As Giambattista Vico argues, we are the only creatures who can interpret history because human beings are historical creatures that “make history”. Therefore, because literary works are ‘humanistic texts’, to understand literary works, we must be able to immerse in… Read More ›
Metafictional narratives are often employed in postmodern novels to dig into the self-reflexive dimension of the authors. They emphasise the artificiality of the works to eliminate the boundaries between fiction and reality. Being aware of the structural components of narratives,… Read More ›
Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, one of the most infernal periods in human history ever known to us. Apart from the infamous rule of Nazi, the decline of Communist Eastern European states led to a… Read More ›
“What do we call visible light? We call it colour. But the Electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.” With scientific specificity and aesthetic poetry,… Read More ›
What makes humans “human”? What is “alive”? These classic philosophic questions floods the stage in the 2011 theatre adaptation of Frankenstein, scripted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle for the Royal National Theatre, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller… Read More ›
The Japanese grand master system iemoto seido is a hierarchical way to preserve many forms of traditional practices of arts such as calligraphy, Noh and chadō (the “Way of Tea”) in local households. When Yasunari Kawabata was awarded the Nobel… Read More ›
Founded more than a century before Communist China was, Hong Kong has a long history. Going through the First Opium War, British colonial period and the Handover, our city has emerged as a complex hybrid of different cultures. Our home… Read More ›
The International Film Festival 2019 has kickstarted last week with opening film, Pain and Glory (2019), directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Pain comes in many forms, both physical and mental, each affects us in different ways. It can be a hindrance… Read More ›
Love and intimacy are two important components in a romantic relationship. It is easy for us to discuss these topics openly nowadays, but not so much in early 20th century. Jenny, written by Sigrid Undset and published in 1911, highlighted… Read More ›
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), as its title suggests, implies the power of human imagination through an imaginary universe consisted of numerous surrealist representations of imaginative cities. Inspired by Marco Polo’s pilgrimages, the novel appears to be a product of… Read More ›
