Author Archives
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This Week’s Features: The World of Fantasy
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 ›
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Art Nouveau in Metacomics: The Autonomy of the Artist in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland
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 ›
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This Week’s Features: WWII
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 ›
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When Politics Confronts Aesthetics in Post-War Japanese Tea Culture: The Decay of Arts in Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes
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 ›
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This Week’s Features: Hong Kong Literature
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 ›
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The Conspiracy Theory of Artificial History as a Political Tool in Authoritarian Regimes: The Manipulation of Social Orders in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
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 ›
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This Week’s Features: Nature and Arts
Henry David Thoreau stated in Walden (1854) that he had gone to the woods because he had wished to “live deliberately and to front the essential facts of life” to reject socially constructed universal truths. Nature is one of the… Read More ›
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Expressionist Aesthetics in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie: A Fictional Recreation of Paris out of the Pastiche and the Cinéma du look
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French romantic comedy film Amélie (2001) is a lighthearted fiesta of daily pleasures. It narrates the life of a waitress, Amélie Poulain, who spent her childhood isolated from the outer world, and her journey to bring her little… Read More ›
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The Abyss of Semiosis in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: The Mise en abyme of Signs
Like many of Umberto Eco’s works, The Name of the Rose (1980) is another postmodern novel that deals with the deceiving nature of language. However, although Eco once again makes use of the technique of intertextuality to mock the search… Read More ›
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This Week’s Features: Aesthetics of Dreams
Fiction itself is an imaginative dimension outside the realm of reality. When authors write about dreams, they remove the ‘ontological distance’ (a term coined by David Mitchell). Because dreams are personal experiences, they often appear in modernist literature to emphasise… Read More ›
