Literary theory is a body of knowledge formed around literature. The dialogue between Chinese and Western literary theory is an event of cultural exchange in the context of globalization. Theoretical ideas of different nations cross national boundaries and form what Edward Said described as “traveling theory,” which gives rise to intersections, borrowings, collisions, and conflicts among different types of civilization. Behind the numerous translations of Western literary theories lie certain hidden mechanisms of selection. Five aspects may influence, to varying degrees, the introduction of Western literary theory: the international environment and ideological frameworks provided by social history, local cultural traditions, different literary genealogies, the demands placed on theory by modern and contemporary literature, and the interpretive function of literary theory. These influences are complex and comprehensive. Within the Chinese local context, there exist a powerful cultural tradition, a specific historical structure, a distinctive problem consciousness, and a drive toward independent knowledge production. The introduction of Western literary theory must be integrated into the construction of disciplinary, academic, and discursive systems.

Chinese literary theory has evolved through its interactions with world culture. During the Republican period, it engaged primarily in dialogue with literary criticism from the English-speaking world, and Introduction to Literature emerged as a general designation for literary theory. In the early period of the People's Republic of China, its dialogue was mainly with Soviet/Russian literary science, and literary science became the dominant designation of the time. After the Reform and Opening-up, Chinese literary theory engaged primarily with American literary theory, and literary theory rose to prominence as the general name for the field. In each period, literary theory also influenced literary creation and developed alongside it. World literary theory is itself a complex system. Anglophone literary criticism, Russian and German literary science, and French comparative literature differ from one another in their intellectual frameworks and key concepts. In its dialogue with this complex system of world literary theory, Chinese literary theory, through its selectivity and transference, has further revealed the richness of its developmental stages and theoretical characteristics. It is precisely by entering into, understanding, and reflecting on the complexity and richness of world culture that Chinese literary theory has continued to move forward with the times.

Since China's Reform and Opening—up, exchanges and interactions between Chinese and Western literary theory have expanded on a remarkable scale. Over nearly half a century, the production of literany theory knowledge has witnessed an unprecedented growth in both scope and diversity. The introduction, study, and localization of Western literary theory have not only reshaped the intellectual landscape of Chinese literary theory but also generated markedly divergent responses, thereby bringing into sharp focus on the question of how to conceptualize the cognitive paradigm underlying Sino-Western literary-theoretical relations during this period. The comparative paradigm, grounded in an either/or binary opposition between China and the West, hinders a holistic and relational understanding of this dynamic. Different cognitive paradigms determine how we see and what we see. Moving beyond the comparative paradigm toward more complex frameworks for Sino-Western literary-theoretical relations has therefore become an urgent epistemological task for contemporary literary theory. Drawing on resources from cultural studies, philosophy, and historiography, the article identifies four relevant cognitive paradigms: third-space hybridity, rhizomatic relationality, intersubjectivity, and crossed history (histoire croisée). These paradigms converge on a central insight: cross-cultural exchanges between Chinese and Western literary theory should not be approached through simplistic comparative methods; instead, the comparative paradigm itself must be reconfigured or superseded by more complex frameworks. Only in this way can the interactions between Chinese and Western literary theory be adequately and critically understood.

The academic community has long accepted Lu Xun's proposition that “Tang people were the first to have the intention to write novels” and Dong Naibin's view that “Tang legends constitute a distinctive literary genre.” However, such assertions are based solely on the literary qualities of the texts and fail to take into account other dimensions of literary self-consciousness. Although Tang legends transcended the limitations of Six Dynasties fiction, they remained rooted in the traditions of Zibu and Shibu. They were essentially a variant of biography that “emphasized both substance and style” and thus represented only a transitional stage in the development of fictional self-consciousness. Driven by multiple factors such as urban economy, civic culture, and advances in printing technology, the Song Dynasty witnessed a decisive transformation in which fiction evolved from a subordinate branch of Zibu and Shibu into an independent literary genre, thereby completing the formation of fictional self-consciousness. This transformation is manifested in four respects. First, it reconstructed the knowledge pedigree of fiction, formed a diversified literary style pattern, and established fictional narrative as its defining core. Second, it transformed “fiction” from a non-literary to a literary concept. Third, it gave rise to a diverse body of authors, fostering the emergence of professional critics, and established a paradigm of literary critique. Finally, it broke down barriers to literary dissemination, enabled the coexistence of elite and popular literary cultures, and brought fiction to a broader readership. The formation of fictional self-consciousness in the Song Dynasty laid the foundation for the subsequent development of classical Chinese fiction and marked a crucial turning point in its historical evolution.

Since the twentieth century, modern theories of fiction, which advocate precise narrative structures, have consistently obscured the dimension of bowu (natural historical) writing in Chinese xiaoshuo (fiction). However, in the indigenous Chinese conception of xiaoshuo, bowu writing has held uncontested legitimacy in both classical-language and vernacular writings. The classical-language and vernacular xiaoshuo could be subsumed under the concept of xiaodao (minor arts) until the early twentieth century, which shares strong structural similarities with bowu knowledge in terms of value, status, and entertainment. The entertainment value of bowu writing often corresponds to an aesthetic style of elaborate display and to related motives for writing. The flaunting of erudition and the flaunting of sensual excess are the two primary motivations that drive bowu writing with the characteristics of xiaoshuo. Both traditions continued from the pre-Qin and Han periods to the Ming and Qing dynasties. They deserve particular attention in the current problematic of xiaoshuo studies, which seeks intellectual resources from ancient traditions.

The distinction between readymade artworks, artworks that appear to be ordinary objects, and ordinary objects themselves constitutes a central issue in contemporary philosophy of art. Arthur Danto and George Dickie both maintain that this difference rests in the non-manifest features of artworks. Although such features are not perceptible through the senses, they nevertheless enable the identification of relevant differences between art and non-art, while also complicating the problem of art evaluation. In response to this challenge, Danto develops a theory of evaluation: within the framework of the artworld and in accordance with the differential logic of the “style matrix,” the position and the aesthetic features of a given type of artwork can be determined. However, the aesthetic features of individual artworks are not established through sensory perception alone but through aesthetic understanding. Aesthetic understanding thus replaces judgments of taste as the precondition for art evaluation, which implies that non-manifest knowledge and interpretive claims can also become objects of aesthetic appreciation. Non-perceptual aesthetic appreciation is therefore possible. Although aesthetic experience is closely related to sensory perception, its essence is not reducible to a sensory response. Rather, it arises primarily from inner, mental acts of perception and judgment.

The body is one of the major themes addressed by the avant-garde art movement. Avant-garde artists take the body either as an object of expression or as a means of expression. They use artistic language to express their understanding and reflection on the body, while also challenging and transgressing taboos surrounding the human body. The bodily taboos in avant-garde art mainly fall into three categories: taboos concerning bodily integrity, impurity taboos, and sexual taboos. These taboos represent the relationship between the body and the world, that is, the relationship between humans and the world. The bodily taboos that avant-garde art intends to transgress are precisely those that structure the human world.

Taking the “theoretical object” as research method and focusing on Derrida's criticism of phonocentrism, Hubert Damisch draws on semiotic theory to critique and revise the formalist-stylistic and iconographic research methods. He criticizes the imitation theory based on visual representation, breaking with the “logocentrism” in art studies. Through a detour via China, and drawing upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and the concept of materiality in Foucault's theory of painting, Damisch uncovers the materiality and perceptibility of painting in the works of such artists as Cézanne and develops a new approach to the semiotics of art. For Damisch, the materiality of an artwork possesses not only the agency to “think” but also the potential to reconstruct art history. His theory not only deepens our understanding of the tripartite relationship between artwork, art theory, and art history, but also offers significant insights for constructing a new understanding of art history — one that profoundly reflects upon the regime of representation and transcends the logic of linear evolution.

Gustave Courbet's theory of realism challenged the tradition of classicism and opened the path toward modernism in Western art. Yet the specific influence of realism on modernist painting, particulary French Impressionism from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, has not been fully examined. Courbet's innovation in using the spatula introduced an autobiographical awareness into his work, prompting the Impressionist painters to recognize the innovative potential of material medium and personal vision, and guiding painting away from literary narrative toward psychological projection. His realistic practice led to the abandonment of theatricality, reshaping the mode of viewing. Moreover, his engagement with popular culture offered Impressionists a perspective for turning to contemporary history, and inspired modernism's critical reflection on vulgar culture. In this sense, Courbet's realist paintings stand as significant practical examples of the artistic theories of his time and the foundations of modernism, offering valuable insights both in technique and theory alike.

Jean-Franşois Lyotard's critical engagement with contemporary art begins with his discussion of Jacques Monory. His two essays on Monory also mark a theoretical transition in Lyotard's work from the “libidinal economy” to “the sublime,” yet this transition has not received sufficient scholarly attention. This article examines the origin of the concept of dandyism that Lyotard employs to characterize Monory's style as well as the paradoxical duality inherent in this term. Lyotard associates the non-utilitarian nature of dandyism with the idea of expenditure that overturns the logic of capitalist economy. In the meantime, through Monory's blue monochromatism and the mediation of imaging technologies, Lyotard interprets the hysterical logic of painting as a libidinal apparatus. This negativity, which runs counter to the logic of production, manifests itself as a death drive that seeks surplus pleasure. The dandy enjoys suffering through self-inflicted masochism. Jouissance thus constitutes the core of the sublime. For this reason, Lyotard argues that the postmodern sublime no longer functions as the Kantian self-affirmation of the subject, but rather as the courage to persist in negation. Monory's Ciels series reveal the melancholy of a dandy, embodying the paradoxical middle term of “presenting the unpresentable.” It also marks the boundary between the postmodern sublime and the romantic sublime.

As a category of The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry, chaoyi originates from Zhuangzi's allegory of the dajiang and the state of consummate skill it embodies, with the transcendence of inner subjectivity as its core. Guided by the metaphysics of the Wei and Jin dynasties, elite literati regarded chaoyi as a refined realm of philosophical discussion, and Tang dynasty scholars further applied it to denote the highest achievement of the poetic way. The concept of chaoyi in The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry corresponds closely to terms such as “spirit”, “reaching the ultimate”, “spiritual attainment” and “entering the mysterious” in poetic criticism of the mid- and late Tang and Five dynasties. At the same time, employing the distinction between words and meaning as a methodology, chaoyi, as the highest attainment of the poetic way, is primarily manifested in the arts of intentional lyricism and the creation of poetic scenes. It not only criticized the excessive mental strain of the bitter-chanting school, but also skillfully includes Sikong Tu's theory of four kinds of poetry state.

Yan Shu was a pivotal figure at the intersection of politics and learning during the early to mid-Northern Song dynasty. His persona as the “wealthy and honorable prime minister” was constructed through later historical narratives and Neo-Confucian discourses. By analyzing narrative strategies in Song sketch writings alongside Yan's literary practice and his political career, this article reveal the misinterpretations underlying this fabricated image. Yan's poems, which employ the style of “evoking pure aura,” and his admiration for Liu Zongyuan's prose assert a literary autonomy that transcends Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. His atypical evaluation of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, which diverges from contemporary literary opinion, reflects both a distinctive literary vision and political inclinations that subtly distance him from the mainstream stance of the Ancient Prose Movement. In Essay on the Courtyard Moss, Yan's shifting rhetorical strategies and the metaphor “rise and fall are never constant” resonate with what Harold Bloom might call a strong poet's stance toward tradition, a complex textual performance that would later be reduced to the trope of “leisurely comfort” in The Anthology of Emperor Yongzheng. Caught between dynastic transition and the tension between literature and social moral pursuit, Yan Shu's literary stature gradually faded. Examining the evolution of his image through the lens of intellectual structure and the shifting culture of the scholar-official helps locate the sources of his anxiety. Combining literary style and Yan Shu's capture of the zeitgeist, this article penetrates the prevailing ways of seeing embedded in historical discourses to recover the literary authenticity.

The textual style of guqin song lyrics in the Ming dynasty differs markedly from that of poetry and other literary collections across history. It is characterized by three qualities: the blending of diverse genres, an emphasis on singability, and continual iterative transformation. These features stem from the enduring tradition of guqin songs(xian ge), which facilitated ongoing process of standardization and innovation through the interaction between music and literature. In this process, boundaries between genres were dismantled, dissolving poetry, rhapsody, essays, ci-poetry, qu-poetry, and other established forms into new material. Such reorganization generated new literary identities, stylistic orders, interpretive modes, and artistic tensions. The incorporation from varied textual forms into guqin music reveals the diversification and evolution of musical expression, including rhythmic and melodic interplay, differences in musical compatibility, and conventions such as pairing song lyrics with filler syllables and finger techniques that mimic vocal timbres. Shaped by multiple aesthetic forces, these forms adapted to contemporary tastes and acquired fresh musical interpretations. Even literary works whose musical qualities had diminished were revitalized as performable compositions. Encoded within the texts of guqin songs are complex experiences and principles governing the interplay between sound and text, offering a distinctive lens through which to reconsider the enduring problem of the unity and disjunction of poetry and music.

“The Rakshas and the Sea Market,” with its vivid characterization and legendary, intricate plot, is one of the best-known stories in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The original story has been adapted, published, and circulated as lianhuanhua, or Chinese serial picture books, more than a dozen times. While these adaptations share a common literary source, they exhibit consistency in certain aspects yet diverge in specific details, each possessing unique characteristics. As a significant medium of visual narrative, lianhuanhua features a dual narrative structure of text and image. These two narrative modes have their respective strengths and intertwine seamlessly. Text and image possess inherent distinctions—the former offers continuity and intellectual stimulation, while the latter provides immediacy and visual impact. Through various adaptation strategies, including the abridgment and modification of the original content, as well as the reinterpretation or even reshaping of character images, lianhuanhua adaptors elevate the process from a unidirectional translation between media to a bidirectional dialogue between text and image. With their distinctive artistic style, lianhuanhua feeds back into and reshapes the source text. The interplay and mutual enhancement of text and image open up new possibilities for the narrative adaptation of classical Chinese literature. The multiple adaptations of “The Rakshas and the Sea Market” into lianhuanhua not only provide a case study for examining different media in literary dissemination but also offer insights into the creative transformation and innovative development of literary classics in a contemporary context.

In the Western context, British academia has successfully employed the postcolonial frameworks pioneered by Edward Said to examine the historical transition from the British Empire to the United Kingdom. This theoretical engagement not only yielded positive effects on parliamentary politics and mitigated Irish and Scottish tensions post-Cold War, but also sustained the global influence of the English language and literature. Conversely, the Russian Federation — despite its pioneering role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union — resisted the broader post-Soviet trend of utilizing postcolonial perspectives to re-examine the national histories of subjects under Imperial Russian and Soviet rule. Russian humanities scholars have largely avoided applying postcolonial theory to critically assess these imperial legacies. Consequently, this theoretical avoidance facilitated the ideological construction of the “Russian World” concept, generating severe practical repercussions. Within this complex landscape, scholars such as Alexander Etkind, supported by the journal New Literary Observer and publishing houses, made concerted efforts to promote postcolonial criticism. However, while this intellectual endeavor has achieved notable academic success, its practical socio-political impact remains highly limited.

The efficacy of literary performativity stems from three interrelated dimensions: the field of “confessional commitment” driven by emotional and voluntary engagement, the suspension of everyday consequences through fictional contracts, and the enduring efficacy of canonization mechanisms. Under these conditions, literature, through its material symbolic structures, is able to exert its performative force in the construction of reality across bodily perception, social structures, and existential cognition. With regard to its capacity to intervene in reality, the theory of literary performativity resonates with the traditional notion of “literature as a vehicle for Dao,” while significantly expanding the connotation of “Dao.” Here, “Dao” is understood here as a perpetually unfolding process of unconcealment. Within this framework, the poetics of defamiliarization, in the diachronic dimension, may be seen as an effective pathway through which literature fulfill its function of unconcealment. Based on this dynamic concept of truth, the ethical responsibility of literature lies in shaping an ethical subject capable of maintaining receptivity to the call of the Other and the courage to respond, even in situations where determinacies collapse.

As one of the most original and influential contemporary French thinkers, Gilles Deleuze uses space as a major approach to observing and reflecting upon the world. Through such innovative concepts as “smooth space,” “rhizome,” and “fold,” Deleuze has constructed a spatial poetics marked by openness, relationality, heterogeneity and becoming, which aims to liberate people from standardized, fixed, and hierarchical orders, thereby enabling the differentiated becoming of life. His spatial poetics is also a radical but poetic aesthetics of life. Chinese Weiqi has aesthetic features such as decentering, anti-essentialism, and free becoming. These features brought Weiqi into Deleuze's field of vision and made it an important “other” that illuminates his spatial poetics. The affirmation of “becoming” is the shared foundation of Deleuze's spatial poetics and the aesthetics of Chinese Weiqi. It is their common mission to establish a world of ceaseless generation and renewal. However, divergence also exists between the two. Whereas Deleuze prioritizes difference, Chinese Weiqi places greater value on harmony within conflict.

This article systematically traces the historical evolution and core theoretical frameworks of the essay film and the video essay, aiming to reveal the internal logic underlying the paradigm shift through which moving images come to serve as a vehicle for critical thinking. The essay film, through montage and narrative strategies, achieves a “dramatization of thought,” thereby establishing the aesthetic foundation for philosophical reflection through moving images. The video essay, in turn, completes a paradigm shift at the level of media ontology — from “index” to “computation” — enabling moving-image production to gain greater critical autonomy within the digital networked environment. By analyzing the diverse expressive forms of the video essay on platforms such as YouTube and Bilibili, this article elucidates its distinctive value in the visualization of knowledge, democratization of the academic, and the construction of participatory culture. However, under the combined influence of platform capital, algorithmic recommendation systems, and deepfake technologies, the video essay faces a profound ontological crisis and a series of practical paradoxes including the erosion of rational reflection by sensory immersion, the restriction of critical freedom by linear modes of playback, echo chamber effects, and the proliferation of deepfake content. It is therefore imperative to return to the self-conscious agency of the creator, to advocate a practice of moving-image production characterized by “technological sobriety,” and to seek a dynamic balance between instrumental rationality and value rationality, so that moving images may truly become a new field for free critical thinking in our time.

The long-standing absence of touch from research on body aesthetics has prevented such research from engaging with the body as such. This article outlines a phenomenology of touch and clarifies the importance of touch as the infrastructure of the body and as a “meta-sense.” On the premise that media technologies are “extensions of the senses” and supplements to epiphylogenesis, it introduces a technological dimension into the relation between bodily touch and aesthetic practice to foreground the experiential logic of touch. It also reconsiders the foundational value of touch in bodily perception and aesthetic discourse. The study finds that handheld and body-based haptic technologies present immersive existential configurations through different embodied postures and participate, at the level of a broader background, in the intentional constitution of the lifeworld. This process, however, inevitably subjects tactile experience to quantification and technological extraction. Yet the fundamental synthetic structure and impenetrability of touch mean that the fleshly subject under technological embodiment ultimately assumes an intermediary mode of being-in-the-world. Tactile experience, once amplified and reproduced through technology, exhibits prediscursive, prereflective, and nonrepresentational features. These features reveal a natural affinity between touch and aesthetics understood as a theory of sensibility. The condition of being-in-the-world under haptic-technological embodiment further confirms a sensory shift between the “I think” and the “I am,” and between cognition and aesthetic experience. Against the background of the “haptic turn,” a body aesthetics grounded in touch as a “meta-sense” is better suited to the realities and theoretical context of the present age.

H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos is generally regarded as anti-realist. Contemporary philosopher Graham Harman, however, characterizes it as “Weird Realism,” a realism proper to Cthulhu itself, which appears “weird” to humans. Its theoretical foundation lies in a reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's notion of the “thing-in-itself,” where real objects withdraw from one another, and human beings can interact with them only indirectly, producing strangeness and distortion. “Weird Realism” resists both the “linguistic turn” and “literalism,” seeking to extend realism to non-human realities with a strong anti-anthropocentric stance. Emerging from the contemporary philosophical “speculative turn,” “Weird Realism” ultimately presents itself less as a theory that reveals everything than a vague theory of everything.

“Commitment” is a key concept in literary theory, but “committed image” has so far received little sustained attention in academic scholarship. The political iconology developed by the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman opens up a path for such inquiry. Through engagement with the divergence between himself and thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Antonio Negri, he proposes the concept of “committed image” to move beyond the two extremes of total non-commitment and direct involvement in action, thereby delineating a viable scope of analysis. Regarding specific approaches to “image commitment,” Didi-Huberman suggests that images should “take position” and, through montage, which deconstructs and reconfigures existing materials, critically interrogate existing political realities and open up new political possibilities. Bertolt Brecht's War Primer can be regarded as an example of this mode of commitment. Around the issue of the position taken by images in this work, Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière engaged in a debate, and their perspectives offer significant insights for a deeper understanding of the “committed image.”