We were extremely saddened by the news that John Neubauer passed away on October 5, 2015, the time when we were in the middle of the 5th international Symposium on ethical literary criticism held in Seoul and Busan, Korea. For years, John has been a major figure for our constant communications and heated discussions on various issues of common concern. It is quite unacceptable that he is no longer there.

National conception and justification of literature constitutes the foundation of literature’s national institutionalization in nineteenth-century Europe. Through examining Wellek’s insightful arguments on literature and literary history, this article specifically focuses on European literary histories, in which the globalization of English has given a multicultural project a monolingual bias. In fact, writing regional literary histories has a twofold significance for globalizing the field: they provide regional models that can be applied to other regions, and they represent concrete steps towards a global conception of literary history. To me, works of literature and other works of art are neither fixed nor eternal but constantly change. Hence, I propose that a broadened notion of adaptation could become the very heart of a global concept of literary history. Such a broadened conception would recognize not only that literary works are constantly reshaped by new historical, cultural, and social contexts but also that new philological shapes emerge via reedition or even digitalization of texts, adaptations via translations, staging, musical setting, and visual illustrations.

Some theorists claim that today’s global world antiquates national literatures in the same way as did Goethe and Marx with their idea of Weltliteratur more than a century and a half ago. I contest this claim, showing, first, that Marx was ambivalent with regard to the formation of the world market, anticipating its compartmentalizing consequences. Second, I argue that Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, far from being opposed to national literature, which in Germany at the time was still in the process of self-finding, has to be regarded as an attempt to consolidate national literature against the homogenizing pressure of a world rapidly and superficially uniting. Goethe was resolutely against the brothers Schlegel’s national exclusionism, but he was equally firmly against the gaudy, overall dilettantism, and bad taste of the culture emerging from the commercial and communicational uniting of the world. His Weltliteratur was conceived as an ongoing dialogue between distinguished national literatures from which German literature, which at the time was the weakest among them, was expected to benefit the most. It aimed at a consolidation of his disturbed personal and the shaky German self at the time and gradually turned into an imperial gesture.

Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, inspired by Paul Klee’s artwork Angelus Novus, has become a modern icon that continues to receive international acclaim in diverse contexts and situations. Its reception raises important questions about the conditions and implications of carrying Benjamin’s allegory — and, by extension, modernist icons more broadly — across cultural, temporal, and political borders. Under what circumstances can this most radical of canonized mnemonic images of the past century be preserved from conventionalization, so that it continues to testify to the violence and destruction perpetrated throughout human history until today? This issue is explored through a juxtaposition of several contrasting interpretations of Benjamin’s famous allegory.

Lu Xun wrote 25 short stories collected in his Call to Arms and Wandering respectively. The majority of his stories use fully or partially internal focalization. There are only two pieces written in 1925, A Public Example and The Lamp That Was Kept Alight, that use external focalization. In his writing, he appears to draw on some strong points in Western fiction and also to inherit some achievements from traditional Chinese fiction. Although these two pieces are small in number, their significance is considerable. These outstanding examples show a unique artistic style and they have an important influence on the creation of later Chinese fiction.

On the eve of our Estonian Association of Comparative Literature 11th international conference in Tartu, Estonia, I received an e-mail letter from my long-time good colleague and friend John Neubauer, from Amsterdam. His short lines from October 26, 2015, with the title “Farewell”, put me in consternation. With heavy heart, John said, he had to announce his retirement from the academic advisory committee of our journal Interlitteraria, because his death was imminent.

With your soft voice still resonating in me from our last conversation, after a night rereading our mails exchanged over nearly twenty years and recalling wonderful moments shared as colleagues, fellow members of various commissions and committees, coeditors of the journal arcadia, and above all as friends, I am overwhelmed by sadness but also by the awareness of the privilege to have known you. We met almost twenty years ago at a scholarly meeting in Leiden and I walked over to you to express my admiration of your book The Fin-de-siècle Culture of Adolescenceon on which I had based one of the first courses I taught as a professor of German literature—a course that I am teaching, with variations, still today. One of our jours fixes and a highlight of my life as a teacher was your annual visit to Antwerp when you gave a guest lecture for this and other courses.

Poetic form has been a focus of contemporary studies of poetry. This is not only because poetic form is largely and deeply connected with literary and cultural tradition, but also because it is widely believed to be part of the meaning generating mechanism of poetry and thus become a necessary step in the pursuit of poetry meaning.

Edgar Allan Poe’s aestheticism, as expressed in his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1848), favors sensation rather than moral sentiment. For Poe, didacticism leads poetry away from its true calling. This is a specifically Western conception of poetic value — “poetry for poetry’s sake” — that makes a striking contrast to Chinese poetics. But there is a point of connection, and that is in the idea of the blank. For Poe, transient sensation in a poem allows for an engagement with temporality and process, as he says in his most famous line from The Raven: “Only this and nothing more.” This force of “nothing” is explored in poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams.

Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter is justly celebrated for his prolific dramatic achievements, yet his poetic output has been neglected. His first love was poetry, which he wrote throughout his life. This paper examines his poetic writing throughout his career, culminating in his late poems that focus on mortality, the loss of his father, the diagnosis of Pinter’s own terminal illness from cancer of the throat, and other subjects. A brief comparison is suggested between Pinter’s poetry and that of contemporaries such as Larkin and W. H. Auden. Cognitive and other approaches are utilized to illuminate Pinter’s diverse and powerful poetry.

The essay analyzes how in Wordsworth a community integrates the loss of the seemingly or actually dead into the community’s natural and social surroundings without reduction of their differences. In the Essays upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth treats the inherent communitarian value of the grave and the epitaph that binds together the living and the dead, which makes up the society’s encircled core. Through the burial practice and epitaphic writing social bonds are created and individuals joined. In The Old Cumberland Beggar, the old beggar is a kind of ghost, neither living nor dead; neither “properly” excluded nor incorporated in the community. He is constantly re-examined and re-interpreted by the villagers: observing the beggar leads them to a greater understanding of the self. Outside the community the beggar becomes a bond of compassion that binds all villagers and forces social cohesion. Martha Ray’s suffering in The Thorn also stitches together the community that is held in the grip of voyeurs and gossips. The narrator and the villagers repeatedly circle back to the enigma of her grief. They transmit and create her tales during which they constantly experience their togetherness in the community.

This article examines W. B. Yeats’s Easter 1916 through an interpretative lens of Yeatsian temporality and discusses how such a lens maps the ways in which Yeats commemorates the Easter Rising by both questioning and affirming it — how to elegize the same people who had up to then been the object of his contempt and how to revise the ways in which he was making sense of contemporary Ireland. To that end, it first looks into how modernist temporality, as a belated reinvention of the archaic and classical order, meets up with Yeatsian belatedness deeply rooted in the Irish literary tradition. It ultimately explores how the two voices, embedded within the poem in a ventriloquist fashion, both contest and complement each other, and how this ventriloquism is simultaneously predicated upon the belatedness of Yeatsian poetics that cuts back and forth between the poet’s personal urge to make sense of the contemporary historical event and the bardic tradition that constantly returns in its engagement with the present, thereby bringing into focus the poet’s self-divisive ambivalence and conflicting impulses.

The Xhosa oral tradition has been persistent in the past two hundred years and is still flourishing. The Xhosa iimbongi compose praise poems at important and exciting occasions. General improvising, memorizing, the refined improvising of the imbongi, and writing form the Xhosa praise poetic traditions. Any Xhosa praise poem is composed through one of these activities. The textural features such as breath, intonation, and gesture produce a division of the poem. Facing the influence of “high culture,” the Xhosa iimbongi still keep their praise poem tradition alive and make the praise poems heard in their homeland.

There are moral principles or rules or standards that are applicable to all people in all ages and areas, regardless of the diversity of their cultures. All literary forms or expressions, such as poetry, must be in accordance with the moral principles in that age and of that country, that is to say, both poets and their works must follow the development of that particular political ideology and social moral principles; if not, they will be driven away from the society. The religious poems, such as Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Prometheus Unbound, etc., illustrate for us some ascetic life, which usually put the protagonists into a dreamy status or virtual reality. The dreams or virtual reality experiences that appear in the ascetic’s meditation are just like the psychoactive drug, which can make the ascetics addict themselves to the factitious pleasures. The decline of morality, particularly in modern society, has made readers turn to religious poems, in which awesome feelings will be aroused. They believe that apart from the man-made law, the divine-made law also can be the most important moral source. They are morally educated through the God-given love and human duty in some religious poems, from which they may find their soul and spirit in a predestined permanent solace and beauty.

In order to promote international academic exchange in the field of literary criticism, the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC) will collaborate with the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature (EACL), University of Tartu, the EACL international journal Interlitteraria, the A&HCI scholarly journal Foreign Literature Studies, and the International Center for Ethical Literary Criticism at Central China Normal University (CCNU, Wuhan, China) in hosting “The 6th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism” in Tartu, Estonia from Oct. 1 to Oct. 7, 2016. Scholars all over the world are warmly welcome.