ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.08.020
Trauma Writing and Ethical Resonance in Disaster Literature from the Life Community Perspective: A Case Study of The Emissary and Distant Signals
Yingjie Wang, Rentang Li, Dandan Wang*, Yixi Zhai
School of Foreign Languages, Tangshan Normal University, Tangshan 063000, Hebei, China.
*Corresponding author: Dandan Wang
This research was supported by the Youth Fund Project of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Program of Higher Education Institutions in Hebei Province: “A Corpus-Based Study on the Discursive Construction of Hebei’s Image in Western New Media Reports” (Grant No. QN2025882).
Published: August 31, 2026
Abstract
Taking The Emissary, a landmark work of Japanese post-3.11 compound disaster literature, and Distant Signals, a representative Chinese novel themed on the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, as comparative cases, this paper adopts the parallel research paradigm of comparative literature, integrating close textual analysis with cross‑cultural interpretation to examine their trauma representation mechanisms and ethical connotations. While the two texts present distinctly divergent narrative modes shaped by their respective historical and cultural contexts—one constructs trauma through restrained ellipsis rooted in the Japanese mono no aware aesthetic tradition, the other portrays disaster reality through straightfor-ward realist depiction—they ultimately converge on a shared ethical framework of “reverence for life, mutual aid and coexistence, and trauma transcendence”. This paper further explores feasible approaches to advancing cross-cultural literary dialogue and ethical empathy in East Asian disaster literature, and offers solid empirical support for cross-regional and cross-disaster comparative literary studies.
Keyword
Trauma writing; literary ethics; East Asian literary dialogue; comparative literature; area and country studies
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
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How to cite this paper
Trauma Writing and Ethical Resonance in Disaster Literature from the Life Community Perspective: A Case Study of The Emissary and Distant Signals
How to cite this paper: Yingjie Wang, Rentang Li, Dandan Wang, Yixi Zhai. (2026) Trauma Writing and Ethical Resonance in Disaster Literature from the Life Community Perspective: A Case Study of The Emissary and Distant Signals. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(8), 986-990.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.08.020