Volume 18, Issue 4

From a narratological perspective, this essay reinterprets the development of Chinese realist art under Western influence in the second half of the twentieth century and explores the narrative issue of the possible author that is transformed from the integral reader. As a crucial response to Western influence, realist art in China developed from imitating to appropriating Western art and continued from taking inspiration from Western art to participating in the international arena of conceptual art with certain renovations. In this essay, the narratological notion of “possible author” is proposed to discuss the issue of narrative identity. While some scholars declared the death of the reader, this essay introduces a new reader to art historical narrative. This is a tertiary reader that transforms into a possible author who re-narrates the story of art history in the possible space between the secondary narration and tertiary narrativization. In this space, the three layers of the first-hand fabula, secondary narration, and tertiary narrativization work together in defining the possible author’s narrative identity as re-interpretive and critical.

Over its long period of development, Zen Buddhism in ancient China has adopted a unique method of enlightenment for the direct individual understanding of the Buddha-nature in the interaction between Zen masters and their disciples, instead of merely depending on written classics or oral teaching, which constitutes so-called “independence-from-words.” Communication between monks in Zen is a process of multimodal interaction, in which many different semiotic modes are included, for example strikes, roars, gestures, foot-poses, body poses, and image drawings. Meditation and understanding in Zen demand an interpretation of these multimodal cues in the interaction. Therefore, multimodal discourse analysis may serve as a novel perspective for analysing Zen modes of enlightenment, since MDA attaches great importance to various semiotic channels besides language. This paper aims to present how Zen masters flexibly utilized multimodal resources in enlightenment, starting from an introduction to the traditional understanding of multimodality in ancient China and how the interpretation of Zen can benefit from its analysis through the lens of MDA.

Filial piety is a basic value in Chinese culture and has been a prominent theme in China’s televised public service advertisements (PSAs). This study takes a multimodal discourse analysis approach to study such PSAs promoting filial piety. We consider filial values as represented through characters’ emotions and attributes, which are realized by linguistic and visual resources on the one hand and shaped by the broader sociocultural context on the other. An explicit framework based on the attitude schema is developed to systemically describe the realization of social values in multimodal discourse. Analysis shows that filial values are mainly realized through verbal and visual representation of reciprocal love between the parent and the son/daughter, as well as filial behaviors of the latter. Our contextual analysis conceptualizes the filial piety PSAs as a form of discursive governance and finds that PSAs resort to two main persuasive strategies, namely emotionalization and moralization, which are results of media marketization and internationalization. We find that promoting filial piety serves China’s governance by addressing two needs of the authority: the practical need of supporting the elderly and the spiritual need of moral reconstruction and reinforcing cultural identity in contemporary China.

This study examines the political discursive construction of the “Chinese Dream” and its representations in global media by drawing on the methodological combination of the discourse-historical approach, corpus linguistics, and framing analysis. The data for analysis consists of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s official speeches and news coverage on the Chinese Dream by the China Daily , the South China Morning Post , and The New York Times for around six years (2012–2018). The analysis identified that the Chinese Dream discourse largely aims to serve toward Chinese nationalism, the reinforcement of the ruling Party’s legitimacy, and the Chinese leadership’s authority. Meanwhile, it was also found that the three media adopted different dominant frames to reshape the Chinese Dream, namely China Daily ’s Chinese national-centric frame, South China Morning Post ’s multiculturalist-oriented frame, and The New York Times ’ US-centric “othering” frame. These news frames were tactically designed to serve their sociopolitical and ideological interests. Through corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the article aims to 1) reveal the discursive strategies and patterns of the Chinese Dream; 2) shed light on the discursive representations of the Chinese Dream in specific global media; and 3) bridge the gap between the original political discourse and its discursive reproduction in media representation.

This article presents an analysis of the most recent statue of Bruce Lee displayed in the entrance to the Bruce Lee exhibition at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. The analysis primarily utilizes O’Toole’s social semiotic framework as outlined in The language of displayed art (1994, 2011) in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics for analyzing the multimodality of sculpture, and provides insights into how the statue represents the kung fu legend Bruce Lee, who created the martial arts discipline of Jeet June Do. The article begins by first analyzing its sculptural features and then interprets these features against the sociocultural context of the city. The paper argues that the cultural background for the representation of Lee in the statue with its unique representational, modal, and compositional features testifies that meanings attributed to visual information in sculpture are to a large degree socially structured and culturally bound. It shows that the location of the statue and its features such as its gaze and torso can be better understood with reference to the political and cultural significance of Lee’s legacies, thereby enhancing our understanding of the social semiotic nature of statues as a means of commemoration- and a significant part of our cultural heritage.

The enchantment and re-enchantment of formal rationalized systems has been an important study in sociology and the social sciences since its first discussion by Max Weber. However, it has received relatively little attention in animal studies, ecology, or environmental studies. This article attempts to fill this gap in the research by focusing on a multiscale perspective that considers the relationship between nonhuman animal umwelt and human perception within the confines of enchantment, re-enchantment, and McDonaldized systems. This is done through a theoretical synthesis of George Ritzer’s work on rationalization, spectacles, extravaganzas, and simulations with Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of umwelt, and zoosemiotic and ecosemiotic perspectives on multispecies environments. It is concluded that enchantment and re-enchantment make use of nonhuman animals and environments to enchant formal rationalized systems, which consequently presents and uses nonhuman animals in situations injurious to their umwelt, while also making use of affect, intersubjectivity, and simulations to influence human perspectives.