Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University, USA. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former MacArthur Fellow, and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent books are The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011), Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which won the Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism in 2003 from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2004; and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2004), among others. Her most recent books of poetry are Red Rover (2012) and Columbarium, winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. This interview begins with a talk about her book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, the Chinese translation of which came out in February 2013, and covers issues concerning poetry, poetic creation, and the role of the senses. Stewart argues that the human senses have a history and that works of art provide an enduring record of that history. She also expresses her idea about how poetry can create meanings between persons and counter the denigration and degeneration of the senses in contemporary culture as it expands our imagination of the range of human expression.

This paper is intended to examine Ezra Pound’s ekphrastic principle of stillness based upon a thorough study of the interconnectedness between his “Canto XLIX” and the Chinese landscape handscroll entitled Eight Views of Xiao Xiang. It demonstrates that the last couplet of “Canto XLIX,” “The fourth; the dimension of stillness./And the power over wild beast,” can be regarded as Pound’s ekphrastic principle of stillness. This is also in accordance with the modern ekphrastic theory of still movement put forward by Murray Krieger.

This article applies Roland Barthes’ theory nominated in his most pivotal essay The Death of the Author to the art of Sohrab Sepehri, one of the Modern Iranian poets. The study endeavors to extrapolate that Sepehri is not absolutely personal and subjective in his art; rather, he tries to be impersonal and objective in half of his verses. He, most of the time, struggles to hide himself in his poems, and there are poems in which he erases himself to communicate his notions to the readers. Hence, he follows Barthes’ belief that as the author’s ideas take the written form only the text remains. In this sense, he is also following the Formalists and their idea about the autonomy of a text as a self-contained entity which has subterranean connections with its author. Considering such a perspective, the present study is to foreground the manifestation of Barthes’ impersonality of author or “The Death of the Author” in some of Sepehri’s poems. The findings show that Sepehri has aptly incorporated the technique of conveying the entities of the world around him to his readers by challenging their thoughts objectively and not through direct expression.

Philip Larkin is one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century. By analyzing the goods and advertisements depicted in Larkin’s poems, this paper points out that the goods and advertisements have obtained “symbolic value” from “meaning transformation,” thus the consumption of symbolic meaning of goods represents value that goods force upon people. Further on, the paper explores the changes of lifestyle caused by consumerism, the ethical guidance of commercial culture, as well as the confusion and meditation of people overwhelmed by consumption and modern life.

The essay addresses the representations of gender, identity, and nationalism in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s novel Dictee to argue that the text offers an interstitial space to conceptualize an identity that both invokes and resists the attempt by the dominant culture to contain the immigrant female self. The novel is composed of repeated silences, peculiar pauses, and narrative gaps found in translations that deviate from the original in an effort to explore the agency of an individual female subject within the national social order. The term “mistranslation” refers to the literary technique of directly altering meaning by leaving out an exact or equivalent translation between languages. Through mistranslation, the text reveals and disrupts the traditional use of translation during colonialism and imperialism as a method of cultural domination.

This article aims to explore four types of cultural images of women in Chinese literature — “the New Woman” from Republican China (1911–1949), “the Strong Woman” in the Mao era (1949–1976), “the Feminine Woman” in the 1980s, and “the Bad Girl” in the 1990s — to illustrate how the status of women is a significant indication of the development of modernity discourse. By exploring the four types of women’s images in the linear development of Chinese women’s writing, this essay argues that the idea of Chinese modernity is a historically specific structure in association with some distinct women’s images. In other words, the New Woman image signifies one dimension of modernity — a rejection of tradition and a break from the past — whereas the Strong Woman becomes the “national resources” during the Mao era’s pursuit of modernity, with the creation of the Feminine Woman as a counter-response to the dominant Maoist discourse, and the Bad Girl image turns into the “consumer resources” in a consumer culture.

A Passage to India is the last and most successful novel of E.M. Forster, a British middle-class intellectual with the liberal humanist ideal expressed in his “only connect” motto. However, Forster’s liberal humanist ideal is incompatible with the imperialism of his time. He criticizes the inhuman imperialistic behavior and condemns it for its undermining of cross-racial personal relations. As a firm anti-imperialist and liberal humanist, Forster’s identity is a dislocated and embarrassing one. Sensing that the empire is “resting on sand” with the inevitable fate of collapse, Forster resorts to the Utopian concept of a “democratic empire” as a panacea of redemption. This depoliticized ideal reflects the latent empire complex in Forster and his double visions: what he opposes is imperialism, not empire. Instead, he shows great anxiety and concern for the fate of the British Empire. A Passage to India is an “epitaph on liberal humanism” and an elegy to the British Empire.

Geoffrey Chaucer has depicted a knight’s love story in his first long poem The Book of the Duchesse. In this poem, the poet modified the traditional idea which divided love and marriage, and pushed courtly love into marriage, building an ideal marriage on true love. In this respect, people can practice the religious teaching of love and accord with Christian morality of family and marriage. This poem links the religious element with the secular element, revealing a general attitude of humanists who could blend different ideas in the early Renaissance.

Science fiction on human cloning keeps pace with social development, focusing on human change brought about by science and the scientific impact on society. In Blueprint, through the accusation of the cloned child of her “mother twin,” it provides us with an ethical revelation of the coexistence of natural human and cloned human. From the perspective of Ethical Literary Criticism, the paper centers around the ethical line of the subversion of biological choice and the pursuit of ethical identity, deconstructing the ethical knots of a new ethical environment: confusion of self-existence, dissatisfaction with double life, rebellion against mother-twin’s orders, and the incest taboo. The paper then explores deeper ethical meaning, namely that any scientific choice beyond the bottom line of cognition will arouse ethical chaos and moral imbalance. Thus, we need to rethink present and future scientific choices through the prediction and warning offered by fiction.

Humboldt’s Gift has been favorably reviewed since its publication in 1975, which contributed to Bellow’s crowning with the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature in the following year. The novel describes the transformative history of the urban landscape and the spiritual world of urban citizens. The sufferings of two intellectual generations reveal how the arts became useless and powerless in their confrontation with urban materialism within the thirty years after WWII. Cities show less vitality and vigor than they once did. Anxiety, hysteria, and suppression have become the main personality traits of urban individuals. Abundant urban signs in the novel demonstrate the transformation of cities from commercialization to industrialization and its impact on urban individuals.

Charles Johnson, the 1990 National Book Award winner, is praised as one of the most important and innovative writers of serious fiction in post–World War II American letters. A man of great learning in both Eastern and Western philosophies and religions, Johnson deliberately makes his writings full of philosophical thinking while diluting their racial and political references, hence challenging readers’ familiarity with conventional Black writings. Rarely noted in the 1980s scholarship but warmly hailed since the 1990s, Johnson has experienced dramatic changes in critical responses. With a general survey of Western Johnsonian scholarship on three dimensions — philosophical Black fiction, Eastern religions, and postmodernism — this article tries to analyze their values and drawbacks respectively, and then to inspire further studies in the future.

The Faulkner study has been in the limelight on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Far East, and yet seems to lack more inspiring focus in the new millenary. Ethical Literary Criticism of Faulkner’s Novels lately written by Prof. Wu Yueming takes the prospective of ethical literary criticism and carries out a systematic study of Faulkner’s major novels. The book argues that only on the basis of the historical locale and ethical context can the Faulkner study reap significant harvest. By dialectically interpreting the ethical relations between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself, the book discusses the ethical mapping of the American South in the early twentieth century, which is different from that of the North, recorded in the textual world created by Faulkner.

As the first important book on American (Black) humor study in China, Black Humor and the Tradition of Humor in American Fiction by Su Hui undoubtedly represents a new advancement in that area. The monograph contributes original ideas in many aspects of (Black) humor such as its social background, narrative strategy, and aesthetic function. Most significantly, it closely grasps the realistic motivation of (Black) humor — the absurdity of human existence — and endows the study with a profound philosophical foundation. This paper mainly endeavors to explore the book’s elaboration on the philosophical foundation, the prerequisites of humorists, and the ultimate function of (Black) humor from such aspects as the absurdity of human existence, the wisdom to detect the absurd, and the transcendence of the absurd.

Inspired by the poetic views of Ezra Pound and the opinions about the methods of coping with Chinese and Western theories proposed by Zhang Longxi, Professor Zheng Yanhong takes a specific view both on the whole and detailed levels and places Rexroth’s poems into a Chinese cultural context to investigate the poetic elements that exist deep in the historical, cultural, intellectual, and psychological dimensions. Ultimately, the author achieves a unique understanding of Kenneth Rexroth’s poetry and restores its value. The significance of this work lies not only in the uniqueness of its topic but also in the universality concluded by analyzing the texts and their surrounding elements from multiple perspectives. More significantly, to some extent it breaks through the academic constraints of the popular notion of “theories first.” With the spirit of Pu Xue, a Chinese traditional textual criticism school, this book promotes a return to the study of the nature of literature rather than the pure application of non-literary theories. In this way, it achieves the goal of bringing together the West and the East both culturally and innovatively.