During the late Qing and early Republican periods, Lu Xun, driven by a profound sense of despair, began to question the established ethical principles of his time. In his view, what was traditionally considered good became evil, while conventional evil took on the semblance of good. This reversal of values was influenced by Nietzsche's concept of the “revaluation of all values”, which challenged and overturned traditional ethical concepts. Lu Xun identified certain forms of the “banality of evil”, such as “spectators”, “servile saboteurs” and “arrogant conformists”, which highlighted the weaknesses in the national character and served as a remedy for them. He further exposed the more terrifying evil rooted in traditional customs, which not only established external moral laws but also permeated the collective unconscious, forming a “nameless, unconscious killing force.” This force, metaphorically encapsulated in the image of an “iron house,” suffocated the spirit and took lives without visible bloodshed. Lu Xun's judgment of good and evil, in its resistance to outdated conventions, subtly echoes Nietzsche's anti-secular indignation and his rebellious ethical stance.

During the “revolutionary literature controversy”, Lu Xun proposed an approach to create a dialogue field and structure for the Chinese Proletarian Revolutionary Literature Movement that differed from the “Revolutionary Literature School”, aligning with two intertwined dialogue traditions within the international communist literary movement. Lu Xun fully affirmed the inevitability of the Proletarian Revolutionary Literature Movement, profoundly summarizing and reflecting on the valuable experience of building a structure and exploring the practice of dialogue in the May Fourth and New Culture Movements, the early Soviet literary movement, and the universal theoretical and practical challenges they faced. Underpinning the recognition of ideological struggle as the core of dialogue behavior, he explored how to create a favorable field, an ideal structure, and ethical rules for dialogue as the foundation of the emerging Proletarian Revolutionary Literature Movement. Lu Xun's intellectual contributions helped communists and revolutionary artists think more comprehensively and objectively about the future development of the Chinese Proletarian Revolutionary Literature Movement, drawing from the experiences of the early Soviet literary movement in the 1920s. Moreover, it played a pivotal role in promoting the establishment of the League of Left-wing Writers.

The article offers a reinterpretation of the nuanced relationship between Lu Xun's role as an “enlightener” and a “participant in life” as proposed by the Japanese scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi. It contends that, beyond his identity as a purely “literary” figure, Lu Xun's role as a “participant in life” significantly contributes to his stature as an “enlightener”. This perspective underscores Lu Xun's active engagement with tangible reality. His enlightenment was forged through an earnest immersion in the lived experience of Chinese society. He grappled with and contested these experiences, delving deeply in them before emerging with fresh insights into the issues surrounding enlightenment within the crucible of real life. The interplay between Juansheng and Zijun serves as a reflection of Lu Xun's contemplation of the environment in which enlightenment ideas were received and his examination of the subject of enlightenment. Concurrently, it provides a lens through which he scrutinizes the ethical conundrum and the crisis of alienation inherent in enlightenment thought during the post-May Fourth era, resulting in the intricate interplay of Juansheng's soliloquies and the text's complexity. The novella not only stands as an indispensable element within Lu Xun's narrative of enlightenment but also as an important practice of his renewed confrontation with the issues of enlightenment during the post-May Fourth era, all approached with the disposition of a “participant in life”.

Image studies is an emerging field that intersects with the humanities, social sciences, and even the natural sciences, demonstrating significant interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary characteristics. Traditional art history is increasingly shifting toward image science or image studies, with new theories, concepts, and methods rapidly emerging, raising many new epistemological questions that need to be addressed. First, establishing an overarching category of image among the various related concepts is a primary task for the epistemology of image studies. Second, the significance and value of the paradigm shift in art history and aesthetic studies, reshaped by the “image turn,” need to be explored in depth. Finally, what are the key questions that will determine the future of image studies as an open, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field? Intellectual reflection on image studies will contribute to answering these questions.

In the history of European art, the production and interpretation of images have been the work both of artisans in art workshops and of philosophers and viewers who have expressed their opinions through various powers. Ignoring this history and the role of artisans and artisanal traditions in the power of images is clearly an ahistorical attitude. The emergence of prominent art theorists and critics is a recent phenomenon. Over time, theorists and critics have turned their power of interpreting images into a privilege. Although they are not engaged in the production of art and images, they can influence the production of art and images through the impact of capital and institutional power. As today's art theory and criticism no longer pay attention to the production activities of artists, theorists and critics may possess barely any of the most basic techniques and knowledge of art production. In this regard, establishing the validity of art theory and critical interpretation is a question worthy of consideration.

The burgeoning field of interdisciplinary image studies is compelling art history to reevaluate its boundaries. Images that exist as formulas or subject programs circulating without a medium require an iconological reading to decipher their symbolism, while the images with a physical presence necessitate insights from media studies are needed to understand their stylistic and technical aspects. Each act of viewing demands that the viewer's embodied experience with the images be considered through anthropological or metapsychological lenses. By embracing multiple methodologies, art history can facilitate a deeper engagement with images. This approach would not seek to intellectualize the images or exhaust their full translatability but rather to make sense of their signs, signals, and sensible markers in order to grasp the infinite potentialities that images can offer.

Aesthetic education is an important part of China's “Five Educations” framework, which emphasizes the holistic development of moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic, and labor education. It also represents a long-term strategy for cultivating national talent. In an era of technological advancement and supremacy, aesthetic education serves as a balancing factor in talent development. Theoretical and cognitive awareness of aesthetic education are vital for in improving the quality of its practice. Therefore, it is essential to engage in deep reflection on the effectiveness of aesthetic education within art education, explore the potential of aesthetic education across various fields such as art, nature, and life, and focus on the logical interaction between aesthetics-centered foundational theory and aesthetic education practice. Additionally, efforts should be made to construct an evaluation system that accounts for the unique characteristics of aesthetic education.

Literature is both singular and ethical, two characteristics that are found to be contradictory. Through a dialogue with Samuel Weber's recent research, we may find a better way to understand this poetic problem. The key to understanding the singular is to understand iterability. Weber distinguishes the potential and impossible iterability from the realistic and possible repetition, revealing that iterability, a spectral after-effect of the repetition, is not “repetition” but “latent repetition.” Thus, the difference of the singular as a movement of potential does not equate to the individual, although it is often equated with the individual under the mono-theological identity paradigm to avoid death. Nor can the singular be generalized and dissolved into the kind of species. These two important differences involve such key ethical issues as the ways in which individuality and universality should be examined. Weber further emphasizes the responsibility to respond and witness in “autoimmunity,” so that the singular acquires its own ethics through iterability and is put into practice in linguistic mechanisms such as gerunds. In the development of research on literary ethics today, it is essential to engage the accomplishments of the research on literary singularity.

Distraction is the misallocation of attention, often considered as one of the consequences of modernity. German scholars in Weimar represented by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin consider moving images as continuous “visual stimuli”, which audience accept with distraction while having no time for contemplation. Paul Virilio and some scholars of media economy consider images as endless “perception supply”, thinking that accelerated supply of images will eventually lead to a lack of audience concentration, followed by various media's fierce competition and ruthless capture of the audience. Today, while video products are incredibly abundant and more accessible, audience become increasingly insouciant. They are often impatient at videos with slow plot progression or insufficient sensory stimuli. In contrast, they frequently speed up the film watching process by selecting multi-speed playback or consuming “speed reading” products. The acceleration of film watching makes the audience think less, and the large numbers of commentaries make videos increasingly shallow. Film audience find themselves encountering an era with rich impressions but insufficient experience.

Cinematic attention refers to the audience's conscious focusing after engaging with a film. This engagement results in the audience's intentional construction of the film, giving the film an appearance within the viewer's consciousness, hence referred to as “audience-cinema.” This study leverages phenomenological principles to dissect the consciousness structure within cinema, aiming to elevate the audience's role in film interpretation and uncover the fundamental nature of cinema as an intentional bond between viewer and film. Cinematic attention, a precursor to other forms of viewing consciousness, is inherent in the act of film perception. It embodies the core structures of conscious activity, serving as an integrative form of perception, that encapsulates the dynamic exchange between film and viewer. Ultimately, this examination of cinematic attention offers a comprehensive, principle-based exploration of how films manifest within audience consciousness, proposing new insights into film ontology and the genesis of filmic understanding from the perspective of viewing consciousness.

Literary interpretation is understood by Derrida as the process of implementing the strategy of deconstruction and expanding the dimension of deconstruction. When Derrida interpreted Shakespeare's classic play Romeo and Juliet, he unearthed several scenes of contretemps in the play, unfolded a wonderful interpretation of “contretemps” through the dimensions of time, proper name and irony, and addressed the question of the possible condition for the generation of meaning through the analysis of three different disjunctions. Derrida's interpretation explores the disjunction between time and space in the dimension of time, the disjunction between the proper name and the bearer in the dimension of the proper name, and the disjunction between finitude and infinity in the dimension of irony. These three dimensions are intertwined to create a complete multidimensional perspective of the “contretemps.”

At the turn of the 20th century, the blend of the “political novels” and the tradition of “historical biography” in the Confucian cultural sphere produced a sub-genre, the historical-biographical political novel. These novels predominantly utilize foreign historical events, employing fictional techniques to “supplement” historical details. The Japanese writer Yano Fumio's Admirable Stories of Ruling the Country and its Chinese translation, adaptation into traditional opera, as well as Lu Xun's Spirit of Sparta, epitomize this literary sub-genre. An in-depth analysis of these works reveals the stylistic value of the political novel. The inclusion of fictional fragments in these stories corroborates the political realities of modern China and Japan, and illustrates the process through which ancient Greek history was assimilated into the modern nation-state narratives during its propagation in modern East Asia.

The “political concept of love” proposed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri has undergone a process of genesis, development, and establishment. Basically, the core of this concept is a type of new and singular subjectivity, which combines the legacy of the Enlightenment and postmodern theoretical resources. This subjectivity provides impetus for “love” and supports the “political concept of love”. However, as a theoretical construct, the “political concept of love” has at least three obvious limitations. First, although it attempts to combine love and force, such combination is not organic. Second, it fails to resolve the conflicts among the multitude. Third, it tends to ontologize love.

Casanova's characterization of the world literary space as “a detour” frames this review of her experiences and works alongside the portrayal of the original context in which she proposed “the World Republic of Letters,” as a detour itself. Such a study provides a crucial reference for understanding The World Republic of Letters. Building upon this, a re-examination of the World Republic of Letters through the “World” perspective unveils that Casanova's Republic not only inherits from the transnational tradition of the historical Republic of Letters but also applies its principles of transhistoricity and discursive diversity in a contemporary context. Viewed through a global lens, the World Republic of Letters transcends the previous limitations of Republic of Letters as an ideal community. Moreover, it assumes multiple meanings within a generative world literary space: it constitutes an invisible yet tangible literary world and offers a fresh approach to world literature studies — depicting the origin and evolution of international literature through a spatial hypothesis, a world perspective and a blend of internal and external literary analysis. Meanwhile, the process of describing such a literary world illustrates a distinct method of writing the history of international literature.

This paper examines the concepts of “blandness (dan)”and “lyrical self” within the context of the Chinese lyrical tradition, which stems from the discovery and contemplation upon the “subjectivity” inherent in lyricism. Drawing upon the unity of aspiration-expression (yanzhi) and emotion-release (shuqing) in Chinese culture, the paper analyzes the relationship between blandness and the lyrical self through the lenses of lyrical tradition and Zhuangzi studies. By engaging with the three aspects of “subjectivity,” “inscape” and “object-self relationship,” the paper explores the how blandness evolves into a collective value, ideal, and inscape, as well as its manifestation in literature and the arts. Furthermore, the paper examines the development of blandness in the theories of music, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, offering a reevaluation of its stylistic significance and its status and value within the Chinese lyrical tradition.

The subclassifications in The Book of Han include Records of Literature and Art which contains under the category of Selected Philosophers a group of articles such as Qingshizi and Yu Chu's Romance of the Zhou Dynasty. This group aims to convey “minor teachings”, which contains the understanding of fiction in the Han dynasty, and it can be argued to be the origin of the indigenous concept of fiction in Chinese literary history. From the Han dynasty to the modern era, the term “novel” has consistently been part of the system of knowledge classification and bibliography, referring to a specific type of knowledge and book category. The novels in the category of Selected Philosophers have never deviated from the scope set by the novelists in Records of Literature and Art, and the modern concept of fiction has also not completely departed from the essential criteria confirmed by Records of Literature and Art in the Book of Han. However, the relationship between the concepts of fiction described in Selected Philosophers, the category of fiction in The Masters in The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries and the modern era is not one of mutual definitions, but rather it may be best expressed as that between the origin and its expansion and evolution. After the Sui and Tang dynasties, fiction as a literary genre, continuously transforms and expands on various levels, such as system construction, attribute characteristics and volume size, gradually occupying a broader and completely different territory that departed from the origin.

Qin-zither was introduced into the court as one of the main instruments during the pre-Qin period. After the Han Dynasty, it gained popularity among general populace and scholars, distinguishing itself from others instruments within the Eight Categories of musical instruments. Since its inception, qin-zither has been well-suited for personal use and performance due to its portability and convenience for solo performances. As a result, qin-zither easily became a common musical instrument among scholars, and playing the qin-zither became a refined hobby for them from the Han Dynasty onward. Many famous scholars from the Han to the Song Dynasty were proficient in playing the qin-zither. More importantly, with the awakening of individual consciousness among the scholars of the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the qin-zither served as a tool for seeking seclusion, cultivating the minds, and promoting elegance. The privatization of qin-zither ownership and the scholarization of qin-zither practice inevitably infused qin studies with the ideas and tastes of literati, forming an orientation that advocated the beauty of harmony in qin-zither and an appreciation for the clear and distant style of qin music.

Bai Juyi (772846) classified his poems into four categories: allegorical, carefree, sentimental, and miscellaneous regulated verses. This classification is of great significance in the history of Chinese poetics as it encapsulated the poetic traditions preceding the Tang Dynasty. These include the aspiration-expressing tradition of The Book of Songs, the sentimental tradition that began with the Songs of Chu, the nature-fitting tradition represented by Tao Yuanming, and the ornate style of the Liang and Chen Dynasties. Compared to his contemporaries, Bai's classification was innovative, particularly through his introduction of “carefree poetry.” This highlighted the long-neglected nature-fitting tradition in poetics. The creation of this category was shaped by the cultural and poetic context of his time. Bai Juyi's classification also invites reflection on classical Chinese affection-expressing poetics, suggesting that, beyond the aspiration-expressing and emotion-expressing types, there exists another poetic type of affection-expressing and a non-affection-expressing poetic type. Analyzing Bai Juyi's classification deepens our understanding of the traditions and evolutions of classical Chinese poetics.

Fang Bao and Li Fu are two renowned masters of classical Chinese prose during the late Kangxi and early Qianlong periods. Their writings continued the early Qing dynasty's tradition of “returning to elegance and upholding correctness,” which emphasized the moral and didactic function of classical prose. They advocated for following the examples set by the Tang and Song dynasty masters and introduced the concept of “wenjin” — a series of prohibitions against certain problematic writing techniques and stylistic choices that they deemed inappropriate for classical prose. Fang and Li's efforts aimed to systematically critique the literary style of the late Ming period and provide concrete methods for achieving “elegance and correctness” in prose. However, the two engaged in direct debates over whether certain rhetorical techniques, such as metaphor, antithesis, citation of ancient events, word reduction, and word substitution, should be included in these restrictions. Their debates revealed differing interpretations of the Tang and Song masters and divergent views on the relationship between form and content in classical prose. These discussions resonated significantly during the mid-Qing period. Although Fang Bao had more followers, Li Fu's perspectives on specific literary examples gained broader acceptance. This shift reflects the growing influence of scholars focused on textual research, which increasingly shaped the meaning of “elegance and correctness” and contributed to a transformation in the theoretical direction of classical prose during this period.