Drawing from the traditional binary thinking of subject-object division and confrontation, the modern interpretation of “artistic appeal and rhythmic vitality” since the twentieth century considers it either as an aesthetic feature or the overall spirit of the artwork, or as the painter's inner harmony and resonance, failing to fully realize that the ideal effect of “artistic appeal and rhythmic vitality” can only be generated by the two-way communication and resonance between the creator and the object. In the light of the aesthetics of atmosphere, “artistic appeal” is a special category or an advanced state of atmosphere that arises from the intentional relationship established by the simultaneous presence of the creator and the object, as well as the creator's integral representation of the object's intuitive visualization and depiction with sublime brushwork and ink in a state of mind that forgets both the object and the self. It embodies the highest artistic realm that combines the aesthetic sense of the atmosphere in the artwork with the creator's life force and sentiment. The unity of humanity and nature is the philosophical foundation of “artistic appeal and rhythmic vitality”, the key to distinguishing it from and elevating it above “atmosphere”, and also serves as the reason why “atmosphere” cannot directly replace “artistic appeal and rhythmic vitality”, nor can the two be simplistically interchanged or confused.

Mirrors, as a tool for presenting images, often have a mysterious quality. From the initial reflection to the later symbolic metaphor, mirrors often appear in the illustrations of popular fictions and xiqu in the Ming and Qing dynasties due to their practical imaging function and multiple symbolic meanings. As a physical carrier, painters use the images reflected by mirrors to create a different image of space-time in the illustrated world. It symbolizes deep emotions and characters' destinies that were not clearly expressed in the illustrations, creating a special visual image of “painting in the mirror”. As a pictorial symbol, the “painting in the mirror” becomes part of the whole expression of the main picture, becoming “mirror in the painting”. Painters not only use mirrors to expand the space of the picture, but also continuously interact with various objects in the main picture through the “picture in picture” in the mirror, leading viewers into the world of “picture in picture” with endless meanings.

Georges Didi-Huberman adopts a trans-historical and interdisciplinary approach to image, and his theory of image unfolds through an ongoing dialogue with such particular figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze. On the one hand, Didi-Huberman develops a style of “figurative thinking” in which he often starts from an old image and reformulates his own conceptual framework, such as the “Ninfa fluida”, the “firefly of resistance” and the “double Atlas” (atlas and resistance). On the other hand, despite the extensive and diverse nature of Didi-Huberman's research, his theoretical thinking maintains remarkable coherence. In the early years, he focused on the issue of image migration and survival represented by the image of the flowing Ninfa, as a means of reassessing the potential for rewriting art history as an open narrative. He later turned to the visual form of image juxtaposition, the atlas approach, and introduced the multiplicity and heterogeneity of montage. In recent years he has attempted to transform the historical and political reflection on image into a philosophy of action: how images move towards emancipatory action through the mediation of desire, affect and imagination.

The fluctuating recognition of Northern dynasties' calligraphy within Chinese calligraphic history stems not only from aesthetic considerations but also from complex cultural identity issues, which profoundly reflects the interaction between calligraphy and cultural politics. The Tang dynasty's reverence for Wang Xizhi and the trend toward “southernization” in calligraphic studies initiated the decline of Northern dynasties' calligraphy, while the Song Dynasty's rejection of Wei steles and related Northern styles reflected the orthodoxy of Jin and Tang, based on the Yi-Xia distinction and the divide between civilization and barbarism. Since the mid-to-late Qing dynasty, the transformation of academic thought, the demands of realistic cultural politics, and particularly the adjustment of Yi-Xia perspective in Qing scholars' studies of the Spring and Autumn Annals transformed the Qing people's view of Northern dynasties' calligraphy. Key thinkers like Ruan Yuan and Kang Youwei were central to this reevaluation, infusing Northern dynasties' calligraphy with new meanings such as “communicating with antiquity” and “transforming antiquity,” which disrupted the prevailing cultural hierarchies of south versus north, cultured versus uncultured, and Xia (Han culture) versus Yi (non-Han cultures) in calligraphic discourse. Emerging from the cultural-political contexts of the Tang, Song, and Qing dynasties, Northern dynasties' calligraphy became a paradigmatic style, which formed a distinct lineage within Chinese calligraphic history. Tracing the reception history of Northern Dynasties' calligraphy would deepen our understanding of the cultural-political psychological structures behind aesthetic values and critical norms in Chinese calligraphy.

In the early period of the liberated areas, Zhu De developed a literary and artistic thought centered on revolutionary utilitarianism. Its main contents are as follows. In terms of nature and function, the literature and art in the liberated areas must become a weapon to suport the Anti-Japanese War. Regarding subject matter, they should correctly deal with the issues of praise and exposure. In terms of artistic form, it is essential to extensively utilize the forms of folk art favored by the masses so as to achieve “popularization and vernacularization.” For the literature and art in the liberated areas to take on these forms and fulfill these tasks, literary and art workers as the primary creators, must develop their class consciousness to a higher level, establish their class position, and immerse themselves in the masses to transform themselves. Zhu De's literary and artistic thought in this period promoted the development of literary and artistic movements in the liberated areas of North China and Yan'an. It also served as a preliminary exploration and preparation for the publication of Mao Zedong's Talk at the Yan'an Conference on Literature and Art, which would become the “Party's policy for literature and art.”

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”.

In comparison to the real world, virtual reality eliminates materiality. The lack of materiality leads to the difference in perception between virtual reality and the real world. First, the perceptual experience in virtual reality lacks the existential thickness of that in the real world. Second, to the perceiver, the entities in virtual reality lack the aura of those in the real world because they lack externality and transcendence. Third, virtual reality is closed and lacks the openness of the spatial and temporal continuity of the perceptual and unfinished experiences in the real world. The analysis of the differences between the two kinds of environmental perception discloses the intrinsic influence of materiality, and at the same time highlights the ecological nature of perceptual activities rooted in the evolutionary history of natural life. Real nature allows possibility for life to grow in its perceptual activities toward the external world, while virtual reality, as a digital fabric, represents the achievement of human mastery over the world. They can never substitute each other, but can only unfold in parallel.

In the early twenty-first century, a group of sociologists based at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, represented by Jeffrey C. Alexander, formally developed a constructivist theory of cultural trauma, or a constructivist social theory of trauma. Based on the rejection of pathological and essentialist theories of trauma, this theory argues that trauma does not exist naturally, but is a symbolic/representational construct; trauma, therefore, is not innately traumatizing but becomes so through social and cultural interpretations and interactions. The primary objective of this cultural trauma theory is to uncover and understand the nature, processes, and mechanisms behind this construction, thereby providing insights into the social underpinnings of trauma.

Deeply involved in religion, Edward Said's intellectual image may not be depicted fully if the significance of religion to him remains unclarified. Religion has two dimensions in Said's writings: one refers to specific religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, which concern his religious identity, religious experience and the religious environment in which he grew up; the other is the metaphorical “religion” of culture, nation and state, or a secularized religion. Said is more tolerant of the former, but more critical of the latter because it always acts as a reductive measurement of differentiation that identifies a particular “we” by excluding the Other. Said has the deepest connection, among various others, with “Islam.” When Western media and the so-called experts regularly reduce “Islam” to a huge homogeneous entity, he endeavors to uncover the ideology and power struggle underlying such representation that seems objective and neutral. By criticizing “covering Islam,” he appeals to the critical consciousness of intellectuals, which Julian Benda refers to as the trabison des clercs, that is, an alienated and uncompromising severity.

Duan Lian has offered a semiotic interpretation of the history of landscape painting. He argues that the formation, development, divergence and decline of landscape painting are all conveyed through the form of images. This constitutes an interaction of image symbols from form to concept, providing new perspectives and paradigms for the study of landscape painting and semiotics. However, regarding the transcendence of landscape painting, we contend that Duan Lian's semiotic interpretation of landscape painting cannot fully capture its intrinsic aesthetics and spirit, as this approach may lead to an underestimation and weakening of the artistic essence of landscape painting. Semiotics, rooted in Western culture, emphasizes the search for definite meaning while neglecting the overall sense of meaning and the unique aura of the artwork, which is central to the expression of Chinese landscape painting.

The presence of the black element in fairy tales and fairy-tale films has always been a challenging issue, sparkling debates on whether these narratives create a utopia of brightness and dreams or a dystopia of darkness and strangeness. Addressing this question necessitates revisiting the definition and history of fairy tales, uncovering the deep-rooted fixation on the binary opposition between adults and children. While Gilles Deleuze's concept of “becoming-child” offers a profound response, it tends to lean towards affirmative becoming, overlooking negative traumatic experiences and favoring abstract speculation over detailed living conditions analysis. This paper shifts the focus to negative aspects through the examination of fairy-tale films by Dani Cavallaro and Sue Short, particularly exploring the key concepts of rite of passage and initiation they introduce.

As a living condition and state in the process of human development and evolution, a posthuman era has indeed arrived, which has brought about fundamental changes in the role and value of humanity. In the past, in the era of high humanism, the status of humanity as the “primate of all things” and the “elite of the universe” was challenged and resisted by various postmodern trends. In particular, the deconstruction of anthropocentrism by ecocriticism, the challenge posed by animal studies to the power and role of human domination, and the attacks launched by various viruses in nature on human survival and health have directly threatened human survival and evolution. The application and popularization of artificial intelligence in the high-tech era have further marginalized human beings and even made a large number of people who once took pride in their work lose their jobs. In the field of humanities that we are dedicated to teaching and research, humanism, which used to dominate modern and contemporary thought, has also evolved into a kind of “posthumanism”, followed by the rise of posthumanist criticism in the field of literary theory and criticism. Posthumanism challenges and deconstructs the myth that overemphasizes the status and role of the human being, leading the human being back to its original state: a species of all things on the earth. Posthumanist criticism, as the name suggests, is a literary criticism that contradicts the development of humanist criticism to the extreme. In terms of time, it has come after humanist criticism, and in terms of content, it challenges the anthropocentric consciousness of humanist criticism on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can hardly separate itself from it, thus maintaining a certain continuity with it. This is why it is called posthumanist criticism. The rise of posthumanist criticism has added a new direction to literary and cultural criticism in the post-theoretical era.

Su Shi articulated the theory of “giving form according to the thing” (suiwu fuxing) through various stages and texts. His discussions evolved from the way of Nature to the way of life and the way of essays, encompassing the theory of essence-function, the moral realm, the world realm, the aesthetic realm, and the theory of practice. Su Shi transformed logical speculation into life experience and conveyed the concept of Taoism in poetic creation. Consequently, his theory of “giving form according to the thing” embodies a complex interpretation of thought and vivid practical perception, reflecting both the influence of philosophical theory on literary concepts and practice and the transcendence of literary concepts and practice.

This article focuses on the relationship between literary views and article studies of May Fourth scholars from the perspective of hermeneutics, in order to re-explain the connotation of “Chinese literary theory” and consider the construction of a Chinese literary theory discourse system. Rooted in interpretations of the interplay between literature and dao, May Fourth scholars reshaped the traditional framework, shifting the focus to the relationship between literature and humanity, through the integration of ideals and dao. Their commitment to broad, applied literary views led to a progression from a simple division between cultural traits and literary function to a more complex fourfold classification of literature. These scholars also returned to an ethically driven interpretive awareness, with the goal of inspiring individuals and reviving the nation, as seen in their promotion of vernacular writing and realist literary forms. This invention within traditional boundaries suggests that the “modern development” of ancient literary theory may serve as a viable alternative to the concept of “modern transformation.” Through a return to holistic philosophical methodologies, this article positions “Chinese literary theory” as a dynamic system, integrating ancient, modern, and contemporary frameworks, and proposes a comparative analysis of key categories (resource-based, referential, endogenous) to establish a coherent and historically continuous discourse system that transcends its time.

In God, Justice, Love, Beauty, Jean-Luc Nancy thoroughly elucidates his perspectives on beauty, extending beyond the confines of conventional epistemological aesthetics by introducing deconstructionism to the discourses on aesthetic issues. Specifically, Nancy reinterprets the legend of Narcissus, positioning its theme as the movement of beauty's self differentialspacing, and unveiling the différance inherent in beauty. However, as a generalized spacing movement, différance cannot highlight the singularity of beauty. Consequently, through an analysis of douard Manet's painting Reading, Nancy contends that beauty, as a motion of meaning that transcends signification, can only be represented as being of near-nothingness, that is, as a transparent representation. Nevertheless, beauty, as a motion of meaning, persistently exposes itself to the relational existence often succumbing to circular reference or self-cancellation. Thus, Nancy argues that the ultimate destination of beauty is the punctuated truth, which serves as an anchor point for enchained senses and, consequently, allow them to belong to each other even in separation from beauty.

The 20th century has witnessed an unprecedented exploration and development of the concept of human essence in the Western theoretical community. In the early 20th century, Heidegger proposed that human essence was existence. Later, Foucault argued that human essence was power. By the end of the 20th century, Derrida clearly pointed out that human essence was neither pure existence as advocated by the existentialists, nor pure power, as claimed by the power theorists. Instead, it is something between existence and power: the “powerization” of existence, which Derrida termed “sovereignty.” The operating rhythm of sovereignty involves the autonomy of automation, specifically speaking, the ordering of disorder, the culturalization of nature, and the rationalization of instinct, constituting the most fundamental mode of existence for the sovereign. By thoroughly examing and elucidating the keyword “sovereignty” that frequently appears in Heidegger's later works and by analyzing and interpreting the classic character Robinson Crusoe, created by Daniel Defoe, Derrida fully and forcefully confirmed his view of the essence on sovereignty. Derrida's theory of sovereignty has advanced the exploration and discussion of human essence in Western cultural and intellectual circles to an unprecedented height.

The label “posthumanism” identifies neither a doctrine, nor an intellectual or analytical approach with a defining set of protocols. Rather, we may take “posthumanism” as a term loosely applied to a range of contributions and approaches, on the basis of a generally under-specified collection of sympathies and commitments. Approximately stated, these sympathies and commitments would entail the claim that — with due allowance for historical variation — the category of “the human” has long played a key role at the centre of Western thought; that this role has included serving to justify the promotion of human beings above other forms of being, and indeed within this, over its history, the violent oppression of the great majority of human beings themselves; and that, in league with the effects of various recent technological developments, it is therefore important to decentre, relativize, critique, and perhaps even move beyond “the human”. In this article, I will accordingly not look to define the term “posthumanism”: rather, I will present some of the background to and influences on the range of contributions and approaches that have come to be assembled under this label; delineate two principles which may be discerned within these contributions and approaches; and consider some of the critiques which these “posthumanist” interventions have attracted. Ultimately, I will argue that the label itself matters less than the impulses behind the contributions it has come to identify.

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.

To identify why only “the poetics of graphite stone paintings” in Wu Changshuo and Pan Tianshou's works deserve to be referred to as representative of “modern scholars' paintings,” several issues need clarification. First, what is the boundary between “paintings by scholars” and “paintings by literati?” Second, how does one identify Wu's “stubborn stone” not only as a kind of “scholarly painting,” but also as “modern?” Third, how does one recognize Pan's “massive rock” as a “scholarly painting” worthy of being called “modern?” The response is as follows. Firstly, “scholarly painting” is rooted in tranquility and introverted in the self-sanctity of personality, while the root of “literati painting” lies in pleasure, and the pursuit of novelty lies in elegance and entertainment. Secondly, Wu's “stubborn stone” embodies a black-robed Zhong Qiu (dispelling evil and supporting the right), whose image resembles a “drunken Taoist priest” (stubborn and ugly) in Su Shi's “strange stone.” With an unrestrained mind, Wu could resign from his official position and pursue art. At the peak of his rise in the Shanghai-style painting circle, with the stone as a shield, he withstood the turbid flow of money worship shared by both the imperial court and the general population, reflected in the paintings of “peony.” Thirdly, Pan's “massive rock,” metaphorical of his late days, stands for his self-expectation to fulfill his mission to climb the pinnacle of modern ink wash painting.