Disease narrative is an important motif in literary creation. Among modern and contemporary literary writers, Xiao Hong's disease narrative has unique characteristics. This paper focuses on Tales of Hulan River and studies the content setting, artistic techniques, narrative functions and themes of the disease narrative in the novel. The disease narrative in Tales of Hulan River presents two forms of diseases and three types of characters. The alternating use of the children's perspective and the adult perspective, the calm language style and the ironic rhetoric strengthen the critical power of the disease narrative. The disease narrative in Tales of Hulan River runs through the text, creating an atmosphere of disease in the novel, forming a contrast with the utopian image of the back garden and the warm family memories, highlighting the fragility of individual lives and the pathological structure of society. Through the disease narrative, Xiao Hong exposes the national inferiority complex of the people in Hulan River, such as their ignorance, superstition, numbness and indifference. At the same time, with a compassionate brushstroke, she pays attention to the survival predicament of the vulnerable groups, achieving the interweaving of the dual themes of national character criticism and individual life care.

Levinas's claim that ethics precedes ontology fundamentally depends upon a radical reconfiguration of temporality. While classical phenomenology, particularly in Husserl and Heidegger, understands temporality as the condition for consciousness or the disclosure of Being, such conceptions remain structurally centered upon subjectivity and therefore fail to account for the originary status of ethical responsibility. Against this tradition, Levinas relocates the origin of time within the encounter with the Other, transforming temporality from a neutral horizon of experience into the very condition of ethical obligation. The notions of the face, the immemorial past, and diachrony reveal a temporal structure in which responsibility precedes freedom, intentionality, and self-consciousness. Rather than unfolding as a continuous succession of past, present, and future, ethical temporality emerges through interruption, asymmetry, and irreducible alterity. Such a reconstruction not only redefines subjectivity as fundamentally responsive to the Other but also provides the temporal foundation for Levinas's conception of ethics as first philosophy. Ethical temporality, therefore, constitutes not a secondary theme within Levinas's thought but the structural principle through which the transition from ontology to ethics becomes philosophically intelligible, while simultaneously opening a new phenomenological perspective on the relationship between time, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility.

Against the backdrop of China's transition from large-scale urban redevelopment to stock-based, quality-oriented renewal, modern and contemporary historic buildings have emerged as core carriers of urban identity and key assets for high-quality urban development. Focusing on adaptive reuse practices, this paper identifies two dominant renewal modes: authenticity-led conservation and function-oriented adaptation. Through comparative analysis of cases including university heritage buildings, Beihai Old Street, and Dubai's Al Shindagha Museum, the study evaluates both the cultural and economic values of reuse, as well as practical dilemmas such as architectural fabric damage, over-commercialization, and community fragmentation. The findings reveal that the two modes are applicable to distinct contexts, each with inherent practical limitations. Long-term revitalization requires appropriate technical improvements and collaborative management among multiple stakeholders to balance heritage conservation and urban development. Theoretically, this study enriches the systematic evaluation framework for the pros and cons of modern and contemporary historic building reuse. Practically, it provides decision-making references and implementation guidance for heritage activation and sustainable historic district revitalization in urban stock renewal.

Stendhal's The Red and the Black is a representative work of 19th-century French realist literature. In its cross-media adaptation into a French rock musical of the same name, plots involving the church and aristocratic politics are substantially cut, and the love narrative is elevated to the structural backbone. Existing studies mostly focus on the appreciation of stage style, lacking systematic analysis from the perspectives of narratology and adaptation theory. Taking Genette's narrative theory and Linda Hutcheon's theory of cross-media adaptation as the theoretical framework, this paper compares the original novel with the musical text to examine the shift of narrative focus and the reconstruction of narrative authority in the adaptation. The study finds that although the musical does not change the ambition-driven nature of Julien, it enables the love narrative to acquire an expression system independent of the main political storyline by reducing political narratives, splitting independent female perspectives, and adding the trans-level narrator Geronimo. Meanwhile, Julien's class-based personality and rebellious traits are transferred into emotional scenarios, achieving a balance between the simplification of surface narrative and the inheritance of deep spiritual connotation. This adaptation provides a referable practical paradigm for the contemporary stage transformation of classic literature.