... humans and nonhumans while simultaneously contemplating the reality of human extinction events. Riddled with such contradictions, The Three-Body Problem thus represents the experience of hope and cynicism in the face of radically transforming human/nonhuman relationships—a sentiment likely shared by many...

...Margherita Long Abstract This essay introduces three works of post-Fukushima Japanese literature, by Hayashi Kyoko (1930–2017), Kimura Yusuke (1970–) and Kobayashi Erika (1978–), to offer an environmental humanities alternative to Giorgio Agamben's response to COVID-19. Politically, Hayashi...

...Ban Wang Abstract Sensitive to modernity's estrangement of human bonds to nature and the rural lifeworld, Shen Congwen affirms an ecological understanding of writing and life. The writing self sinks its roots into nature and enmeshes with nonhuman worlds. Animistic language immerses bodily...

...Ban Wang Abstract Touting the technological fix for environmental crises overlooks the role of society, history, culture, production, and geography. Anthropocene , presuming all civilizations as ecologically destructive, ignores the historical, social, and cultural differences in human-nature...

...Ban Wang Abstract Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering call into question the notion of the human in the humanist tradition, causing deep and subtle rifts in human-human and human-nature relations. Examining stories by Chinese sci-fi writer Hao Jingfang, this chapter argues that digital...

...Ban Wang Abstract Ecocriticism offers a broader horizon than the concept of world literature. Instead of treating culturally bonded beings and political events of a zeitgeist, ecocriticism sees human history and lifeworlds as only one trajectory among myriad evolutions of species and the earth...

...Ban Wang Abstract Environmental writers have sought to retrieve ecological wisdom from traditional Chinese thought to critique anthropocentrism, but the rediscoveries remain a disembodied discourse and ignore the relationships among humans: the political, social, and economic structures and power...

...Ban Wang Abstract Contemporary environmental crises have their origin in the anthropocentric view of humans as separable from and superior to the natural world. Anthropocentrism also marks the realist author of modern Chinese fiction. Departing from that human-centered view, Shen Congwen's work...

...Ban Wang Abstract Chen Qiufan's sci-fi novel Waste Tide attests to the dual alienation of nature and humans. Global capitalism, geopolitical conflict, the scramble for natural resources, and rash development have destroyed the rural community, ruined the health of local populations, and eroded...

...Chia-Ju Chang Abstract The article considers what role “meaning” plays in shaping the unintended suffering caused by human aspirations. The thing we call meaning in “the secular age” has replaced the transcendent to become the new religion we espouse. We fight for abstract ideas, principles...

...Zhuoyi Wang Abstract Planetarianism, proposed by Masao Miyoshi for literature and literary studies, calls for a new sense and organization of human totality truly inclusive of all and against neoliberal division, exclusion, repression, and egocentric consumption. Ironically, it is also the global...

...Ban Wang Abstract Rather than a war against nature, a genuine production is premised on the humanization of nature by producing use values while changing human inner nature. Socialist production strives to achieve an ecologically sound economy whereby labor on nature is in sync with the realization...

... an era of sonic agitation to an aesthetics based on visual perception and contemplation. This rereading of Bei Dao's canonical poem and other related texts goes back to the late 1970s, when the political implications of the human senses were firmly grasped and heatedly debated. The author shows...

...Robin Visser Abstract In “China as Method,” Mizoguchi Yūzō argues that “a world that takes China as method would be a world in which China is a constitutive element.” Similarly, a world that takes ecology as method is a world in which humans are a constitutive element, one of “the ten thousand...

...Liu Zaifu; Yijiao Guo Abstract In this speech, Liu Zaifu thoroughly discusses the history of the May Fourth movement and the New Culture movement in the whole last century and the circumstances of humanity in China. In his explanation, May Fourth could be conceptualized through three different...

... the inculcation of secular humanity as an alternative to religious transcendence. Meanwhile, Liu underscored the transcendence of literatures of sin to stimulate an inner morality through which to excise all secular political commands from human interiority. Whereas Li prioritized a realistic ethical...

...Astrid Møller-Olsen Abstract What if, in the encounter between the subject and the city, it is the buildings, the streets, the rooms that are moving and the human beings who are at a standstill? Inspired by the efforts of literary scholars and human geographers to apply a unified understanding...

..., a fascination with the relationship between humans and Sarawak's various “semi-wild” flora and fauna is paralleled by an attention to the relationship between the region's ethnic Chinese and its various Indigenous peoples—and particularly two subgroups of Sarawak's Dayak ethnicity, the “Sea Dayaks” (also known...