“Anti-order” is an important theoretical category in Chinese traditional culture, often compared with the category of “fro-order.” As the categories of “anti-order” and “fro-order” develop, two value orientations are formed in the process, that is, the orientation that favors “fro-order” over “anti-order” and that puts more merit on “anti-order” than “fro-order.” The preference to “anti-order” has exerted greater influence and given rise to the concept of “anti-order writing” in theoretical criticism of classical Chinese literature. It is a common aesthetic aspiration in literary criticism of the Qing Dynasty that values the “anti-order.” The Tongcheng school, for instance, makes detailed comments on the use of the “anti-order writing” through anthologies and commentaries to emphasize its important meaning. Their creative interpretation by means of metaphor enriches the criticism of the anti-order writing. Tongcheng scholars’ criticism of anti-order writing is a concrete reflection of their literary thought. Moreover, their works not only reflect the profound understanding of Tongcheng school’s creative view on anti-order writing, but also embody the mindset of favoring the aesthetics of twists over smoothness.

 As transmedia storytelling prevails， narrative gradually becomes an art of world-building. A storyworld is an expandable fantasy world aroused by narration. The construction of a storyworld involves precise creation， continuous expansion， and narrative coherence. A storyworld， following the principle of “fantastic realism，” normally consists of a long history， current events， and shared values. Such a world unfolds thanks to the shift of the characters' point of view， the expansion of the space， and the generational developments， three devices used in the narrative like three “searchlights” in the exploration of an unknown world. The popularization of the storyworld is underlined by the rise of a “re-enchanting” world as a result of the dissatisfaction with the society of “disenchantment” and the desire for the resurgence of fantasy. With imminent threats and pressing missions， “re-enchantment” suggests a turbulent and imaginary world， where the participants of the re-enchanting storyworlds manage to escape from the daily life， search for meaning， and establish a sense of identity.

The minor-Asiatic background enabled Apollo to take on multiple identities in the reconstruction process of Greek myths. Appolo's image was initially displaced and equated with the Sun-God Helios. The Sun-God in Homer and Hesiod' works was still Helios while Apollo was the god of hunting, medicine and music (the god of literature and art). The Histories of Herodotus excluded Helios from the main twelve gods of Olympus, and made the young god Appolo take a higher position in heaven. Tragedy playwrights before 500 BC. called Apollo the Sun-God, regarding his oracles as the moira which cannot be altered or resisted. In Hellenic age, the position of Apollo as the Sun-God was unshakable. In the literatures of Miletus school and Socrates, Apollo is turned into the god of reason. This paper tries to delineate how the initially alien god Apollo, with an initially alien background, takes place the former Sun-God Helios during the reconstruction process, to examine what sociocultural features the transformation of Apollo's identities demonstrate during different periods in ancient Greek history, and to explore what significances the remaking of the Apollo myth implies for Greek tragedies, history and philosophy.

The stage design of traditional European and American theatre belongs to the “visual field,” while the perceptual revolution of contemporary scenography aims to break the visual dominance and devise multi-sensory experiences. Behind the traditional scenography dominated mostly by vision and secondly by hearing is the perceptual hierarchy of Western civilization, hammered in especially by rationalism in modern times. Since the 1990s, however, contemporary theatre has turned to touch, smell and taste to provide embodied experiences that are inaccessible through virtual media such as film, television and the Internet. Considering the recent revival of “lower senses,” this article focuses on the perceiving body’s sensory experiences of touch, smell, taste and synaesthesia in contemporary theatre environments. Exploring tactile/haptic experiences from human touch to post-human touch, relating olfactory experiences to emotion, memory and urban smellscape, staging gustatory experiences through taste, cooking and rasaesthetics, and devising synaesthetic experiences to understand (syn)aesthetics and the “weather world,” contemporary theatre has effectively appealed to “lower senses” in both theory and practice through its expanded multi-sensory scenography.

In essence， the metaverse can be regarded as a time process， which will magnify and refine the jump， reversal， and delay of the subject against the flow of time， so as to show the intervention of non-linear time in the subjective perception. Secondary to time， speed generates and presents the synthesis of its internal dynamic relations based on time. As a mirror presentation of the temporal logic of modernity， slow time in the metaverse not only inverts the modern cult of speed， but also resists algorithmic time and its determinism. Slow time acts simultaneously as a new mode of perception and memory， allowing the subject to perceive the heterogeneity of time. In addition， the perspective of media archaeology displays the dual pressure of earlier media on fracture and speed， and later media's re-examination of temporal reflexivity. Therefore， slow time reveals a confrontation with historical totality and its pressure， as well as the pressure of globalized temporal imagination on the other， the pressure of chronological hegemony on individual authenticity， and the pressure of time on space. A reflection upon such will become another path to reexamine the question of contemporaneity.

The history of poetry in Yuan dynasty is usually divided into three periods. In the early Yuan period, the poetic style of late Tang dynasty and late Song dynasty was prevalence. In the middle-Yuan period, the high Tang style was emulated, as was represented by the so-called the Four Great Yuan Poets who were officials and served in the court. Yang Weizhen, an influential poet in late Yuan dynasty for his poetics, however, advocated the Six-Dynasty poetry as well as the works of Li Po, Li Ho, Tao Yuanming, Wei Yingwu, Liu Zongyuan, Du fu, Li Shangyin, etc. Yang Weizhen and his followers were active in southeast China, not in the officialdom. They emulated the mid-Tang poetry, and contributed to the transition toward the style of the airs and the hymns in The Book of Poetry as they also admired the Music Bureau Poetry and advocated the implicit diction commonly known as the strategy of writing The Spring and Autumn Annals.

In the 1940s, Hu Feng proposed a theory of “subjective fighting spirit” for the writing of realistic fiction. This article suggests that this theory implies a political agenda, which should be understood in the cultural politics of China in the 1940s. The divergence of his views towards contemporary Chinese society and its culture from that of the CCP accounts for his disagreement with Mao's vision of a new culture. It is a competition for cultural hegemony with the Party in the field of cultural production.

Heidegger's discussions of Hölderlin's poetry plays an important role in his philosophy of existence. However, it also sparks great controversies, which mainly focus on whether the Heideggerian interpretation implies Heidegger’s “Fighting Spirit” of devoting himself to reality. This article does not view such controversy as a theme of significance, but examines how such a convoluted thought in Heidegger’s philosophy of existence is related to the historical depth as he’s perceived., The relation is expressed through the interpretation of poetry, and the philosophy of existence places Hölderlin’s poetry in the same critical temporal point when a nation faces a decisive historical moment for a new prospect. At this juncture, poetry is related to history, philosophical thinking and even politics, to construct a “historical Dasein” within this world. The paper explores the implications of how historical consciousness permeated with philosophical thinking is thoroughly combined with poetic understanding. This article also tackles the issue concerning Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s thoughts on “spirit,” claiming that this action of Derris’s has so incisively and subtly penetrated Heidegger’s “historical consciousness.” 

After finishing Black Square, the foundation for pure abstract art, Kazimir Malevich sought to further consolidate and develop the connotation of suprematism, using the “zero of form” as a core principle to deepen his metaphysical thinking about color. In his theoretical writings and artistic practice from 1915 to 1920, Malevich developed the concept of artistic evolution, namely “three stages of suprematism” (black–red–white), endowing each stage with a corresponding motivation (economy–revolution–pure action). Malevich saw White on White, which contained universal utopian ideas, as the final stage of Hegel's evolutionary view of history, in which the concepts were integrated into a purely unified form and became self-contained, corresponding to what Malevich referred to as the “unified world architectural system on Earth” or the “post-historical” era of art. Combining Arthur Danto's declaration of the “end of art”, painting has come to an end in the narrative level in White on White, where both form and color are “transformed into zero,” and the interpretation of artistic concepts turn into the interpretation of philosophical concepts. However, abstract art has entered a diversified era in the theoretical atmosphere of the “art world,” and the “emptiness” of abstract art has the potential to continue to nurture or generate new connotations and ideas. The “end of art” in the context of suprematism emphasizes the “liberation” of art in the dual sense of aesthetic and social values, which is closely related to the aesthetics of the Russian Silver Age.

In the Ming Dynasty, Linchuan, in addition to Suzhou, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, is another important center of drama where Tang Xianzu is the core. The center formed around a family with remote village communities and the members include Xie Tingliang, Shuai Ji, Wu Shizhi, Zeng Ruhai, Zheng Zhiwen and Xu Fenpeng. These writers have different degree of social contact with Tang Xianzu, and tend to have similar creation and thought. It is reasonable to consider the Linchuan drama group during the period of the late Ming dynasty as an independent genre of drama. More importantly, to explore the activities of these dramatists from the perspectives of dramatic ecology and literary geography is of special significance for remapping these dramatists' genealogy and geographical affiliation and therefore for revaluating Tang's achievement and status in history of drama.

Embarking on the paradox of the imagination, Schelling elaborates on its creative and intuitive nature. He regards the intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the transcendental foundation of imagination, thus elevating the latter from the level of epistemology to that of ontology, and making it a kind of creativity rooted in the divine Creation that establishes the fundamental relationship between human and the being of the world. The poetic imagination is the objectification of the divine imagination in the empirical world. It communicates the finite and the infinite through the aesthetic action of “Ein-bildung,” and achieves the realization of the Absolute's self-production and self-intuition. The integration of imagination and the metaphysical construction principle of the whole philosophical system is essentially a poetic creation. The inherent structure of imagination contains a contradiction between freedom and necessity. Schelling believes that the real imagination should be free creation constrained by systematic inner necessity. He reveals the real human imagination as the combination of divinity and poetry based on human freedom. The three-dimensional theoretical structure of imagination—divinity, poetry and freedom—runs through the three human spiritual fields, reason, sensibility and will, which correspond to the triple meta-value of truth, beauty and goodness, prompting people to achieve an overall harmonious state of life.

Ihab Hassan is a pioneer and key figure in the theoretical debate on postmodernism in the late half of the twentieth Century. In a relative stagnant period of literary criticism theory, he surveys various types of pioneer literature, proposes for the first time the theory of postmodernism, and elaborates on the characteristics and theoretical implications of postmodernism. He extends the theory of postmodernism further to the fields of culture and philosophy, and with it his influence has also spread from the United States to Europe and other parts of the world. Hassan defines the fundamental characteristics of postmodernism as "indetermanence." After exploring the complex relationships of the continuity and discontinuity between modernism, avantgarde and postmodernism, he puts forward the concept of "paracriticism." Hassan's contributions to the theory of postmodernism lie mainly in proposing, defining, propagating and practicing the theory of postmodernism．

In the sixth year of Wanli Reign in the Ming Dynasty (1578), based on Mao Zhifang’s Great Achievement of the Shilian Poetics and Lin Zhen’s Great Achievement of the Lianxin Shibei Poetics in the Yuan Dynasty, The Great Achievement of Ancient and Modern Poetics was published and exerted great impact in the literary world. It not only was adapted into a variety of reading primers for poetic enlightenment, but also became an immediate reference for the compilation of fictional works such as the Selected Works of Ancient and Modern Grotesque Stories and Youguai Shitan. It deeply influenced the development of the genre of legendary fiction in the Ming Dynasty. First, it enabled poetry to enter fiction in large numbers, generating a narrative form with poetry as its skeleton. Secondly, it made the fictional characters more functional and symbolic. Finally, the book embodied the view that fiction could work as play and attach great importance to the concept of fiction. The Great Achievement of Ancient and Modern Poetics re-created the Selected Works of Ancient and Modern Grotesque Stories and Youguai Shitan as a collective work of poems, poetics, and poetic remarks. It also served as a criticism of poetry, a teaching of practical poem writing, and a fictional narrative. In short, it embodied the dual value of poetics and fiction. The book was at once a showcase of its author’s talent and the result of the development of the concept of fiction in the Ming Dynasty.

Recently, “immersion”, a technical term in virtual reality, has gained attention in narratological studies and has been applied to the construction of multimedia theories. While the emphases and interpretations of different immersion theories are diverse, they share the focus on readers' and/or users' narrative experience and cognitive process, in order to break away from classical narratology and herald the digital turn. Among all these theories, Janet H. Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan and Michael Heim exemplify three approaches to exploring immersive experience in the digital world. Among them, Murray investigates immersion in “low-tech” narrative, Ryan constructs a general poetics of immersion beyond media, and Heim explores “ultimate display” from the unique sensory experience of “high-tech” narrative. Immersion is pivotal to the understanding of narrative cognition in the digital age. Clarifying different approaches is the premise of understanding the technological intervention and aesthetical change in contemporary narratological theories.

Fantastic literature is an important part of the world literature, and also one of the long-term concerns of the Western literary criticism, resulting in a large amount of works and studies. In his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov defines from the perspective of the structuralist poetics the fantastic novels as a literary genre and tries to reveal the mechanism inherent in the genre. Although this book has been the subject of considerable controversy since its publication, it is still, because of its original and insightful views, a must-read canon for the study of the Western fantastic literature, and it also gives an example of the structuralist criticism.

 The concept of “Uber-Marionette,” proposed by the British theatre practitioner Gordon Craig, is a metaphor for an ideal performer whose body has a purely “corporeal/material” quality. In contrast, the body of Cyber “Uber-Marionette,” represented by virtual idols in digital time-space, is a kind of disembodied information body. The evolution of the body landscape from “Uber-Marionette” to Cyber “Uber-Marionette” marks a transition from substantialist views on the body, inherited and developed by Gordon Craig, to cybernetic views on the body in the age of “posthumanism”. This transformation has not only brought about a profound change in the paradigm of existence of the performer's body but has also virtualized the body of the audience and shaken the performer-spectator relationship. In order to respond to the challenges posed by the Cyber “Uber-Marionette” as a kind of disembodied “hyperhuman,” the human performer, rather than retrogressing into the state of “prehuman” implied by the image of “Uber-Marionette”, must evolve into a kind of embodied “posthuman” whose strengthened body coexists with technology.

Pu Songling recounted how ancient scholars made a living in his Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and the means fell into the following categories: home school tutoring, copying books, making paintings and calligraphic works, and doing business. These practices reflected the social reality of the scholars’ life in the Qing Dynasty. The idea behind these practices in the Qing Dynasty was influenced by Xu Heng’s claim that “the primary task of a scholar is to make a living” in the Yuan Dynasty, and the idea underlay the scholars’ practice of making a living in the Ming-Qing dynasties while the need to make a living also reflected the difficult living conditions of the lower class scholars. Pu Songling and his father’s practice of making a living prompted him to pay attention to the social phenomenon and recounted how scholars’ made a living and what social ecology the low-class scholars were confronted, while Pu’s own practice of making a living allowed him to imbue the stories with some unique nuances.

The classical Chinese aesthetics that French sinologist François Jullien tries to construct is centered on such notions as plain (la fadeur), non-objet, désontologie, and l'immanence. In so doing, Jullien aims to give Europe an access to  "l'impensé" via Chinese aesthetics. However, his endeavour presents itself to be more like a derivative of post-structuralist  theories of Foucault and Deleuze and an invention than a reliable representation of China. On the fundamental level, Jullien's views of Chinese thought follows those of Hegel and Max Weber. Although he tries to reexamine Hegel's negative comments on China, his seemingly exquisite discussions fail to rectify the stereotyical notion of European Sinology. Meanwhile, Jullien values the Heideggerian concept of "the undifferentiated basis prior to the realization of form," which has a non-interventional and non-political import. Despite this philosophical ambition, Jullien fails to reach out to reflecting contemporary socio-political problems and therefore his aesthetic construction entails questions in terms of its relevance to current politics.

The Psychology of Tragedy (1933) by Zhu Guangqian is a monumental work in the history of Chinese theories of tragedy. Written from the unique perspective of a Chinese scholar and moving with ease among major Western theories of tragedy, its author had raised therein a good number of great insights that are still valid today. Zhu Guangqian's greatest contribution to the theory of tragedy lies in his modification of Aristotle's theories of "catharsis" and "hamartia", legitimating the plot of innocent suffering and introducing into the mix of tragic feelings such important concepts as love and regret. Probably due to his over-emphasis on the Kantian notion of the sublime, Zhu seemed to have neglected those tragic works that depict the passive suffering of ordinary men and women. As to the three classic German philosophers, Zhu Guangqian rejected both Hegel's theory of universal justice for being too optimistic and Schopenhauer's theory of resignation for being too pessimistic. Zhu's overall outlook on life and his aesthetic theory in particular find a close ally in Nietzsche who combined the ideas of his two German predecessors. Nietzsche, of course, erred miserably in his pronouncement on the death of tragedy in ancient Greece, and this had a negative impact on Zhu Guangqian in his own elaborations of the subject. Nevertheless, their similar effort to connect tragic art with cultural values constituted a great inspiration to later scholars.

Since the beginning of the new century， Western popular culture has been haunted by a ghost — zombie — which increasingly demonstrates its attraction and potential for interpretation in Hollywood genre film. First of all， at the image level， the image of zombie is a metaphorical representation or symbolic critique of such important concepts as capital， the proletariat， and the subject of consumption under the umbrella of capitalism. These critical values of zombie are closely related to the “negative dialectics” implied in its definition. Therefore， it points to an alternative to the post-human vision of cyborg. Secondly， the commercial success of the zombie film is rooted in the plundering and appropriation of images from former colonies on the one hand， and a compromise with the logic of local consumerism on the other. This holistic process is itself an expression of the problems including postcoloniality in the capitalist world system. A theoretical identification of the local metaphor as well as the holistic allegory presented by the zombie film allows us to understand the main aspects of the capitalist cultural logic that underlie these films as well as their future developments.