Volume 11 Number 5 (September 12)

A Comparative Study of Crisis Communication Discourse Between Chinese and American Companies under the Tariff War—A Case Study of Apple and Huawei

Geng Xiaokun

Against the deepening process of globalization, the United States launched global tariff wars and intensified its suppression of China’s development. Trade disputes and tariff frictions between the two sides persisted from 2018 to 2025. Under such circumstance, policy-driven external crises have become a key research context for corporate crisis communication discourse. This study conducts a comparative analysis of Apple and Huawei based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model. Since neither company issued official statements during the 2025 trade conflicts, this paper just analysis the text released in the initial phase of the tariff war from 2018 to 2020. The paper examines their crisis communication discourses. The research findings indicate that Huawei adopted a clear and confrontational discourse strategy, constructing an identification of "survival and development". Through emotional mobilization, historical narration and collective identity rhetoric, it linked corporate prospects to national industrial security. In contrast, Apple maintained a neutral, restrained and depoliticized stance and established an identification of "efficiency and win-win cooperation". It upheld shared interests via rational elaboration, interest balancing and data expression. The difference between the two companies stems from ownership nature, supply chain structure, market reliance and political and economic contexts. This research broadens the application of Critical Discourse Analysis in studies on crisis communication discourse triggered by policy-driven external crises, and provides references on discourse strategies for both multinational corporations and local enterprises to deal with international political risks.

Remembering Caste, Reclaiming Identity: Childhood, Humiliation and Resistance in Select Marathi Dalit Autobiographies

Dr Suresh G D

Dalit autobiography has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of Indian life writing because it transforms personal experience into a narrative of collective history, social injustice and resistance. Unlike conventional autobiographies that frequently concentrate on individual achievement, Dalit autobiographies locate the individual within the structures of caste, poverty, labour, social exclusion and community life. Childhood occupies a particularly important place in this tradition because caste consciousness is often formed through experiences encountered during the earliest stages of life. Sharankumar Limbale’s The Outcaste: Akkarmashi, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, and Laxman Gaikwad’s The Branded: Uchalya are significant Marathi Dalit autobiographies that remember childhood and community life through the experience of caste oppression. Although the three narratives differ in gender, social background, narrative structure and individual experience, they collectively reveal how caste penetrates everyday life through poverty, untouchability, education, occupation, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation. Limbale’s The Outcaste explores the painful identity of a child born to a Dalit mother and a dominant-caste father, making questions of legitimacy, belonging and caste central to the narrative. Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke extends the autobiographical perspective from the individual to the collective life of Dalit women and the Mahar community, exposing poverty, gender oppression, caste discrimination and the struggle for dignity. Gaikwad’s The Branded: Uchalya represents the experience of a nomadic community historically stigmatised and treated as criminal, demonstrating how social prejudice can become attached to an entire community and continue across generations. Through memory, these writers recover experiences excluded from dominant histories. Their narratives transform humiliation into testimony and memory into resistance. This article argues that the three autobiographies reclaim Dalit identity by challenging caste-based representations and asserting the right of marginalised communities to narrate their own histories.

The English Translation of Chinese Internet Buzzwords and Its Dissemination and Reception in Mainstream British and American Media

Ziyuan Dai

Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional discourse analysis model and the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, this study is going to explore the dissemination and reception of Chinese internet buzzwords in mainstream British and American media from 2019 to 2024. The research will focus on high-frequency buzzwords such as "neijuan" (involution), "tangping" (lying flat), and "996 culture", and will be conducted from three dimensions: textual features, discursive practices, and social practices. The findings indicate that multiple translation versions coexisted for each buzzword during the early stages of dissemination, after which mainstream translations (e.g., involution, lying flat, 996 culture) were gradually established. From the perspective of media cognition and attitudes, mainstream media in the UK and US generally acknowledge the social realities and youth mentality reflected by these buzzwords. However, their reports inevitably carry their own national stances, and some degree of bias in understanding is unavoidable. Overall, the cross-linguistic dissemination of Chinese internet buzzwords not only reflects the growing international influence of Chinese online culture, but also reveals differences in sociocultural thinking and discourse construction between China and the West.

Exploring AI-Based Sentiment, Emotion, and Tone Measurement Tools in the Interpretation of English Literature: A Comparative Framework for AI-Assisted Literary Analysis

Dr. Ambreen Khanam

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence within literary scholarship has significantly expanded the methodological possibilities of digital humanities research. In particular, sentiment analysis and emotion detection models have been widely used in the analysis of large textual corpora and in the examination of affective patterns in literary narratives. Notwithstanding these leaps, deep desegregation persists in the interpretive reliability of computational strategies for the literary language of perplexity. Figurative expression, narrative voice, irony, and contextual nuances often confound automated sentiment classification systems, thereby posing important methodological questions about the role of artificial intelligence in literary interpretation. This work fills a key gap in digital humanities scholarship by presenting a Comparative AI-Assisted Literary Interpretation Framework (CAALIF) that implements a method for systematically testing interpretive results from various sentiment analysis models. The framework involves lexicon-based, transformer-based, and large language model approaches, comparing their analytical performance within a structured interpretive pipeline. The analysis is applied to a corpus of canonical English literary texts which cover a range of narrative traditions - tragedy, realist fiction and modernist literature. The results show high levels of divergence among computational models in interpreting literary sentiment, especially in passages characterised by figurative language and narrative ambiguity. While AI analytics tools can effectively identify general emotional patterns and sentiment shifts across the stages of a narrative, their interpretations offer a reflection on why the process of humanistic critical assessment remains critical. The creation by this study of a consciousness of a comparative methodological framework for artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted literary analysis contributes to a continuous debate regarding the integration of computational methodologies with literary studies. It provides a liberal strategy for enhancing methodological rigour in digital humanities research.

Traumatic Saga of Dysfunctional and Domestic Depression in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Dr. Dnyaneshwar Kisan Satbhai

The intangible subjectivity of beauty creates inferiority and deep perpetual impact in the psyche of innocent child, and The Bluest Eye is the fine epitome of it. Toni Morrison's has indignantly exhibited the sobs and sighs of psychologically inflected wounds of the black family. The concept of the beauty has to be formed to establish the new and equal civil liberties in the world, which will inspire man to look at each other as human being. The novelist depicts a tormenting study of trauma rooted in dysfunctional family and domestic depression within African-American societies. The researcher focuses on how systemic racism, internalized notions of beauty, and socioeconomic marginalization inflict deep psychological wounds on individuals, particularly children. The novel reveals the emotional neglect, domestic violence, and cracked parental associations generate a cycle of despair and self-loathing. It also shows domestic spaces not as situations of protection but as arenas of sustained trauma, where inherited pain is silently transmitted across generations. By interrogating the imposed standards of white beauty and their destructive impact on Black identity. Pecola, the novel’s protagonist, has been victimized due to her blackness and ugliness.

Sufi Poets as Ideal Poets in the American Transcendentalist Imagination

Sumera

This research paper examines the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller regarding the criterion of an ideal poet. The paper tries to demonstrate how the transcendentalist’s notion of the ideal poet was greatly impacted by Sufi thought by illustrating a common vision of artistry based upon spiritual freedom, depth of feeling, imaginative capability, and a commitment to free thought and expression. The paper draws heavily from Emerson’s and Margaret Fuller’s Transcendentalist philosophy to delineate the Transcendentalists’ value of freedom of thought and spirit, sincerity, self-sufficiency, and a heightened perception of beauty both in the natural world and in humanity as fundamental traits of an ideal poet. The paper focuses on key components of the idea of the ideal poet and demonstrates how transcendentalists’ thoughts parallel Sufi thoughts. It examines key areas such as solitude, the beauty of nature, imagination, free expression, and noble thought.

Narratives of Power and Resistance: Reading the Victorian Era through the Lens of Indian Colonial History

Dr. Sarbani Sankar Panigrahi

This article explores the intricate relationship between Victorian literature and British colonial rule in India, examining how literary narratives both supported and challenged imperial ideologies. By analyzing selected texts from prominent Victorian authors alongside responses from Indian thinkers and writers, the study reveals the dual role of literature as a tool of colonial power and a medium of resistance. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the article highlights how literature became a site of cultural negotiation, where identities were shaped, contested, and reimagined within the colonial context.

Enhancing Sustainable Development and Gender Equality through Women's Education

Mamta Rani, Rupinder Kaur

Education is widely recognized to provide benefits for women's empowerment and the progress of the nation. The present paper aims to investigate how education enhances women's socioeconomic status and benefits society. The study is based on secondary data sources. The data are taken from the Education Statistics at a Glance. 2018 reports of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, annual reports of the Department of Higher Education and the Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, and various web sources. The paper explores the relationship between women's education, gender equality, and sustainable development. The government of India's various initiatives and schemes for women's education are also discussed in the paper. This study presents a thorough analysis and highlights that increasing investments in women's education are strategically vital for women's empowerment, promoting gender equality, and sustainable development.

Constructing Fragile Manhood: Manifestations of Male Crisis in Kate Chopin's Selected Short Stories via Connell's Model

Abduladheem Khalaf Jasim, Prof. N. Solomon Benny

Kate Chopin’s nineteenth-century local color short fiction has long been celebrated for its pioneering critique of patriarchal structures and its unflinching psychological portraits of female entrapment and liberation. Meanwhile, a critical gap persists concerning how Chopin’s realist canvas simultaneously exposes the structural vulnerability, internal anxieties, and emotional paralysis of her male characters. This paper examines the representation of masculinity in selected short stories by Kate Chopin—specifically "Desirée's Baby" (1893), "Fedora" (1897), and "At the 'Cadian Ball" (1892)—through the sociological lens of R.W. Connell’s groundbreaking theory of multiple masculinities, particularly the concepts of hegemonic masculinity, marginalization, and crisis tendencies. Applying Connell’s framework reveals that Chopin’s male figures do not merely operate as static enforcers of patriarchal oppression; rather, they are trapped within an unforgiving normative architecture that demands absolute authority while rendering them emotionally illiterate and psychologically brittle. When confronted with shifts in racial purity, female autonomy, or unrequited desire, these characters experience acute crises of manhood, exposing the systemic fragility inherent in nineteenth-century American hegemonic ideals.

A Correlated Study on Psychological Well-Being, Social Support and Stress among Transgender Adults

Twinkle Bundela, Dr. Jyoti

Understanding the association of psychological well-being and social support with stress is important for understanding the mental health of transgender adults. The present study attempts to investigate these dimensions and examine the relationship of psychological well-being and social support with stress among transgender adults. It intended to find the relationship between psychological well-being, social support and stress among 60 transgender adults aged between 20 and 30 years through psychological tools and statistical analyses such as Pearson correlation and regression analysis. The results showed a significant correlation between psychological well-being and stress (r = -0.31, p < .05). Furthermore, a significant correlation was also found between social support and stress (r = -0.32, p < .05). These findings indicate that lower levels of psychological well-being and social support were associated with higher levels of stress among transgender adults. The findings support the hypotheses that psychological well-being and social support have significant relationships with stress. The study highlights the importance of psychological well-being and social support in understanding and reducing stress among transgender adults. Further research may help in understanding the factors that influence these dimensions and contribute to the development of appropriate psychological and social interventions for transgender adults.

From Marginalisation to Empowerment: A Study of Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life

Karishma Bharti

This paper studies the journey from marginalisation to empowerment in Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life. It focuses on red lipstick as a visible sign of gender identity, self-expression, social judgement, and resistance. The paper uses Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to explain how gender is produced through repeated social acts and expectations. Tripathi’s autobiography shows how a transgender person is often asked to behave according to the gender assigned at birth and how breaking these expectations can lead to shame, exclusion, violence, and silence. At the same time, the autobiography shows how self-expression can become a source of confidence and resistance. The paper discusses childhood, family, language, the hijra community, relationships with men, religion, work, activism, and legal rights. It also engages with existing critical studies on Tripathi’s autobiography. The study argues that red lipstick changes its meaning during Tripathi’s life. It can first be associated with judgement and fear, but later becomes a sign of self-acceptance and public visibility. Thus, the lipstick becomes a simple but powerful symbol of the movement from marginalisation to empowerment.

Confined and Classified: Female Madness and Institutional Power in Jane Eyre and The Woman in White

Aneeth Karunya Saj, Dr. Imtiyaz Ahmad Bhat

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) represent female madness through spaces of confinement and systems of institutional authority. Although the novels differ in genre and narrative technique, both question the authority through which women are classified as mentally unstable and subsequently deprived of autonomy. This article examines Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White to argue that female madness is represented not merely as an individual psychological condition but as a category produced and reinforced through patriarchal, domestic, legal, and medical structures. In Brontë’s novel, Bertha’s confinement in a concealed room on the third floor of Thornfield removes her from social visibility and limits her narrative presence, while Rochester’s account of her condition becomes the dominant explanation of her identity. Collins develops the relationship between madness and institutional power more explicitly through the asylum, where Anne Catherick is associated with insanity and Laura Fairlie is subsequently confined under Anne’s identity. This substitution exposes the vulnerability of institutional classification and demonstrates how the designation of madness can become an instrument for controlling female identity and autonomy. Drawing on feminist literary criticism, Foucauldian approaches to madness and disciplinary power, and historical perspectives on Victorian confinement, this article compares the two novels to examine how institutional and patriarchal authority regulate women’s bodies, identities, mobility, and testimony. It argues that confinement and classification operate as interconnected mechanisms of power: the classification of women as mentally unstable legitimizes their confinement, while confinement further undermines their ability to define and defend their own identities. Ultimately, both novels expose the precarious relationship between female identity, narrative authority, and institutional power in Victorian culture.

Nature and Ecological Consciousness in Kalidasa’s Abhijnanashakuntalam

Kranti Devi Lodhi, Dr. Nisha Indraguru

Literature and nature have long had a deep and intimate connection. From classical poetry and drama to modern literature, authors have portrayed nature as an essential component of human existence and civilization rather than just as a decorative backdrop. The multidisciplinary field of ecocriticism studies the connection between literature and the natural world. The study of the connection between literature and the environment is the focus of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism in literature focuses on both human and non-human social life and current environmental challenges. The rapidly developing field of ecocriticism in recent years has given academics, critics, and scholars a new avenue for investigation and inquiry. Abhijnanasakuntalam by Kalidasa presents ecological ideas to its readers, such as the interdependence of man, nature, and the dominant culture. From an ecocritical standpoint, this essay examines how nature and ecological consciousness are portrayed in Kalidasa's traditional Sanskrit drama Abhijnanasakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntala). Despite being a work of ancient Indian literature, the play's depictions of rivers, woods, animals, plants, seasons, and human interactions with the natural world provide important insights for modern ecological theory. The Kanva hermitage is portrayed as an organic community where people, animals, birds, trees, and other natural elements live in harmony. An ethical connection between human life and the natural world is demonstrated by Shakuntala's close interaction with the forest and its inhabitants. The shift from an environmentally balanced area to a more socially and politically ordered world, on the other hand, is reflected in the journey from the forest to the royal palace. The argument made in this study is that Abhijnanasakuntalam can be considered an early literary manifestation of ecological consciousness. The drama questions a strictly anthropocentric vision of nature through its depiction of the sacred forest, non-human life, seasonal cycles, and the emotional bond between Shakuntala and her natural surroundings. It implies that the health of the natural environment and human well-being are closely related.

A Study of Multimodal Metaphor in the Film Deep Sea from the Cognitive Perspective

Zixuan Zhong

Grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the multimodal metaphor framework, this study examines 58 valid multimodal metaphors identified in the 2023 Chinese animated film Deep Sea. Adopting a mixed-methods approach of quantitative statistics and qualitative case analysis, it categorizes the metaphors, describes their distributional features, and explores how pictorial, linguistic, and sonic modalities collaborate to construct metaphorical meaning. The findings show that ontological metaphors account for the largest proportion (52%), followed by structural and orientational metaphors (24% each). Pictorial modality serves as the fundamental carrier, while pictorial-linguistic and pictorial-linguistic-sonic combinations are the dominant realization patterns. The synergy of multiple modalities visualizes the protagonist’s inner psychological state and enhances audience empathy. This study extends the application scope of multimodal metaphor research to animated film discourse and provides cognitive insights for animation production and mental health communication.

Synchronic re grammaticalization: The translation of modal adjuncts in Chinese government regulatory academic discourse

Zhuyang Liu

Although considerable research has been devoted to the translation of modality from Chinese into English, existing studies have focused predominantly on individual modal lexical items or localized translation phenomena, with relatively limited attention to the systemic transformation mechanisms of modal adjuncts within Chinese social science academic texts. Drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics theory of modality, this study examines the English rendering of modal adjuncts in government regulatory academic discourse, based on a self built small scale Chinese English parallel corpus from a monograph chapter on Chinese regulatory theory. The findings demonstrate that the translation of modal adjuncts in academic texts is not a matter of straightforward formal adverb for adverb matching, but rather a target language oriented process of synchronic “re grammaticalization”. In this translational process, modal adjunct translation necessitates cross categorial shifts in grammatical realization, alongside the reconstruction of semantic prosody to fit English academic stylistic conventions. Such cross categorial adjustments are realised via predicate absorption, nominalization, adjectivization, prepositional comment constructions and referential pragmatic calibration. This study sheds light on the mechanisms through which modal adjunct meanings are reconstructed in cross linguistic outbound academic translation, and may offer practical implications for the international dissemination of Chinese characteristic social science academic discourse.

Exile, Identity, and Postcolonial Consciousness in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction

Anju, Dr. B M Yadav

V. S. Naipaul is regarded as one of the foremost expatriate authors with direct colonial experience. Most of his novels address socio-cultural dilemmas in postcolonial contexts, providing a clear depiction of the inherent intricacies among marginalised communities. He outlines the challenges faced by Indian immigrants, including their difficulties and struggles in a rapidly evolving environment. His writings reveal the torment of an expatriate; the struggles of an individual seeking purpose and selfhood, an audacious spirit who has endeavoured to investigate legends and penetrate illusions. This academic paper will examine the socio-cultural themes in the works of V. S. Naipaul. This concerns the Caribbean societies as depicted by the diverse characters in the works of V. S. Naipaul. Nobel laureate Naipaul holds a significant position in postcolonial literature. His work Half a Life chronicles his experiences of exile and illustrates the interplay between subjectivity, geography, and language in relation to a multicultural and flexible identity. The current study will also investigate the emotional and cultural dialectics experienced by expatriates, drawing on specific works of V.S. Naipaul.

Engagement Functions of AI-Generated Text from the Perspective of Appraisal Theory

Sun Hechu

Within the framework of Appraisal Theory, this corpus-based study investigates the use and functions of engagement strategies in human-written and AI-generated academic discourse. A total of 190 academic texts (95 human-written from the BAWE corpus and 95 generated by DeepSeek-V3) were analyzed. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, involving both quantitative and qualitative analyses of Dialogic Expansion and Dialogic Contraction strategies. The results show that human writing contains significantly more engagement resources than AI-generated texts overall. This difference holds for both Dialogic Expansion and Dialogic Contraction. AI-generated texts also exhibit frequent vague Attribution and localized overuse of Proclaim resources. These patterns are associated with weaker stance construction, less effective dialogic negotiation, and weaker reader-oriented persuasion. Based on the observed differences, this study offers implications for academic writing instruction and human-AI collaboration.

From Human to Divine: The Transformative Dimensions of Love in Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

Nalin Ganesh N.

This article “From Human to Divine: The Transformative Dimensions of Love in Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali” examines love as a dynamic and multidimensional experience that moves progressively from the human and mundane toward the spiritual and divine. Rather than presenting love as a single, fixed emotion, Tagore explores its varied manifestations through affection, innocence, sacrifice, longing, loss, nature, universal compassion and transcendence. The article particularly examines maternal love and the innocence of childhood, highlighting the self-negating and selfless dimensions of a mother’s love. It further explores the presence of the Divine in nature, where the material world becomes a medium through which spiritual love is experienced. The recurring themes of love, loss, separation and longing are examined through Tagore’s representation of the beloved, whose identity remains deliberately ambiguous between a human lover and the Divine. This ambiguity enables the poems to move fluidly between earthly and spiritual registers of love. The article also considers the expansion of personal affection into love for all humanity, suggesting a movement from individual attachment toward universal love and spiritual fellowship. Finally, it examines Tagore’s treatment of death as a transformative experience through which the boundaries between life and eternity are transcended and union with the Divine becomes possible. The study argues that in Gitanjali, love is not merely an emotion but a transformative spiritual force that enables the individual to move from the mundane to the divine, from the self to the universal, and ultimately from separation to transcendental union.

Historiographic Metafiction, Paratext and the Politics of Retelling in the Bharat Novels of Ashwin Sanghi

Pradeep Kumar Sharma, Dr. Ravi Kumar Yadav

This paper approaches Ashwin Sanghi's Bharat Collection not primarily as an instance of mythological fiction, as most existing criticism does, but as a body of historiographic metafiction in Linda Hutcheon's sense: fiction that is at once self-consciously artificial and insistently anchored to verifiable historical and mythic referents. Reading Chanakya's Chant, The Krishna Key and The Ayodhya Alliance through this lens, the paper identifies a recurring palimpsest structure in which a modern character or plot is laid, almost stencil-like, over an ancient one, so that the present is legible only as a repetition or completion of the past. It further examines the paratextual apparatus author's notes, bibliographies, acknowledgements of historians and archaeologists through which Sanghi stakes a rhetorical claim to historicity that his fiction's postmodern self-reflexivity simultaneously destabilises. The paper argues that this tension between claimed authenticity and acknowledged invention is the central, productive contradiction of Sanghi's project, and that it is this contradiction, rather than mythological content alone, that accounts for both his popular success and his ambiguous critical standing as the writer often labelled ‘the Indian Dan Brown.’

Pluralistic Heritage and Cultural Diversity in Literary Landmarks of Shashi Tharoor

Rina Rakesh Lakakwar, Dr. Ravi Kumar Yadav

India is a land of diverse culture, language, religion and multiple regional and indigenous identities which define the country as Unity in Diversity. All these existing identities in the nation are connected with each other through a shared democratic history and as per Tharoor they more or less appear like a platter of various dishes. Tharoor's core idea emphasizes the thought that India and its essence of Indianism is defined purely by the idea of embracing multiple identities. He popularly uses the term thali to represent India as a harmonious whole. The idea if India's unique multiculturalism has been reinforced in his works Riot and India: From Midnight to Millennium. The present research paper is an attempt to reflect Tharoor's perspective of Pluralism and Cultural Diversity in his literary landmarks reflecting the Pluralistic concept of Hinduism and Cultural Inclusivity of India.

Toxic Grounds, Stolen Lands: The Anthropocene, Industrial Dispossession, and Adivasi Resistance in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar's The Adivasi Wil Not Dance

Dr. Mayurakshi Mitra

The extractive logic of modernity has always rendered the landscapes and communities as sites of exploitation and destruction. Anthropocene, industrial capitalism and environmental destruction converge most smoothly at the margins, subjecting both the landscapes and the communities to the worst possible effects of this inextricable trio. This paper examines the convergence of anthropocene, industrial capitalism and environmental destruction in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi will not Dance, arguing that the Anthropocene as a category of planetary crisis can be best understood in the post-colonial context where industrial extraction for human advancement takes the space of prime importance. Reading these two texts through the frameworks of Anthropocene theory and post-colonial ecocriticism, particularly Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and subaltern studies forwarded by Gayatri Spivak and others, this paper argues that both these narratives cannot be exclusively defined by anthropocentricism; rather can be best understood by the concept of ‘stratified anthropocentricism’ where the ecological catastrophes are borne by the marginalized castes and communities of the society. Both these texts stage the Adivasi and subaltern bodies as the site where the violence of industrial capitalism become visceral. Based on these frameworks, this paper contends that the ‘toxic grounds’ and ‘stolen lands’ are not incidental settings but active protagonists featuring the sad story of dispossession spearheaded by corporate and state powers. The paper also intends to explore how the texts resist reducing the communities to ecological ruins. Drawing on the theories of Anthropocene, environmental justice and Adivasi studies, this paper argues that these texts reframe the epoch not as a story of undifferentiated human agency but one of industrial dispossession, where resistance becomes a means of reclaiming land, story and selfhood.

Exploring a Task-Based Learning Framework for Enhancing Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing (LSRW) Skills in the English Language Classroom

Abilash Valluri, Yadlapalli Manikanta Venkata Sai, Korada Sravani

The four macro-skills of English language learning Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing (LSRW) are traditionally taught in isolation, a practice that limits learners' capacity to use language communicatively and adaptively. Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), grounded in the premise that language is best acquired through meaning-focused, outcome-oriented activity rather than explicit rule presentation, offers a pedagogically robust alternative. This paper synthesises the theoretical foundations of TBLT (Prabhu, 1987; Long, 1985; Skehan, 1998; Ellis, 2003; Willis, 1996; Nunan, 2004) and proposes an integrated Task-Based Learning (TBL) framework designed specifically to develop LSRW skills in a coordinated, mutually reinforcing manner within the English language classroom. The framework operationalises three cyclical phases pre-task, task cycle, and post-task/language focus and maps each phase onto specific receptive and productive skill demands, supported by a skill-integration matrix and a set of classroom-ready task typologies (information-gap, opinion-gap, reasoning-gap, and problem-solving tasks). The paper further discusses pedagogical implications for lesson design, learner autonomy, and formative assessment, and critically examines implementation challenges such as large class sizes, assessment-driven curricula, teacher preparedness, and learners' first-language reliance. It concludes by outlining a research agenda for empirically validating the proposed framework across diverse classroom contexts. The paper is conceptual in nature, synthesising existing empirical and theoretical literature; no new primary data were collected.

A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of News Discourses on China-Papua New Guinea and China-Solomon Islands Agricultural Cooperation

Peng Jiahan, Pei Zhengwei

Pacific Island nations are key participants in South South cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative, with agricultural cooperation serving as a vital area for China’s practical collaboration with these states. Adopting Fairclough’s three dimensional critical discourse analysis model, this study constructs two small corpora consisting of 68 news reports (2018 2026) from Papua New Guinea’s Post Courier and three major Solomon Islands English language newspapers. With the AntConc tool, it compares media narratives of China PNG and China Solomon Islands agricultural cooperation across textual, discursive practice and social practice dimensions.The results reveal that while both media outlets adopt state centred narratives focusing on rice production and food security, they differ noticeably in framing. PNG media emphasizes technology driven industrial projects, aid and bilateral trade, whereas Solomon Islands media highlights livelihood support, sovereign equality and local public benefits. At the discursive practice level, indirect quotation is widely used. PNG reporting is dominated by official and elite voices, while Solomon Islands coverage incorporates ordinary citizens’ viewpoints. Such discursive variations stem from differences in agricultural conditions, bilateral cooperation maturity and regional geopolitics. This paper argues that Pacific Island local media are heterogeneous. Differentiated communication strategies should be adopted by China to deliver grassroots perspectives and manage geopolitical risks. It further demonstrates the value of corpus assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for studies on South Pacific international cooperation.

Breaking the Fetters of Family and Shame: Meerabai, Krishna Bhakti, and the Gendered Politics of Devotion in Sixteenth-Century Rajasthan

Vivek Chauhan

Meerabai (also Mirabai; c. 1498–c. 1546), a Rathore princess of Merta who was married into the Sisodia house of Mewar, is among the most widely remembered women saints of the North Indian bhakti tradition. Later hagiography presents her as a widow who refused sati, rejected the honor codes of a Rajput court, sang and danced in public temples, kept the company of sadhus across caste lines, and survived attempts on her life before vanishing into the image of Krishna at Dwarka. This article reconstructs that story with scholarly caution. Court chronicles of Merta and Mewar are almost silent on her; the earliest firm literary notice appears in Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal (c. 1600). The immense padavali sung in her name is a layered, co-authored corpus rather than a closed authorial canon (Hawley, 2005; Martin, 2023). Reading life-narrative, attributed Hindi and Rajasthani padas, and modern critical literature together, the essay argues that Meerabai’s significance lies less in a fully recoverable biography than in a durable public language of devotion that made gender, caste, and royal honor contestable in the name of Krishna.

Tracing the Subaltern in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti— A PoCo-Feminist Critique

Nimra Shah, Inshal Uroos

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a novel authored by Mohammed Hanif that discusses the underdog status of minorities, especially Christians in Pakistan. It examines how untouchables (Choohras, the janitors) in Christian community are subject to oppression from those within their group but also those outside their group, i.e., Muslims. What makes it worse is the oppression of the women from this class who are considered untouchables when it comes to equal opportunities in life and socialization but fit for interaction when taken as objects to satisfy the libido of those from out-group. This research is an attempt to study how they are exploited by those outside their community and deprived of their identity, in an attempt to silence their voices. Gayatri Spivak’s essay Can the Subaltern Speak is used as the theoretical framework to analyze this novel. This research is a qualitative research based on textual arguments.

Victor Frankenstein’s Creature as a Literary Metaphor for Artificial Intelligence: Autonomy, Responsibility, and Technological Control in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus

Idris Laré, Mabandine Djagri Temoukale

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) remains a significant literary meditation on scientific ambition, artificial creation, responsibility, and the consequences of innovation. This article examines Victor Frankenstein’s creature as a literary metaphor through which contemporary controversies surrounding artificial intelligence can be integrated. Rather than equating the creature with contemporary AI, the study identifies a limited but productive analogy between Shelley’s representation of artificial creation and contemporary concerns about learning, autonomy, control and responsibility. Using a technoethical lens, this study compares and contrasts the creature created by Mary Shelley and Artificial Intelligence. The creature’s eloquence, intellectual capacities and strength have become a causal factor in destabilising its creator and society. This article argues that the novel’s continuing relevance lies not in a literal prediction of AI, but in its exploration of what happens when a creator develops a powerful artificial entity without adequately anticipating its needs, social environment or consequences. This article provides a valuable cultural and ethical lens for examining responsible innovation, human oversight, technological control and accountability in the development and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.

Culture as Power Play: Negotiating Gender, Caste and Social Exclusion in Mahasweta Devi’s Bayen

Rekha V. G.

This paper examines Mahasweta Devi’s Bayen through the lens of culture as a mechanism of power, exploring how gender, caste and social exclusion are produced and sustained through culturally sanctioned practices. Drawing on the concept that culture is neither neutral nor autonomous, but shaped by dominant power structures, the study argues that cultural norms function as instruments of social regulation, determining identities, roles and hierarchies within the community. In Bayen, the protagonist Chandidasi’s transformation into a” Bayen” illustrates how patriarchal and caste-based ideologies construct and marginalize individual identity through social designation rather than inherent reality. The paper contends that power operates through cultural discourses that normalize exclusion while presenting it as tradition or collective morality. Institutions such as the family, community and the state reinforce these discourses by legitimizing particular beliefs and religious practices, thereby maintaining existing social hierarchies. At the same time, the text exposes moments of resistance that challenge these structures, revealing the tensions between imposed identity and individual agency. Informed by theories of power and discourse, the study demonstrates that identity is socially constructed through intersecting systems of caste, gender and cultural authority rather than existing as a fixed or natural category. Ultimately, Bayen critiques the cultural politics of exclusion and underscores Mahasweta Devi’s broader concern with exposing the invisible mechanisms through which power governs social life and marginalizes vulnerable communities.

An Investigation and Research on English Student Teachers’ Literacy and Application of Artificial Intelligence

Liu Yang

This study aims to explore the literacy of artificial intelligence that English teacher trainees should have and the application of artificial intelligence in English teacher education. Through the analysis of questionnaires and interviews, this study finds that English student teachers have different levels of artificial intelligence literacy. Many have some knowledge and can use relevant tools, but their knowledge and experience of AI are insufficient, and their views on its role in education also vary. Therefore, English student teachers need to improve their knowledge, skills and attitudes of artificial intelligence in order to adapt to the development needs of future education. Meanwhile, it has been found that the application of artificial intelligence in English teacher education can improve teaching efficiency, personalize learning experience, and provide teachers with more teaching resources and support. In the future, the integration of artificial intelligence into English teacher education should be further explored in order to cultivate high-quality English teachers with innovative spirit and practical ability.

Waiting versus Acceptance: Responses to the Absurd in Waiting for Godot and The Stranger

Arun Katara

This paper explores the philosophical Divergence in existentialist thought through a comparative analysis of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger. Both text capture the 20th-century crisis of meaning, illustrating a universe devoid of inherent purpose-a condition defined by Camus as the Absurd. However, they present fundamentally opposing behavioural responses to this condition. Beckett’s protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, embody the paralyzing state of "waiting," relying on a passive, hopeful dependence on external salvation to defer the terror of existential vacancy. Conversely, Camus’s protagonist, Meursault, transitions from passive alienation to active "acceptance," embracing the indifferent universe without the crutch of hope or metaphysical illusion. By examining these contrasting mechanisms-waiting as a desperate avoidance strategy versus acceptance as a liberating confrontation-this study demonstrates how Beckett dramatizes the tragicomic stagnation of unfulfilled hope, while Camus outlines a blueprint for the Absurd Hero. Ultimately, this paper argues that while waiting shackles the individual to an illusory future, acceptance liberates the self to exist authentically in the absolute present.

Choosing Herself: An Existentialist Reading of Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes

Ramya Bharathi K, Dr. Ganga Parameswari T

This paper reads Paulo Coelho's novel Eleven Minutes, through the philosophical lens of existentialism, arguing that the protagonist Maria's journey from a small Brazilian town to sex work in Geneva is best understood not as a story of victimhood or of mystical awakening, but as a dramatization of how a person builds a self through choice. Using the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Soren Kierkegaard, the paper traces four stages in Maria's development: her starting point in circumstances she did not choose, her exercise of freedom in leaving home and entering sex work, her repeated retreat into fixed, self-protective identities, and her final, uncertain choice to risk love with the painter Ralf Hart. The paper shows that each stage matches a specific existentialist concept: facticity, radical freedom, bad faith, the absurd, and authenticity. Reading the novel this way reveals a coherent philosophical structure beneath its simple, popular style, one that most existing criticism, focused on spirituality or feminism, has not fully addressed. Overall, it could be concluded that the paper proves that Maria’s tale is more concerned with learning to accept her fate than trying to evade it, which only an existentialist might have the ability to comprehend.

Indian English Literature in the Age of Globalisation: Identity, Migration and Cultural Change

Dr. Abhilasha Rohilla

The advent of globalisation has significantly transformed the thematic, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions of Indian English Literature. As India became increasingly connected to global economic, technological, cultural, and migratory networks, Indian writers in English began to engage with questions of identity, displacement, belonging, hybridity, cultural memory, and social transformation in increasingly complex ways. This paper, Indian English Literature in the Age of Globalisation: Identity, Migration and Cultural Change, examines how contemporary Indian English writers negotiate the tensions between local cultural affiliations and global modernity. It explores the ways in which globalisation has reshaped individual and collective identities while creating new spaces of cultural interaction, negotiation, and resistance. The study focuses on representations of migration, diaspora, transnational mobility, urbanisation, changing family structures, and encounters between traditional and modern value systems. Indian English literature frequently presents characters who inhabit multiple cultural worlds and experience a sense of belonging that is neither completely local nor entirely global. Such narratives reveal the complexities of cultural hybridity, particularly among migrants, diasporic communities, second-generation Indians, and individuals negotiating rapidly changing social environments. At the same time, contemporary writers examine how global capitalism, consumer culture, digital communication, and Western cultural influences affect Indian social practices, relationships, aspirations, and perceptions of self. The paper adopts a qualitative and textual approach to selected works of prominent Indian English writers, including Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, and Rohinton Mistry. Through a comparative reading of their narratives, the study investigates the relationship between migration and identity and considers literature as a significant space for negotiating cultural change. It argues that Indian English Literature does not simply reproduce the effects of globalisation; rather, it critically examines, questions, and reimagines the relationship between the local and the global. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that contemporary Indian English literature functions as a dynamic cultural space in which identities are continuously reconstructed through migration, memory, language, intercultural encounters, and changing social realities.

Research on the Efficacy and Paradigm of AI-Assisted English Translation of Forestry Ecological Security Legal Texts— A Comparative Experiment Based on Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, and Chain-of-Thought Prompting Strategies

Li Bolin

The international dissemination of China's ecological rule-of-law discourse relies heavily on high-quality English translation of legal texts. However, English translation of forestry ecological security legal texts has long faced quality bottlenecks due to inconsistent species nomenclature, complex interdisciplinary semantics of ecological terms, and difficulties in restructuring complex legal sentences. The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (LLMs) offers a novel path for legal translation in domain-specific contexts. Using the Forest Law and the Wetland Protection Law of the People's Republic of China as corpora, this study constructs a Chinese-English parallel dataset and designs a comparative experiment across three prompting strategies—Zero-shot, Few-shot, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT)—based on a 5-point Fluency and Adequacy scale. The results indicate that Chain-of-Thought prompting achieves the best performance in restructuring complex sentences and converting legal jurisdiction concepts; few-shot examples significantly reduce mistranslation rates; and general-purpose large language models can efficiently adapt to forestry legal translation scenarios through prompt engineering optimization. This study constructs the 'Prompt Guide for AI-Assisted Forestry Legal Translation,' providing a reusable solution for cross-border forestry law enforcement cooperation and the international dissemination of ecological rule of law.

Myth, Memory, and Female Agency in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions: Reclaiming Draupadi’s Voice Through Feminist Myth-Making

Anchal Behera, Dr. Brahmananda Padra

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions (2008) retells a mythical tale of Mahabharata from the perspective of Draupadi, making the traditional epic narrative a tale of women’s consciousness and rebellion. In this paper, I would like to discuss how the author uses the concepts of myth as a living cultural memory and the idea of reconstruction of female agency through the revival of Draupadi's voice. Based on the theories of cultural memory, feminist myth criticism, and Indian Knowledge Systems, the study shows that Divakaruni does not deny mythology or simply update it but recovers myth as a vibrant memory space which gives women an opportunity to navigate their identity, power, and subjectivity. In order to do so, the following three interconnected aspects will be discussed: myth as cultural memory, memory as resistance to patriarchal historiography, and agency of women as self-narration. It will be shown that The Palace of Illusions turns Draupadi into a conscious subject who reinterprets the concept of dharma, desire, and fate. Therefore, this reinterpretation proves that myth is an important means of reconstruction of female history while keeping the philosophical basis of Indian civilization.

The Hyperreal in Select Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Sheckley

Mibdah Aijaz

This paper proposes an examination of two postmodernists who incorporated many existential questions in their portrayal of other-worldliness: a world torn between humans and sub-humans and other entities. While Vonnegut's larger and more profound works center on the questions of war and humanity faced with destruction, in some of his shorter works he examines other designs meant to confound humanity. Those challenges to humanity include using advanced technological means through which to control pleasure, breach privacy, inhibit thinking, and so on. Sheckley, on the other hand, puts the problems of alienation and identity-formation, or the lack thereof, at the core of his investigation. He offers alternative realities where man gets to flee from the tyranny of being alive in the world that he himself made uninhabitable. While Vonnegut swirls from past to present, or even blends flashbacks with fast-forwards such that there are no certain points from which to begin or at which to stop, Sheckley tends to be more linear, even as he inserts flashbacks here and there. Both authors, in writing short fiction, demonstrate their mastery of the form, but they approach it from different angles, albeit sharing some characteristics. Interestingly, whereas Kurt Vonnegut rose to fame for his mind-boggling visions of a possible future, Robert Sheckley remains lesser known, notwithstanding that he is an excellent futurist.

Spatial Construction of Brave New World from the Perspective of Literary Cartography

Sun Anqi, Duan Rongjuan

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World constructs two contrasting yet mutually reflective social spaces through the juxtaposition of the World State and the Savage Reservation, revealing the tensions among technological rationality, institutional discipline, and human nature. Drawing upon Robert Tally's theory of literary cartography, this paper examines the awakening of topophrenia and the spatial construction of the novel from the perspective of literary space. It focuses on the metaphorical functions of literary cartography in representing civilizational conflicts, cultural divergence and ideological tensions, which together constitute a complex network of power discourse. Furthermore, this paper investigates the influence of power space on character identity formation and explores the utopian paradox and dystopian essence embedded in the novel from the perspective of heterotopian space. The study demonstrates that the World State, characterized by a highly standardized and institutionalized spatial order, eliminates individual differences through technological rationality and disciplinary mechanisms, whereas the Savage Reservation, as a heterotopian space, preserves primitive human emotions, religious beliefs, and experiences of suffering. This paper argues that literary cartography serves not only as a spatial narrative strategy but also as an intellectual practice to rethink social order, power relations and the potential of free space in the future, which provides a new theoretical perspective for studies on spatial politics in dystopian literature.

Between Human and Machine: Posthuman Narratives and Artistic Experimentation in Human Al Collaboration

Dr. Suruchi Upadhyay

Posthuman narratives offer a critical framework to examine how Al tools when collaborated with traditional ways of authorship, identity, and creativity can reframe the artistic narratives. The present paper explores the emergence of posthuman narratives in when artistically cooperate between Human and Al reinvent a new ways of creativity. The integration of Al into creative processes challenges the conventional notion of the artist as the sole creator, positioning artistic production within a hybrid human –machine ecosystem. The study takes into account a series of case studies and investigates how Al as a collaborator redefines human experiences in art. Futher, it highlights how these experimental practices of human-machine engagement, refigure artistic authorship and intellectual ownership and last but not the least , the paper argues that post human narratives offer speculative future of digital creativity and Human-Al collaboration.

An Analysis of Attitude Resources in the Reading Materials of New Horizons College English (4th Edition) from the Perspective of Eco-linguistics

Jin Weijia

This study examines the attitude resources in six ecologically-themed texts from New Horizons College English (4th Edition) from the ecological discourse perspective. Using the UAM Corpus Tool software for annotation and statistical analysis, combined with qualitative and quantitative methods, the study investigated the distribution of attitude resources and the ecological orientation in the texts. Two findings emerged in the results. In terms of the distribution of attitudes, a relatively balanced distribution was observed among affect, judgement, and appreciation, with each subsystem emphasizing certain constituent within itself: the highest proportion of insecurity/security in affect resources reflects editors’ concerns about ecological crises; negative evaluations in judgement resources reflect critical attitude toward behaviors that harm nature; and negative evaluations in appreciation resources express editors’ dissatisfaction with the current ecological situation. In terms of ecological orientation, the three types of attitudes were relatively evenly distributed, with negative resources being used most. In practical implications drawn from the study, it is proposed that textbook compilers should enhance ecological awareness, increase the proportion of texts with ecological beneficial attitudes, and enhance the topical coverage of ecological topics, so as to improve the guidance and enlightening nature of the textbooks in ecological teaching.

The sense of alienation and dislocation in the study of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Line

Bharat Ram, Dr. Lila Dhar Mishra

“Shadow line” by Amitav Ghosh is one of the prominent novels in Indian English Literature. It is a popular historical novel which has been written under the canopy of postcolonial literature. This is the second novel of Amitav Ghosh which was published in the year 1988 and earned the Sahitya Academy Award in 1989. In the current research paper, themes of alienation and dislocation have been analysed. Amitav Ghosh, one of India’s the greatest contemporary novelists, strongly depicts the social, cultural and psychological experienced by individuals and marginalised communities uprooted from their native lands. The study also examines, how the writer presents the poor lives are disrupted by migration, war and the brutal partition of India. The main objective of this study through the close textual analysis is to bring into limelight the brutal impact of the brutal division of India that results into pain and trauma of the oppressed community members of the society.

Learning Experience, Learning Behavior, and Major Retention Intention: Mediating and Moderating Pathways among Chinese Undergraduates

Mengyuan Lei

Whether students are willing to choose their own major again is an important indicator of the quality of education. In China, most students enter their major through the national college entrance examination, so this issue is particularly important. This study examines whether learning experience (course experience, resource support, and academic advising) mediates the link between learning behavior and major retention intention, and whether learning behavior moderates each dimension. We investigated 4,765 undergraduates in a large public university in mainland China, and used structural equation modeling, bootstrap parallel mediation analysis, and moderation analysis. Learning behavior not only directly predicts retention intention, but also indirectly predicts retention intention. The three dimensions of experience account for 58.98% of the total effect, among which course experience is the strongest path. Learning behavior weakened the relationship between resource support and retention intention (beta = -0.12, p less than .001), but enhanced the role of academic advising (beta = 0.08, p less than .05). This "support mismatch" pattern suggests that the best effect can be achieved only when institutional support matches students' engagement level.

The Aesthetics of Silence and Moments of Being: Emotional Self-Preservation and the Refusal of Critique in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

Jushmi Gogoi

Silence is often interpreted as blank, meaningless, absent, and hollow, but in many ways, it can hold meanings deeper than words can suggest. Today’s moments are saturated with constant connectivity and sensory overload; the overflow of information from different social media platforms is blurring people’s own thoughts and authenticity. This paper re-examines solitude as a necessary space in the formation of self through a close reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (1875-1926). Drawing upon Susan Sontag’s Aesthetics of Silence, the study seeks to find how Rilke destabilizes and refuses the standard criticism of a work of art through his letters to Kappus, emphasising inwardness, reflection, and understanding of the self and a writer’s own understanding of his creative process. Even though silence can be seen as a patriarchal erasure, repression, and absence of self-knowledge or opinion, this is the most crucial and sophisticated psychological space for a person to find themselves, to form their selfhood, to make choices and create decisions, and to meet the unspoken possibility of the language. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet frames a total rejection of literary critique not merely as advice but as a crucial strategy of emotional self-preservation. The text provides a path to be true to one’s own self and cultivate an inviolable sanctuary of silence where creation remains the ultimate necessary process and self-discovery rejects outside opinion and market logic to form an embodied mind in the process of becoming.

Functional Transformation and Value Reconstruction of Art Intermediaries in the Digital Age

Yi-Ching Hsieh

Against the backdrop of digital technology reshaping the art ecosystem, art intermediaries, as the core hub connecting art production, dissemination, and consumption, have seen their traditional functional boundaries broken, ushering in a systemic transformation. Supported by art intermediary theory, the cultural diamond model, and stakeholder theory, and combined with practical cases of public art foundations in mainland China, Taiwan, and Macau, this paper analyzes the transformation characteristics of art intermediaries in the digital age from three dimensions—resource allocation, value construction, and relationship coordination—in terms of functional positioning, operational mechanisms, and value orientation. The study finds that digital technology not only drives art intermediaries to achieve de-layering of resource allocation, precision in value dissemination, and flattening of relationship networks, but also triggers new challenges such as the reconstruction of intermediary authority, digital divide, and ethical dilemmas. In this context, art intermediaries need to build collaborative governance mechanisms, strengthen digital literacy, and uphold the bottom line of publicness, so as to realize a value reconstruction from "gatekeeper" to "ecosystem builder," providing support for the virtuous cycle of the art ecosystem.

The Architecture of Forgotten Past: A Psychological and Literary Critique of Anterograde Amnesia in TAMIL film “Ghajini” (2005)

B. Bharathi Bhuvaneswari

Literature and film studies often go hand in hand as they both are intertwined with each other. The integration of Psychology into film studies is an unavoidable topic. Psychology becomes a major discourse in both literature and film studies. This paper aims to study Anterograde amnesia through a Tamil film Ghajini 2005. The protagonist of this film leads a normal life like others but his life turns upside down after a severe injury in his head. He cannot lead a normal life like others. His memory wipes everything clean after every 15 minutes, he couldn't recognise people, events, things, incidents that have happened during this period. He barely remembers certain repeated faces and repeated events. He maintains everything in a record, through polaroid photographs and notes. This paper could further be explored as a study of trauma.

Relational Professionalism and Continuing Professional Development of English Language Teachers in India: Challenges, Opportunities, and Strategies

Dr. Ch. Paul Krupakar

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is an essential part of English language teachers’ professional lives because language, learner needs, educational technologies, and pedagogical expectations continue to change. This conceptual paper examines how relational professionalism—the quality of professional relationships through which teachers learn with and from colleagues, mentors, teacher educators, researchers, and wider communities—can strengthen CPD in the Indian context. Drawing on established literature on language teacher development, reflective practice, professional learning, and teacher professional development, the paper discusses the meaning of relational professionalism, the purposes and features of effective CPD, and challenges that may restrict teachers’ participation. It considers self-directed learning, reflective practice, classroom-based inquiry, peer observation, mentoring, professional associations, academic writing, digital learning, and collaborative professional communities. The paper argues that professional development is more likely to be meaningful when it is sustained, relevant to teachers’ subject and context, connected to classroom practice, and supported by collegial relationships rather than limited to one-off workshops. It also relates these principles to India’s National Education Policy 2020, which calls for continuing opportunities for teacher learning and specifies an expectation of at least 50 hours of CPD annually. As a conceptual discussion rather than an empirical study, the paper does not claim to measure the impact of any particular programme. It concludes with practical recommendations for teachers, institutions, and professional development providers.

The Real Question in Translation — How to Balance the Accuracy of Machine Translation with the Creativity of Human Translation?

Xiaoyi Linghu

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, machine translation has made remarkable progress in accuracy and speed, and has become a powerful tool for learning languages in the context of globalization. At the same time, however, machine translation still has certain limitations in handling complex language structures, cultural differences, and contextual understanding, so the intervention of human translation is necessary. This study aims to explore how to give full play to the creativity of human translation while ensuring translation accuracy and speed, so as to achieve a balance between machine translation and human translation. It first reviews the historical development of machine translation and human translation, their advantages and disadvantages, and their application in different fields, and discusses the advantages and limitations of machine translation in terms of accuracy and speed, as well as the unique creativity of human translation. The study finds that machine translation is relatively standardized when processing large amounts of textual content, but human translation has a more prominent advantage when it comes to literary or other highly specialized texts. To address this issue, this study proceeds from four strategies: 1. hybrid translation mode; 2. post-editing; 3. customized machine translation; 4. creative intervention of human translation, so as to achieve an effective balance between machine translation and human translation.

The Sea as an Archive: Memory, History and Non-Human Agency in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle

Thakur Anmol Patyal, Manjeet Singh

Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2015) shows the Caribbean Sea as not just a fragile ecosystem, but also as a lively space where histories, memories, and forms of nonhuman agency meet. Encompassing varied time periods and locations, the novel intertwines environmental devastation with the Caribbean’s historical and cultural patterns. The article presents a case that Tentacle’s sea is a living archive, holding traces of histories unsuited for human archives. Aclide’s movement through time and her relationship with the sacred sea anemone disrupt the conventional distinction between the human and the environment. The anemone is essential because it is more than just a passive symbol of nature it is an agent of the temporal, the ecological, and the historical that bears on the possible. The paper applies ecocritical approaches to nonhuman agency, environmental memory, and Caribbean literary studies to examine how water connects colonial history, contemporary environmental degradation, and imaginings of ecological future. The contention is put forth that Tentacle reimagines the Caribbean Sea as a repository of historical memory and as an agent in producing Caribbean identity. The novel of Indiana challenges anthropocentric understandings of history and proposes a more-than-human framework which may make sense of the ecological and historical crisis as an interconnected phenomenon.

Navigating Ecological Dystopia and Apocalyptic Predictions in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times

Dr. Sima Kalita

This paper intends to explore ecological dystopian reality and subsequent apocalyptic scenario caused by excessive exploitation of Nature as exposed in Amitav Ghosh’s fabulous book The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times (2022). Contextualizing within a dystopian set-up, Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times operates as one of the most significant pieces of writing which brilliantly exposes the man-Nature interaction considering human beings as an integral part of Nature. The narrative exhibits an ecological dystopia where the Great Mountain or the Mahaparbat and its native dwellers have gone through a terrible catastrophe. By mapping the consequences of both harmony and disconnectedness among living and non-living beings of the environment, the narrative concentrates on analyzing the reasons behind this imbalanced man-Nature relationship and its adverse impact upon the environment. However, by encapsulating the ideas of Deep Ecology, Eco-criticism and the features of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic literature, Ghosh’s text tries to reconcile this imbalanced relationship through an awareness of following sustainable outlook in terms of the protection of Nature.

The Right to Remain Human: Artificial Intelligence, Citizenship, and Posthuman Personhood in Contemporary Science Fiction

Dr. Arjun Kumar

The emergence of artificial intelligence has generated renewed debates about consciousness, agency, personhood, and political rights. Contemporary science fiction has become an important literary space in which these questions can be examined because it imagines artificial beings whose social and ethical capacities exceed the categories of “machine,” “property,” and “tool.” This article examines Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), and Martha Wells’s All Systems Red (2017) to investigate the relationship between artificial intelligence and political personhood. Existing scholarship has extensively examined these works through artificial consciousness, embodiment, affect, moral agency, and posthuman subjectivity. Moving beyond these approaches, this article argues that the central political problem represented by the three texts is not whether artificial beings can become sufficiently human to deserve rights, but whether political communities can recognize nonhuman entities as subjects of rights without requiring their assimilation into humanity. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights,” Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism, N. Katherine Hayles’s critique of autonomous humanism, David J. Gunkel’s work on robot rights, and Visa A. J. Kurki’s theory of legal personhood, the article develops the concept of ontological statelessness to describe the condition of artificial beings that participate in human societies while remaining excluded from recognized political membership. Adam is rendered a purchasable object, Klara is valued through her usefulness as an Artificial Friend, and Murderbot is constrained by corporate ownership despite exercising autonomous judgment. Their different forms of exclusion demonstrate that intelligence, moral agency, and social participation do not automatically generate political recognition. The article argues that contemporary science fiction shifts the question of AI ethics from “Can machines become human?” to a more radical political question: Can a person possess rights without being human?

Depiction of Early Roman’s Power and Social Hierarchy in Michelle Moran’s Cleopatra’s Daughter

R. Sobha, Dr. S. Raja Prabha

Michelle Moran dives deep into a wide arena of political, cultural and geographic spheres and tend to depict the lives of powerful women in intricate historical contexts. The present study analyzes how Moran’s characters traverse the treacherous landscape of ancient lands thereby reflecting larger cultural trends in which tradition, ancestry and divine association are used to rationalize and enforce discrimination. Moran depicts the characters who navigate complex hierarchies of power, showcasing how power influences everything from individual relationships to broader social and political structures. The oppressive nature of power is integral to understand the power structural acts as a framework for interpreting cultural and historical narratives. Moran uses the factors such as monarchy, imperial rule as well as gender discrimination to validate the hierarchy and power by probing into the characters across period and culture.

Hermeneutics of Societal Fabrication in Munshi Premchand’s Short Stories: A Critical Evaluation of Rich Daughter-in-Law and The Thakur’s Well

Dr. Abhilasha Rohilla

In this research paper, we discuss social awareness and reformist spirit of Munshi Premchand in his short stories. The short stories are Rich Daughter-in-Law and The Thakur’s Well. The study examines, via a close textual analysis, the manner in which Premchand uses the ordinariness of rural life as a canvas to depict the entrenched realities of caste, class and gender oppression in early twentieth century India. These two narratives are interrogated in the paper to reveal the complex nature of marginalized identities, resistance and the transformative potential of empathy and agency. The analysis is located within the wider literature on his contribution to Hindi-Urdu literature and suggests the continuing relevance of his critique of social hierarchies. In contrast, this paper contends that his short fiction is ultimately a testimony of the struggles of his time, and is still a source of inspiration for discussions on social justice, individual dignity and reform in our society today. He is regarded as the father of the modern Hindi-Urdu short story and one of the most influential voices in Indian literature. Premchand’s output of more than three hundred short stories was prolific and not only pioneered a new realism in Indian prose fiction but also established the short story as a potent vehicle for social critique and human empathy. His works continue to resonate, offering timeless insights into the struggles, hopes, and resilience of ordinary people.

The Crucible of Coloniality and Resistance: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in Uzma Aslam Khan's The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

Ancy Cyriac

Uzma Aslam Khan's The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2019) excavates a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the Indian subcontinent: the experience of the convicts, their island-born descendants and the colonised inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands under British penal rule and, from 1942 to 1945, under Japanese military occupation. This article argues that the novel presents the archipelago as a crucible of coloniality, a space in which successive regimes of domination are tested, refined and handed on, and in which the replacement of one coloniser by another produces not liberation but a renewed form of the same violence. Drawing on Aníbal Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power, Michel Foucault's analysis of panoptic discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's account of the subaltern and Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory, the article reads the novel in four movements: its historiographic method, which sets fiction against an archive, Khan regards as written by and for the privileged; its rendering of kaalapaani and the Cellular Jail as an architecture of total surveillance; its figuration of the unnamed Prisoner 218 D, whose body and memory become the last territories of resistance; and its depiction of the Japanese occupation as a continuation rather than a rupture of colonial rule. The article concludes that Khan's novel performs a decolonisation of history, recovering the archipelago's silenced lives while refusing the comforting binaries of coloniser and colonised, and of oppression and liberation, on which official national narratives depend.

Repetition and Feminist Agency in Selected Contemporary African Women’s Poetry

John Tikikus, Maureen Amaka Azuike

The Paradox of Freedom: Reimagining Partition in Chaman Nahal’s Azadi

Dr Yash Pal Singh

This paper investigates how Chaman Nahal’s Azadi offers a poignant canvas of the devastating and lasting effects of partition on individuals, communities, and shared cultural spaces in the Indian subcontinent. Through politics of religion and cartographic violence, the idea of the division of territory was executed insensibly, fracturing lived spaces, identity, memory, and belonging. The expectations, desires, and dreams of attaining freedom from British imperialism ultimately culminate in a paradoxical situation. Nahal underscores that partition is not simply a historical moment but a political quirk that accompanies displacement, violence, and commodification of the female body. The familiar landscapes, homes, neighbourhoods, and ancestral places transform into sites of displacement for Hindu-Sikh minorities in the western Punjab. The paper examines how this restructuring of borders produces experiences of exile, alienation, and economic and cultural loss. The decision imposed from above adversely affects ordinary people whose identities and social relationships were formed beyond region and religion. It further foregrounds how the vibrant socio-cultural thread of the Sialkot region is snapped by the departing British apparatus and emerging Indian and Pakistani regimes, causing communal conflict, bloodshed, and forced migration. The paper argues that Azadi illustrates that freedom comes with a deeply ambivalent condition, marked by enduring cost.

The Nets Worn Inward: Alienation as Method in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Dr. Janet Paul, Dr. Bommana Indu

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is usually read as a novel of growth, freedom and artistic awakening. Yet Stephen Dedalus does not grow simply or peacefully. He is formed by quarrels at home, strict religious schooling, sexual guilt, political bitterness and unease with the language in which he must think and write. This article argues that Stephen's movement from alienation towards artistic selfhood is the central drama of the novel, and that Joyce leaves it deliberately unfinished. Alienation in Portrait is both wound and resource. It cuts Stephen off from family, church, nation and human warmth, yet it also sharpens his perception and drives him towards art. Reading the novel alongside recent work on Joyce's composition, religion, language, form, gender and nation, the article shows that Stephen never escapes the nets he names. He learns instead to work inside them. Family decline, Jesuit discipline, colonial language and inward unrest are not obstacles he clears on the way to art; they are the material from which his style is made. On this reading the ending offers no finished identity. Stephen leaves Ireland with a voice still in formation, and the closing diary marks work begun rather than completed. The article also holds Stephen to account. The detachment that makes him an artist is the same detachment that makes him a difficult son, a distant friend and a poor reader of the women around him. Joyce grants him his vocation without granting him innocence.

Beyond Sisterhood: Alterity, Internal Exclusion, and the Politics of Belonging in Morrison and Naylor

Mahaman-Sani Ali, Larry Amin

This article examines alterity, marginalization, and community fracture in African American women’s writing through two novels: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Black female solidarity is often celebrated as a site of resistance, and rightly so. Yet both novels also show how marginalized communities can reproduce, among themselves, the hierarchies that oppress them. On the one hand, the article sets out the theoretical and spatial framework. It distinguishes two senses of alterity (the Levinasian ethical Other and the Other produced by domination), and it draws on Black feminist and intersectional thought, spatial theory, and the philosophy of epistemic injustice. On the other hand, it offers a comparative reading. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison shows how internalized racism destroys Pecola Breedlove, how the demand to be respectable divides the Black community, and how that community, by refusing to see or acknowledge Pecola’s suffering, becomes part of her ruin. In The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor shows how a walled-in street of mutual aid turns on Lorraine and Theresa, a lesbian couple, and exposes the limits of conditional sisterhood. The article argues that both authors refuse a romanticized vision of community: liberation requires confronting the otherness that exists outside marginalized spaces and also within them.

Embodied Disruption: Gendered Subversions, Performative Agency, and Sociocultural Reform on the Malayalam Stage

A. T. Nasheeda

This paper investigates the transformative trajectory of female performance in modern Malayalam theatre, tracing how women shifted from marginalized spectacles to active agents of cultural dissent. Through the analytical framework of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this study interrogates the historical transition from female impersonation by male actors to the radical bodily presence of women on stage during the sociopolitical churn of mid-twentieth-century Kerala. By examining key dramatic movements—such as the anti-caste, progressive political dramas of the KPAC (Kerala People's Arts Club) alongside contemporary feminist experimental theatre—the paper demonstrates that the stage functioned not merely as a space of aesthetic reflection, but as a liminal arena where hegemonic patriarchal norms and caste codes were contested and rewritten. Butler’s formulation of performativity illuminates how female actors redeployed bodily gestures, speech acts, and spatial negotiation to expose gender as a regulatory social construct rather than an innate essence. Concurrently, the paper addresses the enduring structural tensions of the medium: the persistent dialectic between the progressive radicalization of scripts and the moral surveillance, commodification, and domestic containment imposed upon female performers offstage. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that Malayalam theatre served as a vital site of counter-hegemonic practice, wherein women’s embodied presence disrupted regional socio-aesthetic hierarchies, forged an alternative public sphere, and fundamentally reshaped the discourse of modern Kerala's sociopolitical renaissance.

Husband (lǎogōng) Beyond Marriage: The Generalization of a Kinship Address Term on Weibo

Yin Binxin

The generalization of kinship terms is a highly active linguistic phenomenon in modern Chinese. However, existing studies have largely focused on consanguineal kinship terms, leaving the generalization of marital kinship terms under-examined. Taking the kinship term laogong (husband) as a case study, this paper draws on 507 Weibo posts collected from January to July 2025 and employs qualitative content analysis to investigate its referents, pragmatic functions, and underlying motivations. The findings show that: (1) laogong has been highly generalized on Weibo, with generalized uses accounting for 73.96% of the data and referring to male idols, female idols, virtual characters, and fellow netizens; (2) the generalized use of laogong serves three main pragmatic functions, including constructing intimacy, conveying positive evaluation, and mitigating face-threatening acts; (3) the generalization is driven not merely by intra-linguistic mechanisms but also by users' emotional needs and communicative strategies, and is continually shaped by platform affordances. This study fills a gap in online address term research concerning marital kinship terms, reveals how address term evolution in the new media era is increasingly embedded in the affective and attention economies of platform society, and offers implications for regulating online language use and community governance.

Queer Literary Expressions in the Select Anthological Collection “Yaraana” by Hoshang Merchant— A Critical Study

Navin Chandrakar

This Research paper deals with a critical study of selected Indian queer literary marvels written by different Queer Writers of India, which has found its deep expression in the anthological collection “Yaraana” (1999) by Hoshang Merchant. Being gay or queer in India has always been considered and believed to be of occidental origin and has no connections with Indian society despite the fact that Homosexuality in India dates back to as early as the 2nd Century CE and is mentioned in the ancient Indian text Kamasutra and is explicitly depicted in the famous Khajuraho Temple. Most early modern queer writings were not documented due to the fear of being executed, as it was illegal and despised at the time. Queer Indians have secretly produced a lot of good writing reflecting their common lives, perceptions, feelings, pains, and pleasures. These emotions finds its expressions in both English and other Vernacular languages and the later is also translated into English by many modern and openly gay writers like Hosang Merchant, R. Raj Rao, Mahesh Dattani, Ashok Row Kavi, Vishnu Khandekar, Vikram Seth etc. Due to the queer nature of queer literature, most writings are difficult for common readers to find. Unlike the common literary genres, the LGBTQ genre came much later in the English Literary Canon. The anthological collection of gay writings from South Asia by Hoshang Merchant has made the critical study of Queer Expressions easy and possible. The anthology is a collection of 47 Queer Expressions by different Queer Writers of South Asian origin, mostly from India. Diaspora has also enriched the queer literature through their vivid expressions and shades . Love, deception, acceptance, romance, hidden lives, queer feelings and fear of being found out, sexual desire and pleasures, and unfulfilled ambitions have been beautifully woven through stories by queer writers. This provides insight into their lives and the societal conditioning impacting their lives.

Nature’s Retribution: An Ecocritical Perspective on Human-Environment Conflict in The Hungry Tide

Dr. Dinesh Panwar

In the field of contemporary Indian English fiction, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) is one of the richest and most sensuous literary depictions of the complex ecology between nature and humanity. The novel is set in the ecologically fragile Sundarbans, where nature is not only a scenic backdrop but an active entity that contributes ceaselessly towards the shaping of human communities, their lives, their identities, and destinies. Ghosh focuses on the conflict here between the conservation of the environment, the efforts to make a living, state policies and indigenous inscribed knowledge through the overlapping experiences of Piya Roy, Kanai Dutt, Fokir and Nirmal. This paper aims to apply ecocritical approaches to The Hungry Tide to reinterpret the novel in the context of a more ethical and sustainable view of human existence in nature, which will doubtless involve a contestation of anthropocentrism. It adopts an ecocritical approach to support its interpretation that Ghosh depicts ecology as an interactive gathering in which the very survival of the human species is contingent upon coexistence with others, and not domination. Moreover, “The Tides of Numenera” sheds light on the environmental injustices faced by the residents of the Sundarbans, and it also poses challenging questions about the conservation policies that ignore human suffering for the sake of preserving biodiversity. Finally, The Hungry Tide argues that ecological sustainability and human survival are not separate, making the question of environmental ethics a major issue in the social and political debate of today.

The Terms and Conditions of Intimacy: Contracts, Consent, and Emotional Negotiation in The Big Bang Theory

Swarnika

This research examines the roommate and relationship agreements in The Big Bang Theory as recurring devices through which friendship, romantic attachment, and personal boundaries become subjects of explicit negotiation. Focusing on Sheldon and Leonard’s shared domestic life and Sheldon and Amy’s romantic relationship, with selective reference to Leonard and Penny, the paper considers who establishes the terms of intimacy, who interprets them, and who undertakes the work of sustaining relationships when those terms become inadequate. The agreements offer reassurance through clearly stated expectations, yet their apparent reciprocity requires closer examination when the authority to draft and enforce provisions is unevenly distributed. Through close audiovisual analysis of selected episodes, including “The Agreement Dissection,” “The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition,” and “The Romance Recalibration,” the study traces the movement from contractual compliance to disagreements over care, attention, privacy, and physical intimacy. Drawing on scholarship on negotiated intimacy, relational autonomy, and emotion work, it distinguishes consent to a relationship from continuing consent to particular interactions. Sheldon’s preference for predictability and Amy’s desire for greater closeness are examined as needs whose recognition depends on the possibility of refusal and revision. Leonard’s accommodation of domestic rules provides a parallel inquiry into the obligations attached to friendship. The analysis also attends to formal dialogue, bodily gestures, reaction shots, comic pauses, and audible laughter to examine how television comedy frames boundaries and unequal demands. Across recurring conflicts, separation, and reconciliation, the paper asks whether character development alters established patterns of authority or temporarily softens them. It argues that the series locates the difficulty of intimacy in the distance between stated obligations and responsive care: agreements can clarify expectations, but their value depends on whether those affected retain a meaningful voice in changing them.

Bridging the L2 Speaking Gap through Multimodal Re-Speaking

Dr Mary Sooria, Dr Deepa George

Oral fluency in English does not always grow along with the acquisition of vocabulary, grammar and written language. Learners' hesitation, anxiety and difficulties in spontaneous oral communication are not uncommon when they perform well in academic English. The study investigates the effectiveness of a Multimodal Re-Speaking Cycle (MRC), an integrated classroom intervention that aims at facilitating secondary-school students' linguistic knowledge to be expressed orally. A quasi-experimental study was conducted on a group of 40 students of Class IX of a secondary school in Ernakulam district, Kerala. The results were evaluated based on a pre-test post-test speaking task. The evaluation method followed a recurring pattern of multimodal input like verbal self-analysis, group interaction, verbal intervention re-speaking, and reflection. The mean score increased from 5.11 (SD = 2.32) in the pre-test to 17.45 (SD = 2.67) in the post-test, producing a mean gain of 12.34 points. It was a very large within group effect size (Cohen's dz = 4.19), and there was a statistically significant difference, t (39) = 26.52, p < .001. 40 participants had higher post-test scores. The results indicate the importance of a structured cycle of repeated oral performance, noticing, multimodal support, interaction, and scaffolding as a productive way to develop L2 speaking. The study demonstrates the pedagogical potential of viewing attempts at first speaking as less of a performance and more as an opportunity for reflection, support and better re-speaking.

A Study on the Challenges and Safeguard Mechanisms in the Exercise of Procuratorial Investigation and Verification Powers in Civil Enforcement

Huo Yidan

The power of China's procuratorates to investigate and verify in civil enforcement is established at the normative level, yet its operation is constrained by path dependence on trial-supervision paradigms and the coercive, fast-moving character of enforcement. Rigid initiation thresholds, the absence of coercive deterrents, court–procuratorate data silos, and weak binding force of supervisory outputs impair both procedural and substantive fairness. Grounded in the doctrinal separation of adjudication and enforcement, this article diagnoses these dilemmas and proposes four interlocking reforms: concurrent ex-officio oversight, tiered limited coercive safeguards backed by judicial disciplinary referrals, real-time digital integration across agencies, and a closed-loop accountability regime for procuratorial recommendations. This reconstruction turns enforcement oversight into substantive check-and-balance and offers theoretical reference for the forthcoming Civil Compulsory Enforcement Law.

Literary Criticism of Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Study on An Apology for Poetry

Dr. Murugesan A.

Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry,” also known as “The Defense of Poesy,” is one of the foundational works of English Renaissance literary criticism. Written in a period when poetry was challenged by moral, religious, and philosophical objections, the treatise argues that poetry is an ancient, imaginative, and morally productive form of knowledge. This paper examines Sidney’s use of the term “apology,” the intellectual and cultural context of the work, and its principal arguments. It summarizes the treatise in four connected parts: the antiquity and dignity of poetry, the nature and kinds of poetic imitation, poetry’s superiority to philosophy and history in moving readers toward virtue, and Sidney’s answers to the major objections against poetry. The paper then evaluates the merits and limitations of Sidney’s criticism. Its merits include the powerful conception of the poet as a maker, the integration of pleasure and instruction, the emphasis on imagination and memory, and the recognition of poetry’s social and political force. Its limitations include the defensive character of its argument, its selective use of Plato and Aristotle, its dependence on historical exempla, and its unresolved tension between pleasure and moral discipline. The study concludes that Sidney remains relevant because he connects literary form with ethical education, political imagination, cultural authority, and the reader’s active response.

An Empirical Study on the Translation of Political Texts — A Study on the English Version of The Governance of China from the Perspective of Domestication and Foreignization

Wang Wenjun

In recent years, metaphor research on key Chinese political discourses has attracted extensive attention, especially works represented by The Governance of China. The metaphors adopted in such works help highlight national ethos and state governing philosophies. Drawing on Lakoff’s metaphor theory and Venuti’s domestication foreignization translation theory, this study employs Nvivo15 to analyze metaphorical expressions and translation strategies in the source text and its English translation. The findings reveal that the text contains 13 main types of metaphors, and foreignization is the dominant strategy adopted in the English translation, dominated by literal translation and word for word translation. This paper aims to explore how to convey the in depth implications of the source text in cross cultural communication and facilitate the effective international communication of Chinese political discourse.

Ideal Image and Technical Intervention: A Study of Liking What You See: A Documentary from the Perspective of Jung Archetype Theory

Jiahe Yang

Ted Chiangss works have attracted widespread critical attention for their exploration of humanity and philosophical questions from the perspective of science fiction, with Story of Your Life being one of his most representative works. Among his writings, Liking What You See: A Documentary explores the complex relationship among appearance-based discrimination, social prejudice, and identity through the fictional technology of “calliagnosia.” Adopting a pseudo-documentary narrative form, the work presents the changes that occur in both social aesthetic judgment and individual psychology following technological intervention. Accordingly, this thesis situates the work within the contexts of aesthetic archetypes and the development of fictional technology, examining how the “ideal image,” as a deep-seated psychological structure, influences individual cognition and the operation of social structures. Drawing primarily on Carl Gustav Jung’s archetypal theory, this thesis analyzes the archetype of the “ideal image” in the text. The discussion focuses on three major aspects. First, it examines the formation mechanism of the “ideal image” archetype within the narrative and the process through which it is socially reinforced. Second, it investigates how calliagnosia intervenes in and deconstructs the operation of the archetype by altering cognitive pathways.

Practices, Dilemmas and Causes of Chile’s Population Aging Countermeasures— Also on the Enlightenment to China

Zheng Qingqing

As a pioneer economy in global pension privatization reform, Chile is currently in the transition period of deep population aging. The adaptability of the original individual account pension system to the labor market structure continues to decline, and problems such as old-age poverty and social exclusion have become increasingly prominent. Carrying out relevant country-specific research has clear practical necessity. Based on the social exclusion theory and the multi-pillar old-age security analysis framework, this paper adopts policy text analysis and data research methods, combines official Chilean statistical data and two authoritative aging survey datasets, systematically sorts out Chile's aging response policy system, and analyzes the implementation dilemmas and underlying causes of the policies. The study finds that Chile has built a four-in-one policy framework covering legal protection, pension system, elderly care services and governance support. However, it still faces dilemmas such as low public institutional trust, unbalanced elderly security structure, multidimensional social exclusion of the elderly, and significant group security gaps. The causes stem from the multiple superposition of institutional path dependence, political fragmentation, fiscal constraints and age stereotypes. This research can provide Latin American perspective experience and policy enlightenment for China to improve its aging governance system and optimize the elderly security system.

On the Application of Three-Dimensional Transformation Means in Translating Historical Classics — A Case Study of the “Hereditary House of Chu” of the Records of the Grand Historian

Xia Yawen, Chen Shuangyu

Chinese historical classics face prominent translation difficulties due to concise classical Chinese, culture-loaded terms and context-dependent dialogues. As the core analytical tool of Eco-translatology, three dimensional transformation requires translators to make adaptive selections from linguistic, cultural and communicative dimensions. Taking the well-known chapter “Zhang Yi Deceiving King Huai of Chu” from the “Hereditary House of Chu” of the Records of the Grand Historian as the source text, this paper conducts translation practice and case analysis. It explores how adaptive transformation strategies solve translation obstacles of ancient historical texts: restructuring run-on sentences, reconstructing rhetorical parallelism, interpreting culture-specific items associated with institutions and geography, and explicating implicit pragmatic motives in historical narration. This study finds that proper three-dimensional adaptive selection can help target-language readers acquire historical facts, perceive character traits and grasp didactic implications, so as to realize effective cross-cultural communication of Chinese historical classics. It also provides practical references for the external dissemination of Jingchu historical materials represented by Records of the Grand Historian.

Gender and Resistance: Exploring Violent and Non-Violent Forms of Women’s Agency in Contemporary Indian Fiction

Nivedita Patel, Ila Rathore, Jadhav Saurabh Maruti

Contemporary Indian fiction increasingly represents women as active subjects who negotiate, challenge, and resist patriarchal structures rather than merely experiencing them as passive victims. This paper examines women's agency through violent and non-violent forms of resistance in selected contemporary Indian fictional works. It argues that resistance extends beyond physical confrontation and includes silence, refusal, education, economic independence, mobility, storytelling, writing, bodily autonomy, sexual self-determination, and collective solidarity. Through a qualitative and comparative reading of selected works by Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Anita Nair, Arundhati Roy, Bama, Meena Kandasamy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Megha Majumdar, the study investigates how women negotiate gendered power within family, marriage, caste, class, sexuality, and institutional structures. Drawing upon feminist literary criticism, postcolonial feminism, theories of agency, intersectionality, and resistance, the paper conceptualises violent and non-violent resistance as interconnected rather than mutually exclusive forms of agency. It demonstrates that the meaning and consequences of women's resistance are shaped by their social and economic locations. The study concludes that contemporary Indian fiction expands the understanding of female agency by presenting resistance as a continuum of negotiation, refusal, survival, self-expression, and direct confrontation. Such representations also demonstrate that female subjectivity is produced through women's struggles to reclaim voice, body, mobility, identity, and interpretive authority.

Dilemmas in Selecting Early Reading Content for Young Children: A Family Perspective

Guo Wang, Yang Sijie

Early reading plays a well-documented role in young children's language acquisition, cognitive development, and emotional socialisation. Within the family - the primary site of early literacy - parents act as "gatekeepers" who determine which books children encounter. Yet their choices are not purely pedagogical; they are entangled with educational anxiety, commercial marketing, children's preferences, and digital media shifts. This conceptual paper examines the multifaceted dilemmas facing Chinese families when selecting early reading materials. It identifies four parental-level obstacles: insufficient literary knowledge, developmental misjudgements, consumerist influences, and intergenerational conflicts. It then analyses structural imbalances in the children's book market, including the dominance of functional texts over aesthetic works, the prevalence of moralistic narratives, and the underrepresentation of high-quality indigenous picture books. Finally, it explores how algorithm-driven recommendations and screen-based reading further complicate selection. The analysis concludes that these dilemmas reflect a deeper tension between adult-imposed standards and children's authentic needs, calling for a more child-centred approach to content choice.

China-Serbia Partnership Discourse in Serbia's Multi-Vector Foreign Policy

Guo Yinuo

Serbia has deepened its relations with China while formally maintaining European Union membership as its principal foreign-policy objective. This article examines how that apparently contradictory position is constructed and used. Drawing on Chinese and Serbian policy documents, European Commission reports, trade statistics, and the cases of railway construction, industrial investment, and the China-Serbia Free Trade Agreement, it connects partnership discourse with Serbia's role claims and foreign-policy practice. It argues that expressions such as “ironclad friendship,” “comprehensive strategic partnership,” and “community with a shared future” do more than celebrate bilateral goodwill. They provide continuity and political legitimacy for cooperation and help Serbian leaders present the country as a development-oriented, autonomous, and regionally connected actor. Yet this agency remains bounded. The European Union continues to be Serbia's principal market, investor, regulatory reference, and accession framework. China-Serbia cooperation therefore does not replace a European regional order. It gives Belgrade additional partners and bargaining resources within that order, while creating new trade, regulatory, environmental, and political tensions. The case demonstrates that changes in the Western Balkans cannot be understood solely as competition among external powers; they also depend on how local governments interpret and deploy external relationships.