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.

With the development of computer vision and real-time interaction technologies, interactive music creation based on body gesture recognition has gradually become an important direction in contemporary electronic music practice. As an open-source, lightweight computer vision framework, MediaPipe offers new technical pathways and practical possibilities for interactive music creation due to its features such as rich solution and parameter offerings, high hardware compatibility, flexibility, and extensive support from the community. This study focuses on the application of MediaPipe technology in interactive music creation. It first outlines the core technical characteristics of MediaPipe and, in comparison with currently popular gesture recognition technologies, analyzes its applicable scenarios and features in creative practice. On this basis, three interactive music works based on MediaPipe are selected as case studies. These works are analyzed from the perspectives of sound material, interaction design, and technical implementation, exploring the functional roles and expressive modes of body gesture recognition in different creative contexts. Through the analysis of these works, the study summarizes several creative characteristics of MediaPipe-based interactive music, including the body as a medium for sound generation and control, the body as a tool for visual expression, and the body as a structural and narrative element within the composition. The findings suggest that MediaPipe not only lowers the technical threshold of interactive music creation, but also encourages a transformation of the body from a functional control interface into an aesthetic and structural component of musical works. By combining technical analysis with creative practice, this study aims to provide a practical reference for computer vision–based interactive music creation and to offer methodological insights for future artistic research and development in this field.

This study examines syntactic restructuring in the Chinese and Hungarian translations of Rabindranath Tagore's Stray Birds and explores its effects on poetic expression. A qualitative comparative analysis is conducted on selected poems in which the syntactic organization of the English source text is substantially reorganized in one or both target texts. The analysis focuses on changes in clause structure, coordination, predicative organization, and the expression of logical relations. The findings show that the Chinese and Hungarian translations adopt different syntactic solutions in reconstructing the English source. These changes affect not only grammatical organization but also rhythmic segmentation, the configuration of poetic images, the dynamic or static presentation of metaphor, and rhetorical emphasis. The comparison further suggests that syntactic restructuring results from an interaction between cross-linguistic structural differences and translators' choices within the target languages. The study therefore argues that syntax in poetry translation functions not merely as a grammatical means of conveying propositional meaning, but also as an important formal resource for reconstructing poetic effects.

In the Chinese context, refined egoism is distinct from reasonable self-interest in the conventional sense. Rather, it constitutes a value orientation that prioritizes individual interests over other values and strategically pursues self-interested goals by leveraging knowledge, rules, social connections, and moral discourse. Among college students, refined egoism is primarily manifested in self-interested motivations, increasingly sophisticated calculations of personal gain, strategic behavioral choices, and the rationalization of self-serving pursuits. Although this tendency may offer certain advantages in adapting to real-world circumstances, such adaptive benefits do not alter its underlying value bias. Refined egoism may exert multifaceted effects on college students' personal values, interpersonal relationships, sense of collective identity, and civic-mindedness. Higher education institutions should clarify the boundary between reasonable self-interest and refined egoism and guide students, through curriculum instruction, evaluation mechanisms, public engagement, and everyday interactions, to properly balance individual development with public responsibility, thereby promoting the integration of personal growth and public values.

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder marked by substantial individual variability. Quantitative measures of connected speech may clarify how linguistic performance relates to aphasia severity. Semi-spontaneous speech samples from 22 English-speaking adults with aphasia in the APROCSA subcorpus of AphasiaBank were analyzed. Eight measures represented three domains: Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), clause density, and embedded clause ratio for syntax; type–token ratio, verb diversity, and content-word ratio for lexis; and verb marking and noun marking for morphology. Pearson correlations examined associations with Quick Aphasia Battery Overall scores. Three domain-specific regression models and one comprehensive model containing all eight measures were compared using adjusted R², AIC, and BIC.MLU (r = 0.734), clause density (r = 0.592), embedded clause ratio (r = 0.488), and verb marking (r = 0.753) were significantly positively associated with QAB Overall scores, with higher scores indicating milder aphasia. The lexical measures and noun marking were not significantly associated with QAB Overall. Among the domain-specific models, the morphological model showed the greatest explanatory power (adjusted R² = 0.523), followed by the syntactic model (adjusted R² = 0.494); the lexical model was nonsignificant. The comprehensive model provided the strongest explanatory power and best fit (adjusted R² = 0.805; AIC = 64.82; BIC = 75.73). Syntactic and morphological measures, particularly MLU and verb marking, were more sensitive to variation in aphasia severity than the lexical measures examined. Combining measures across domains provided complementary information, supporting a multidimensional approach to connected-speech assessment in aphasia.

Fundamental differences exist between the tense-aspect systems of English and Chinese: English primarily expresses temporal meanings through grammatical tense and verbal inflections, whereas Chinese lacks a grammaticalized tense system and relies mainly on aspect markers such as le, zhe, and guo, together with lexical and contextual cues. These differences make L1 transfer a key factor in Chinese learners' acquisition of English tense and aspect. Based on relevant empirical studies, this review examines how Chinese aspect markers influence the acquisition of English tense-aspect forms from the perspectives of language transfer and conceptual transfer. It focuses on the transfer effect of le, guo, and zhe on the past, perfect, and progressive forms. Existing research shows that L1 transfer involves both positive and negative effects, with negative transfer being more systematic, leading to errors such as tense confusion, missing subject–verb agreement, and misuse of non-finite verbs. This review further highlights the growing prominence of conceptual transfer perspectives and summarizes emerging research approaches, including neurolinguistic methods, longitudinal studies, and pedagogical interventions. The findings provide implications for language transfer theory and English tense-aspect teaching for Chinese-speaking learners.

As an important method of spiritual practice, Buddhist mindfulness of death (maraṇasati) is significant not merely as a reflection upon the concept of death, but in that it influences the agent's practice through the awareness of death and promotes the cultivation of character. Adopting the perspective of practical philosophy and focusing on the question of how death enters the agent's practice and influences the formation of virtue, this paper examines the different paths taken by Aristotle's theory of tragedy and the Buddhist method of mindfulness of death. Through an analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Poetics, and the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness-of-death practice, it is concluded that death itself does not directly generate virtue; its practical significance lies not in the fact of being the end of life, but in that it reveals the finitude of the agent's existence. Aristotelian tragedy provokes practical reflection by having one witness the fate of others, whereas Buddhist mindfulness of death advances the reorientation of practice through contemplation of one's own impermanence; though their paths differ, both jointly reveal the possible mechanism by which the awareness of death enters the agent's practice. This paper summarizes this mechanism as "finite practice", and on this basis explains how death can be transformed from a mere fact of existence into a crucial juncture for the agent's practice and the formation of virtue.