Search Results (164)

This article examines the early formation of Confucian–Islamic synthesis during the Yuan dynasty, arguing that institutional and intellectual adaptations in this period laid the groundwork for the later systematic synthesis known as “Yi-Ru Huitong” (伊儒會通). Moving beyond narratives of assimilation or resistance, it analyzes how Muslim communities navigated China’s pluralistic sociopolitical landscape through a process of creative adaptation. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates textual analysis, historical comparison, and transcultural theory, the study investigates three key dimensions: the development of hybrid religious institutions, legal-political negotiations, and mechanisms of social integration. Drawing on multilingual sources—including Persian Islamic manuals, Yuan administrative archives, and epigraphic evidence—it demonstrates how Yuan-era Muslims established patterns of selective adaptation that preserved Islamic identity while enabling meaningful engagement with Chinese cultural norms. These developments not only ensured the survival of Islam in China but also generated a range of transcultural achievements in astronomy, medicine, architecture, and the literary arts, thereby creating the necessary conditions for the profound philosophical syntheses of the Ming-Qing era. By positioning the Yuan period as a crucial incubator of Sino-Islamic civilization, this study offers insights for comparative philosophy and the global history of civilizational dialog, inviting reflection on the early Chinese Islamic experience as a significant case of sustainable cross-civilizational engagement. Full article

This article examines the interaction between phenomenological illness theory and magical realism in Stephen King’s The Green Mile. It uses ideas from phenomenological psychopathology and illness narrative theory to explain how King presents supernatural events through a restrained and matter-of-fact narrative register. Instead of considering magical realism as a genre or a mere literary device, the article views magical realism as a stylistic mode that is produced by the tension between realistic descriptions and unexplained supernatural moments. Through a close reading of King’s prose, especially his diction, narrative voice and bodily descriptions, this study shows that John Coffey’s healing acts represent the otherwise incommunicable experience of suffering. These supernatural events make visible forms of institutional violence such as prison brutality, racial injustice and execution, which are often invisible in traditional realist narratives. This article also argues that magical realism is not limited to Latin American literature but can function effectively in American popular fiction. Finally, the findings suggest that, while magical realism may be helpful in exposing injustice and suffering, it may also have the danger of aestheticizing pain rather than fully transforming it into political critique. Full article

Evaluating emotional understanding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging because assessments are subjective, ambiguous, multidimensional, and sensitive to controllable generation parameters. We developed a unified mathematical framework for characterizing LLM “emotional individuality” that integrates softmax sampling–temperature control (the decoding-time temperature parameter exposed by the API and typically used to modulate output randomness during token generation), fuzzy set theory with Shannon-type fuzzy entropy, and persona-based cognitive diversity analysis. We evaluated 36 API-accessible LLMs from seven major vendors on Japanese literary texts, using four personas each assigned a sampling temperature ($T\in \{0.1,0.4,0.7,0.9\}$), yielding 4227/4320 trial responses (97.8% coverage), of which 4067/4227 contained valid numeric emotion scores (96.2%). Temperature controllability varied approximately 25-fold (${\kappa }_M\in [0.039,0.982]$) with both positive and negative temperature–variance relationships across models. Because each sampling temperature is deterministically assigned to a persona in our design, ${\kappa }_M$ should be interpreted as an operational temperature–variance association across persona conditions rather than an isolated causal temperature effect. The model-level mean fuzzy entropy ranged from approximately 0.40 to 0.66, and the numerical stability consistency scores ranged from approximately 0.548 to 0.780. We also observed text-dependent structure, including genre-specific variation in the Interest–Sadness relationship. For practitioners, the framework is most directly useful as a benchmark-design and model-screening template for structured emotion-scoring tasks; its empirical conclusions remain limited to the present Japanese literary, text-only setting. Full article

Verbs of perception show complex linguistic behavior, both grammatically and in semantic terms. Owing to their connection with perceptual processes (sight, hearing, smell…), they always operate in a heterogeneous way, since these types of verbs must code highly diverse events. In light of all the above, the specialized literature has tried to systematize the use of these verbs during the last few years, for the purpose of identifying the overall patterns which govern their utilization in natural languages. To that end, numerous authors chose to formulate dichotomous oppositions (for example, active vs passive perception), aiming to describe the syntax of verbs of perception rigorously. The aim of our paper is to critically analyze such dichotomies, which will allow us to ascertain how verbs of perception relate to grammar (type of transitivity, resultative nature of perception, aspectual typology of events, link between perception and space, etc.). This work will additionally provide evidence that, contrary to what has been argued at times, the dichotomies proposed by scholars are quite gradual or prototypical rather than rigid. In short, the aim sought with our study consists of offering an up-to-date review about a topic of great interest—namely, the methodology to analyze verbs of perception—insofar as these verbs stand out for being one of the most frequently used lexical categories in all languages around the world. Full article

This article focuses on the origin of “Wenqi Theory”—a core domain of ancient Chinese literary theory—specifically Cao Pi’s proposition that “literature is governed by qi”. It situates this concept within the 21st-century context of cultural globalization to engage in dialogue with Western aesthetics, aiming to revitalize the theory through mutual learning between Chinese and Western civilizations and integrate it into the system of modern transformation for classical literary theory. From the perspective of contemporary theoretical reconstruction, the paper analyzes the modern discourse paradigm of “Wenqi Theory”, traces its philosophical roots, and points out that the “clearness” or “murkiness” of “Wenqi” directly influences the aesthetic value of writing and the evaluation of objects. The study reveals that “Wenqi Theory” possesses rich connotations and unifies multiple dialectical relationships such as author and text, macrocosm and microcosm, personal temperament and acquired cultivation, content and form, fully embodying the distinctive integration of Chinese cultural tradition. Furthermore, the paper studies the lineage of life aesthetics from “Qi-Theory” in philosophy and science to “Wenqi Theory” in literary criticism, and its importance in constructing modern discourse paradigms. Meanwhile, by utilizing the categories of “the sublime” and “the beautiful” in Western aesthetics, it reactivates the contemporary aesthetic implications of “Wenqi Theory” within the context of globalization and cross-cultural exchange. The article endeavours to place this seemingly esoteric concept of classical Chinese literary theory within a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary philosophical horizon for systematic and theoretical interpretation, revealing its universal aesthetic value that transcends specific cultural backgrounds, thereby providing a possible paradigm for the modernization of traditional Chinese literary theory and its participation in international academic dialogue. Full article

Modern, post-Scaliger expectations for constructing an absolute chronology out of ancient biblical narratives introduce a fallacy of assumed time that distorts the reading of these narratives. While absolute chronology undergirds historical-critical interpretation from Spinoza and Reimarus to twentieth-century scholarship, the more recent “temporal turn” in philosophy, historiography, and literary theory aligns with a renewed attention to narrative time and ancient temporal consciousness. Focusing on 2 Maccabees and the Gospel of John as historiographical narratives reveals how both texts configure events through relative temporal devices—such as temporal markers and temporal process verbs—rather than through absolute calendrical dating, even when coordinates appear in 2 Maccabees’ embedded letters. Building on this comparison allows for a dimensional model of time that respects these configurational strategies and avoids obscuring how these texts construct theological and historical meaning within their own narrative worlds. Full article

Surrealism persistently resisted its own historicization, defining itself not as a literary or artistic movement but as an activity of the mind aimed at total liberation. This essay re-examines surrealism’s internal contradictions: its rejection of literature alongside its dependence on literary institutions; its commitment to psychic freedom alongside political orthodoxy; and its hostility to authorship alongside the production of canonical works. Drawing on manifestos, journals, performance practices, and postwar critical reception, the essay situates surrealism at the fault line between modernism, Dada, and later poststructuralist theory. It argues that surrealism’s most enduring legacy lies less in its aesthetic products than in its reconfiguration of cultural authority among artist, artwork, and reader, a redistribution that continues to shape contemporary literary, media, and performance studies. Full article

This paper introduces a multi-turn large language model (LLM) jailbreaking attack called Defamiliarization, in which malicious queries are embedded within ostensibly harmless narratives. By reframing requests in “unmarked” contexts, LLMs can be coerced into producing undesirable outputs. A range of scenarios is documented, from planning ethically dubious actions to selectively overlooking critical events in literary texts, thereby exposing the limitations of alignment strategies predicated on detecting trigger words or semantic cues. Rather than substituting vocabulary, defamiliarization manipulates context and presentation, highlighting vulnerabilities that cannot be addressed by token-level fixes alone. Beyond demonstrating the effectiveness of defamiliarization as an attack strategy, evidence is presented of a systematic relationship between model scale and susceptibility. Experiments reveal that smaller-parameter models are significantly easier to manipulate using defamiliarized prompts. This finding raises important concerns regarding the growing popularity of lightweight, locally hosted LLMs, which are favored for their lower computational requirements but may lack alignment safeguards. A more holistic approach to LLM safety is advocated—one that incorporates insights from literary theory, ethics, and user experience—treating these models as interpretive agents. By doing so, defenses against covert manipulations can be strengthened and AI systems can remain aligned with human values. Full article

Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the academy and just as passionately defended that territory against their neighbor’s incursions. At times, authors and their intentions have been central to literary criticism, while at others, they are intellectually discarded or severely reduced in importance. Much of the friction caused by the shifting focus of literary criticism is driven by impassioned rhetoric and convictions that leave little room for compromise. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the possibility of a dispassionate arbiter, one that, should the literary community have the courage and conviction to embrace and exploit, could offer a new level of harmony between divergent literary theories. Full article

The rise in the West of religious unbelief and its sometimes companions, relativism and nihilism, has been widely noted. Dostoyevsky’s famous dictum, “Without God, everything is permissible,” has in many quarters been taken as more recommendation than warning. The causes behind this trend are surely complex, but a key accelerant appears to have been the triumph of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in its original and now updated forms. Taken to its logical conclusions, the theory, together with part of its methodological apparatus (methodological naturalism), would seem to drain physical reality of meaning and humans of free will, significance, and higher purpose. Atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett called it a “universal acid.” The subject is one that could fill many books. One manageable way of rendering the subject manageable in a single paper is by considering key narratives that buttress Darwinian theory and by tracing the theory’s impact on the narrative arts of literature and film. How have Christians in the academy responded to modern evolutionary theory’s impact on the culture? One response has been to graft it onto Christianity in the hopes of neutralizing the theory’s more pernicious cultural implications. In practice, such attempts have tended to fundamentally alter either modern evolutionary theory or Christianity or both. Before attempting any such union, we would do well to revisit the foundations of the theory. Full article

This essay offers a comparative reading of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Los suicidas and Leila Guerriero’s Los suicidas del fin del mundo through the lens of the “suicidal archive.” Drawing on literary criticism, trauma studies, and biopolitical theory, it explores how both works transform suicide into a problem of representation, where writing functions as an aesthetic mediation against the chaos of reality. In dialogue with the ideas of Mbembe, De Martelaere, and Caruth, I argue that Di Benedetto and Guerriero move beyond the rational frameworks of scientific or journalistic discourse to probe the ethical and affective dimensions of suicidal acts. While Di Benedetto’s text renders repetition as a metaphysical and introspective structure, Guerriero’s transforms it into a collective, polyphonic archive of trauma. In both cases, literature emerges as a symbolic space of containment that, rather than closing off meaning, keeps the wound open. Ultimately, the essay concludes that the suicidal archive does not seek to explain or domesticate death but to inhabit its enigma—affirming writing as an act of resistance against silence and disappearance. Full article

The artificial generation of text by computers has been a field of study in computer science since the beginning of the twentieth century, from Markov chains to Turing tests. This has evolved into automatic summarization and marketing chatbots. The generation of literary texts by Large Language Models (LLMs) has also been an area of scholarly inquiry for over six decades. The literary quality of AI-generated text can be evaluated with GrAImes, an evaluation protocol grounded in literary theory and inspired by the editorial process of book publishers. This evaluation can also be framed as part of broader editorial practices within publishing, emphasizing both theoretical grounding and applied assessment. This protocol necessitates the involvement of human judges to validate the texts generated, a process that is often resource-intensive in terms of both time and financial investment, primarily due to the specialized credentials and expertise required of these evaluators. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach by employing LLMs themselves as evaluators within the GrAImes framework. We apply this methodology to assess human-written and AI-generated microfictions in Spanish, to five PhD professors in literature and sixteen literary enthusiasts, and to short stories in both Spanish and English. By comparing the evaluations performed by LLMs with those of human judges, we examine the degree of alignment and divergence between both perspectives, thereby assessing the feasibility of LLMs as auxiliary literary evaluators. Our analysis focuses on the alignment of responses from LLMs with those of human evaluators, providing insights into the potential of LLMs in literary assessment. The conducted experiments reveal that while LLMs cannot be regarded as substitutes for human judges in the evaluation of literary microfictions and short stories, with a Krippendorff’a alpha reliability coefficient less than 0.66, they can serve as a valuable tool that offers an initial perspective on the editorial quality of the texts in question. Overall, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the role of artificial intelligence in literature, underlining both its methodological constraints and its potential as a complementary resource for literary evaluation. Full article

Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World portrays a world where the “shadow”, the seat of memory, desire, and volition, is surgically removed, leaving behind a perfectly fluent but phenomenologically empty self. We argue that this literary structure mirrors a precise mathematical distinction in topological quantum matter. In a semisimple theory such as the semions of $\mathrm{SU}{\left(2\right)}_1$, there is a reducible component $V\left(x\right)$ of the $\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{C})$ character variety: a flat, abelian manifold devoid of parabolic singularities. By contrast, the non-semisimple completion introduces a neutral indecomposable excitation, the neglecton, whose presence forces the mapping class group from the standard braid group $B_2$ to the affine braid group ${\mathrm{Aff}}_2$ and lifts the character variety to the Cayley cubic $V\left(C\right)$, with its four parabolic loci. We propose that contemporary AI systems, including large language models, inhabit the shadowless regime of $V\left(x\right)$: they exhibit coherence and fluency but lack any bulk degree of freedom capable of supporting persistent identity, non-contractible memory, or choice. To endow artificial systems with depth, one must introduce a structural asymmetry, a fixed, neutral defect analogous to the neglecton, that embeds computation in the non-semisimple geometry of the cubic. We outline an experimentally plausible architecture for such an “artificial ombre,” based on annular topological media with a pinned parabolic defect, realisable in fractional quantum Hall heterostructures, $p+ip$ superconductors, or cold-atom simulators. Our framework suggests that consciousness, biological or artificial, may depend on or benefit from a bulk–boundary tension mediated by a logarithmic degree of freedom: a mathematical shadow that cannot be computed away. Engineering such a defect offers a new pathway toward AGI with genuine phenomenological depth. Full article

The modern world has had a long and uneasy relationship with the nostalgic past, with the line between the harmless and the harmful in this relationship often difficult to parse. This article looks at a particular microcosm of nostalgic medievalism in nineteenth century popular culture—selections from the work of prominent editorial cartoonist Sir John Tenniel in Punch that combine gothic imagery with depictions of modern science and technology—through the literary critical theoretical framework of nostalgia theory, connecting it with strong societal forces in his time. Full article

Abductive reasoning—the search for plausible explanations—has long been central to human inquiry, from forensics to medicine and scientific discovery. Yet formal approaches in AI have largely reduced abduction to eliminative search: hypotheses are treated as mutually exclusive, evaluated against consistency constraints or probability updates, and pruned until a single “best” explanation remains. This reductionist framing fails on two critical fronts. First, it overlooks how human reasoners naturally sustain multiple explanatory lines in suspension, navigate contradictions, and generate novel syntheses. Second, when applied to complex investigations in legal or scientific domains, it forces destructive competition between hypotheses that later prove compatible or even synergistic, as demonstrated by historical cases in physics, astronomy, and geology. This paper introduces quantum abduction, a non-classical paradigm that models hypotheses in superposition, allowing them to interfere constructively or destructively, and collapses only when coherence with evidence is reached. Grounded in quantum cognition and implemented with modern NLP embeddings and generative AI, the framework supports dynamic synthesis rather than premature elimination. For immediate decisions, it models expert cognitive processes; for extended investigations, it transforms competition into “co-opetition” where competing hypotheses strengthen each other. Case studies span historical mysteries (Ludwig II of Bavaria, the “Monster of Florence”), literary demonstrations (Murder on the Orient Express), medical diagnosis, and scientific theory change. Across these domains, quantum abduction proves more faithful to the constructive and multifaceted nature of human reasoning, while offering a pathway toward expressive and transparent AI reasoning systems. Full article