The Female Body and the Environment: A Transnational Study of Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Overall, the resubmitted article is much more reader-friendly. Extensive edits decrease potential misunderstandings. Sections and subsections identify the goals and outcomes of sections with increased clarity. Transitions work well to guide readers through the article.

 

The article explains in increased depth and detail how considering indigenous worldviews represented in literary works can inform perspectives beyond the dualism between humans and nature. The role of the female body in literary representations is articulated with increased clarity. The article increases our understanding of how cultural contact, between indigenous and foreign and cultural interactions bring to light limitations in world views. This clear focus on the importance of cultural interaction in a process of re-thinking dualistic worldviews is helpful. The sections discussing the three literary works integrate theory and interpretation in productive ways. Concerns expressed in my previous review have all been addressed.

 

Another round or copy editing could provide further improvements. The abstract, for example, has subject-verb agreement (which roots in different cultures)  issues and awkward phrasing (to rethink of it).   The readers’ experience could improve, I suggest, with rephrasing / precise articulation of the “it”  at the end of a clause. For example,  the Conclusion could gain by replacing the final “it”  - and actually explain how this aim has been reached (so well indeed!) in the work presented above.

"This article aims to challenge the distinction between humans and the environment, reconsidering the utility of these binary frameworks in shaping our views of the environment and our relationship with it." (p. 12, 604)

 

In the body, some small remaining issues could be addressed in copy editing - e.g. the uses of indefinite articles with such as p. 2,  45 An ecofeminist; or p. 2, 80 A Material feminist, or vague formulations (check for the frequent use of “things”) or  using pronouns, e.g. in the concluding paragraph on p. 3, 112 “ a similar thing” … or a deeper analysis of this.”   p. 6, 262  “a problematic thing.”

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

 

Some minor copy editing might improve the reading experience, as suggested above. The quality of English does not complicate comprehension in any way. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think the article has been significantly improved from the initial version. It is now much better framed and the argument is coherently developed and presented. The three novels are analyzed in sufficient depth and their significance for the overall argument is clearly highlighted. Relevant conclusions are also drawn from the comparative analysis. I don't think the article needs substantive improvements in terms of content.

There are, however, some problems in terms of referencing, formatting and language (see below). Some of the authors referenced are introduced with full first name and last name, while others are not. This is inconsistent. Also, the use of articles in some of the author references is awkward and non-idiomatic. In addition, the block quotes do not seem to be properly formatted (but please check the house citation style).

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The text of the article seems to have been revised for language and has improved from last version. There are, however, still turns of phrase and linguistic uses that are not idiomatic or grammatically incorrect, both in the main text and in the abstract. An additional linguistic revision to fix these problems is needed.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This version is much improved but several issues where sources are unclearly or illogically cited remain, especially on p 1 and 2, where e g Braidotti, Maller and Morton are either misunderstood or misrepresented, or both. Later on the citations get better, and I think the editor must have a done a great deal of the background writing, Given that the manuscript was revised so very quickly, I wonder if the editor might be generative AI? 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The language is very much improved, again with the exception of the abstract and the first and second page which must be revised.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review:

• A brief summary: 

• The article offers analyses of representations of the female body in novels by Mo Yan, Murakami Haruki, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  The author demonstrates how critical attention to culture specific worldviews in Japanese, Chinese, and Latin American cultures connects to feminist, posthumanist, and ecocritical theoretical frameworks. They challenge the hierarchical dualism between humans and the natural environment inherent in western traditions, along with hierarchical dualist thinking about culture/nature, subject/object, human/more than human. 

• The main contribution and strength of the article is bringing together works of fiction that reflect worldviews other than dualistic views. In the culture specific contexts, the focus on representations of the female body as the site of challenge to dualism leads to the suggestion that female corporeality  in the three novels is a bridge between nature and culture. The study aims to foster a more integrated and equitable understanding of the interconnectedness of the human and more than human word.

• General concept comments
  Article: Areas for improvement should perhaps include a more thorough discussion of the culture specific “local worldviews” that connect human and particularly female bodies to the environment in non-dualistic ways. The significance of Amazonian Indigenous cosmology (p. 8, 404),  Japanese tradition (e.g. p. 4, 279; 6, 252; and Japanese Shinto 7, 346),  Chinese traditional world view (p. 11, 551), and  Fengshui (p. 12, 613) could be more closely connected to the novels. Helpful for readers would be a consistent use of terminology, e.g, explain the use of terms like “non-human” or “more than human” in the article.  Could this be connected to the question posed in the introduction - where a potential typing error could change the meaning: p. 1, line 43 – are we looking for a “broader” line between humans and environment, or should this be “boarder” line? 

• The theoretical framework considers important research and offers summaries in very broad strokes, risking, perhaps, becoming rather  unspecific. (e.g.p. 2, 62 “theoretical books”,  p. 3, 117 Braidotti points out the problematic thing .. p. 4, 167 “while being different from…. )  The use of important terms could be defined with increased clarity - hybridity, mental spirit, mental emotions, local belief

• There is an imbalance between the space dedicated to the discussion of the three novels. Could those three sections be aligned more effectively, e.g. moving from the short plot summary to central figures and questions? The conclusions of those sections could be connected more effectively in the conclusion of the article, highlighting the culture specific contributions of the literary works to moving beyond dualistic world views. 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English Language used in this paper is comprehensible, yet errors in standard grammar, spelling and vocabulary complicate communication.

Clarity will increase after a thorough revision throughout the paper. While readers can follow the argument, potential spelling errors like "broader line" or "boarder line" complicate comprehension. Attention to sentence fragments, punctuation, subject-verb agreements, consistent use of tenses, and choice of vocabulary will improve readability. Wo

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

- The conceptual framework is not properly laid out. The author relies on Alaimo's "transcorporeality" and Nash's "disease", but these notions are not adequately exposed or linked with the article's close reading of the texts. 

- In general, the articulation of posthumanist and ecofeminist concepts in the article is theoretically superficial and poorly developed. The exposition is often repetitive, disjoint and vague.

- While the comparative reading is interesting, the argument of the article relies too heavily on cultural determinism, assuming that broadly conceived and superficially defined notions of culture (i.e. Japanese, Latin American, Chinese "cultures") may provide an explanation for literary constructions of the feminine body and human/nonhuman relationality. Without proper caveats and a more subtle analysis of nature/culture this is very problematic and constitutes, in my opinion, a fundamental flaw of the analysis. While this problem cannot be easily solved with a revision, I would recommend the author to provide more nuance and finer analysis in order to minimize this weakness as much as possible.

- I think that the conclusions of the article are not adequately supported by the analysis in the previous sections. Moreover, these conclusions are vague and imprecise. They tend to repeat the broad and generic statements drawn from a superficial understanding of posthumanist and ecofeminist concepts in the introduction, without properly showing how the three novels sustain or deepen these notions.

 

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Comments on the Quality of English Language

- The article needs to undergo thorough editing to fix grammatical mistakes. There are obvious and systematic mistakes in sentence construction and non-idiomatic uses of the English language throughout the text.

- There are also formal problems in the layout of the article, particularly with the quotations.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this article the author aims to analyze the representation of the female body in three different novels, via the human/nonhuman and the nature/culture dualities discussed by e g Braidotti, Alaimo, and others.

Its strength lies in the literary analysis which is interesting and mostly well-written, although for the most part only superficially related to the above mentioned dualities. The topic and theoretical background is potentially interesting, but the author needs to spend more time reading the background sources, in order to gain a better understanding of them. This text is inconsistent and unclear in its representations of secondary sources, which unfortunately affects the argument and discussion considerably. Many, but not all, of these problems might be due to weak English proficiency, but at this point I don't think a language editor is the solution, since the discussion is so unclear.

 I think this article would benefit from a completely new start, in which the author first, reduces the background theory to a smaller number of more accessible sources, and second,  focuses on one of these novels for a deeper analysis, or else makes use of the opportunity to compare and contrast. Then, a thorough language review will probably be very useful and educational.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The language quality is low, impacting severely on the comprehensibility of the discussion, and especially on the discussions of secondary sources which are often extremely difficult to understand. Apart from simple grammar mistakes, prepositions, article usage etc., there are a large number of sentence fragments, other sentence structure problems, and contradictory statements.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf