspective study, with an intricate structure of feministic and political critique at play and mythic method lying at the heart. “Paratactic” is the most important and innovative keyword in Smith’s monograph, which embraces differences to keep the harmonious, in common with Chinese Confucius saying “harmony in diversity.” It is Woolf’s core idea, which is worthy of a full and deep interpretation.

The Trespasser focuses on the story of the main character Sigmund's extramarital affairs, addressing ethical dilemmas, ethical choices, and ethical tragicality. Sigmund's ethical dilemmas reflected in two aspects: One is the imbalance between Sigmund's emotion and social morality, namely, the disequilibrium between physical pleasure and social moral norms, aesthetical freedom and social moral responsibility, individual experience and social moral cognition. The other is the conflicts between his multiple ethical identities, including the conflicts between the identities of husband and lover, and between the identities of father and lover. Additionally, it reveals his ethical choice of emotional freedom over social morality in the former ethical dilemma, as well as its constant escape via space transfer in the latter ethical dilemma. The former choice reflects the preference of physical pleasure, aesthetical freedom and physical experience over social moral norms, social moral responsibilities and social moral cognition. While the latter choice displays the ethical path of "lover-family-suicide" through the spatial framework of "leaving home-returning home-abandoning home," which is intended to present the tragic outcome of individual's ethical dilemmas. The ethical tragedy has two causes. On the one hand, man is incapable of truly knowing his own body and of incorporating social morality into the experience of self. On the other hand, man disregards what the society demands of him. Meanwhile, these ethical dilemmas and choices reveal not only Lawrence's critique of the industrial capitalist society's suppression of humanity, but also his compassionate values of life.

George Eliot, an English writer, has participated in the construction of British culture in the second half of the 19 th century through her novels which represent important cultural concepts of the Victorian period. Based on her reflection on the social problems of the Victorian era, Eliot keenly realizes the shortcoming of “the gospel of mammonism” and “the gospel of dilettantism”, and embraces the cultural concepts of “the gospel of work” and “the gospel of art” raised by Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris. Through her thorough understanding of these concepts, Eliot depicts the affectivity of work, the musicality of labor and the poetics of life in her novels such as Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and reveals the core ideas that work brings happiness, that art is pleasant work, and that living is artistic, demonstrating her social responsibility as a novelist.

英国艺术批评家罗杰·弗莱的"情感说"曾有力地推动欧洲审美趣味的转向,其观点值得梳理与阐明.20世纪初期,弗莱汲取并修正托尔斯泰的"情感论",提出"艺术是情感交流的手段,以情感本身为目的 "的定义.他阐明"情感说"美学意义上的四大突破,提出"以情为目的 "的表现原则和"技法与元素——构图——情感"表意途径,其观念基于英国经验主义哲学,与中国诗学的"情志说"和立象尽意的表现原则相通.其"情感说"的价值在于:彰显艺术的情感性与表现性本质,阐明其传统性、原创性、突破性和形式性,实现从印象主义到后印象主义的审美趣味转向.

性别与跨性别理论在西方当代批评理论中颇具代表性和影响力.该理论的缘起可追溯到20世纪20年代以来女权主义对女性受压迫根源的探寻、20世纪60-70年代生理性别/社会性别的分类与制度探讨、20世纪80年代男女性别二元对立困境.该理论先后以社会性别和跨社会性别概念为聚焦点,以突破二元对立为驱动力,对性别理论和跨性别理论进行了深入的学理探讨和批评实践.该理论一方面从多元视角考察生理性别与社会性别的关系,以获得对性别的整体理解;另一方面以跨性别群体的性取向遭压制的根源探讨为出发点,描述和解析除异性恋之外的跨性别性取向的内涵与本质,旨在为跨性别者争取公正合理的社会地位和政治待遇;此外,它与同性恋批评和酷儿批评构成文学跨性别理论与实践的互动促进关系.该理论体现出明确的介入和干预社会与政治的意识、以问题为导向的内在发展机制和跨学科的研究方法等三大特性.

英国艺术批评家罗杰·弗莱具有宽广的全球视野.他将批评视为基于生命体验的心灵对话,强调在深入了解艺术创作者的性情与时代背景的基础上,以批评家之情志领悟作家作品之情志,以揭示作品之意味.其艺术批评特性与中国传统批评的"知人论世"和"以意逆志"相通,这一点充分体现在他对中国艺术和欧洲艺术的批评中.弗莱艺术批评的价值在于,不仅将狄德罗的文学性艺术批评、罗斯金的道德性艺术评判和瓦特·佩特的印象式批评推进到审美批评层面,而且努力推进古今艺术与世界艺术的互鉴.剖析其批评特性与价值,有益于我们反思文艺批评的本质和方法.

伍尔夫的《伦敦风景》从地理、文化、生活、政治、宗教多方位描写伦敦,表现了伦敦的景观、意蕴和本质.以中国诗学的"情景交融"范畴为参照,可发现物我合一、形神合一、言外之意的"情景交融"观念在伍尔夫的创作思想中有自觉阐发,其源头是她的全球化阅读感悟.《伦敦风景》中6篇随笔均体现主观情感与客观景象融会贯通的特性,其景、情、意层层递进且水乳相融,多层次展现伦敦的形貌、脉络、精神、首脑、情性和生死,揭示伦敦作为大都市的生命情志.其多元境界融合相通于中国诗人王昌龄所提出的"物境、情境和意境"说,兼具由表及里的深度和超然物外的高度.

托妮·莫里森的小说《宠儿》表现了黑人在奴隶制下实现个体身份建构的历程.以知觉派、动机派和评价派情感理论为参照,可以发现情感在黑人身份建构中发挥了重要作用.具体而言,"爱"为身份建构奠定了基础,它帮助个体获得与周围世界的联结并赋予个体以生存支柱;"愤怒"建构了身份的核心要素,它以身份的自我建构为目的,努力让自我获得他人和社会的认同;"共情"建立了身份的社会环境,它以促进自我与他人的情感交融为主要特征,通过情感交流治愈他人和自我,实现个体与族群的和谐与幸福.从情感维度探讨黑人身份建构的路径和内涵有助于揭示莫里森对黑人问题的深刻反思和阐释.

Emily Dickinson's ecological ethics is notable for her humble and tolerant attitude toward nature, namely her reverence for natural wonders and mysteries, her non-discriminatory appreciation of natural diversity and complexity, her recognition of the significance of nature itself rather than that of "human value." With such ethical attitude toward nature, Dickinson presents her ethical choices correspondingly through the personae and narrators in her nature poems. First, they remain humble to nature, no matter it is spectacular or trivial, graceful or destructive, and choose to be modest observers and admirers to honour the sublimity and inscrutability of nature. Second, they are always sympathetic with "Nature's People" no matter these wild lives cater to human beings or not. They choose to live in a state of symbiosis, namely a state of harmony instead of cutthroat competition. Third, Dickinson establishes positive abstinence with her "ascetic paradoxes", which proposes to abstain human beings from their animal-like appetite to prevent the unprotected nature from being spoiled and keep themselves open to higher possibilities. Her ecological ethics is positive: it is mutually beneficial to sustainability of nature and human spiritual self-realization, and to potentialities of coexistence of human beings and nature in the long run.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf juxtaposes life with death, sanity with insanity, to demonstrate her ethical choice for the Western society after WWI, which implies her critique of the Western culture from the perspective of Chinese "Way." Based on her contemporary philosopher Bertrand Russell's view of Chinese "Way," Woolf apposes different ways of life through different characters in the novel: Elizabeth Dalloway, Richard Dalloway and Sally embody the way of "let nature take its course" and "unselfish and uncontested," in contrast, Peter Walsh and Kilman represent the way of self-assertion, possession and domination, which brings pain to their friends and themselves. Clarissa represents the way of "cherishing life," holding the truth of "softness prior to hardness," "production without possession" and "love," on the contrary, Septimus demonstrates the way of "idealism," "ruthlessness" and "heartlessness," which defeats his life. Woolf illustrates her life ethics of "life-orient," "life-esteem" and "life-unification" through unifying Western and Eastern ethics.

Since the implement of Reform and Opening-up policy 40 years ago, Chinese researchers on foreign literatures have introduced and absorbed Western literary theories, critical approaches and research viewpoints abundantly, and have witnessed a rapid development in the Chinese foreign literature criticism, which makes possible the formation and enhancement of Chinese critical position, modes and theories in this field.The development trends of Chinese literary criticism in the New Era will be examined from three perspectives, namely, positions, orientations and methodologies.In terms of critical position, Chinese criticism is in a new stage of ″adhering to ourselves and benefiting for our own use″, which means that our criticism will follow the principles of ″Chinese mode of thinking″ and ″dialogue-innovation″.The former refers to an adherence to Chinese xiang (image) thinking pattern, which is characterized by an integral, correlative, complementary and dynamic thinking way based on the unity of nature and human beings and that of subject and object.The latter indicates an effort to unify China and the West, to be more specific, to blend Chinese holistic vision with Western rational analysis, and to fuse perception of soul with an analysis of things in order to interconnect aesthetic comprehension with rational cognition.In terms of the critical orientation, firstly we need to recognize that the difference between Western dominant epistemological criticism and Chinese dominant aesthetic criticism is that the former regards critical object as a ″thing″ to be analyzed rationally so as to deduce and verify general truth, in other words, it begins with a theoretical hypothesis, and its rational analysis leads to an ultimate verification or amendment of the hypothesis, the latter considers critical object as ″soul″ to be comprehended by the critic so that he may experience communication, resonance and insight in the literary work, in other words, it starts from the intersection of life perception between the critic and the literary works, and the critic's holistic vision of the work leads to the disclosure of insight into life and artistic beauty.Secondly, we shall grasp the sameness and the differences between Western marginalized aesthetic criticism and Chinese dominant aesthetic criticism.The sameness is that both define criticism as an aesthetic experience. And the difference is that Western aesthetic criticism emphasizes inner life exploration by means of imagination, judgement and learning, while Chinese aesthetic criticism stresses the disclosure of both insight into life and artistic form, which has established writing categories as Shensi (spirit and imagination), Xujing (emptiness and serenity), Miaowu (transcendental epiphany), Xushi (fiction and truth), formal categories as Qingzhi (emotion and thought), Wenzhi (expression and quality), Yixiang (significance and image), Yijing (sublime state of mind), Xingshen (form and spirit), and critical categories as Zhiyin (resonance and appreciation), Meichou (beauty and ugliness), Quwei (taste and interest), etc.In the new era, facing theory-oriented Western criticism and its constant construction and deconstruction trends, Chinese foreign literary criticism may advance Chinese aesthetic-oriented criticism through following Chinese poetic principles, such as ″the precondition of understanding is knowing the world and the people″, ″to perceive meaning through emotion and thought″ and ″Theory of Six Perspectives″.In terms of critical methodology, a thorough examination of the Western ingrained ″definition-analysis″ critical model reveals its method as follows:to take certain influential and generally accepted theory as reference, to regard conceptual definition as presupposed hypothesis, and to extract abstract concept through analyzing the text.Chinese foreign literary criticism follows the ″holistic approach″ of Chinese poetics, which comprehends literary works intuitively from subjective perspectives, and to seize the insight into the spirit of life based on the unification of the thing and the self.The current creative literary theories in China are mostly based on Chinese holistic approaches as follows:the modernization of Chinese poetics, the breakthrough of Western theories by means of Sino-Western theoretical dialogues, and extensive cosmopolitan, comparative and transnational critical approaches.

W. B. Yeats's understanding of Chinese arts and poetics is best presented in his poem "Lapis Lazuli," in which he parallels European arts and Chinese arts, displaying a West-East contrast in terms of creative perception, poetic form, and aesthetic essence. Firstly, the poem shows a shift of perception from the personal to aesthetic and finally to Chinese Xujing() through adjusting the distance between arts and reality and changing literary concerns. Secondly, there is a formal contrast between European symbolism and Chinese Yixiang(), revealing the difference between well-designed symbol arrangement, the natural unification of life perception, and the image of things. Thirdly, the differences between the West/East aesthetic essences are revealed through a contrast between the Western intellectual-physical division and Chinese human nature unification. A reading of Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli" from a Chinese poetic perspective will help deepen apprehension of Yeats's universal perception of arts, civilizations, and life.

In Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, Kazuo Ishiguro expresses the unpleasant feelings confronted with the conflict between a sense of homelessness and a sense of being at home, presenting creatively and naturally Freud's theory of "uncanny" defined as "something repressed which recurs", in order to disclose psychological problems of modern individuals, cultural crisis of modern society and an ideal spiritual state. In terms of psychological description, it arouses through music a momentary impact between the past pleasant memory and the present broken reality, foregrounding an unspeakable sense of homelessness haunting modern individuals since their natural desires have long been repressed. In terms of cultural examination, the root of "uncanny" feelings is revealed, through focusing on the existential state of musicians, to be fame-and-wealth-oriented cultural value. In terms of ideal spirit reconstruction, it emphasizes the significance of music as both means and end, and music as both professional and spiritual, which is an effective way to transcend negative feelings and return to the real of life.