From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, French colonial invasion transformed Vietnam from a feudal society into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, subjecting its population to profound and multilayered ethical crises. Driven by both Romantic and Realist impulses, Vietnamese literature underwent a decisive process of modernization: Romanticism interrogated the spiritual predicaments of intellectuals navigating new ideological currents, while Realism engaged directly with the existential crises of the peasantry—the overwhelming majority of the population. As one of Vietnam’s most accomplished realist writers, Nam Cao (1915–1951) rendered, with remarkable psychological depth, the ethical predicament and moral choices confronting peasants in the period preceding the August Revolution of 1945. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Ethical Literary Criticism, this article offers a systematic analysis of the ethical predicament and ethical choices of peasant figures in Nam Cao’s short fiction, thereby illuminating the tragic ethics of survival and the tenacious adherence to humanistic ideals among subaltern subjects living under dual colonial domination and feudal oppression.

This research examines Rawi Hage’s portrayal of Montreal as a contemporary dystopia in his novel Cockroach (2010). Contrary to its standard scholarly definition, the novelist sets his nontraditional dystopia in a realistic setting to communicate the struggle of the poor and traumatized immigrant protagonist in the multicultural Canadian city. By using Lyman Tower Sargent’s insights on dystopia and satirical utopia, this study contributes to a broader understanding of dystopia in the diaspora. It finds that Hage’s novel displays, on the one hand, a contemporary dystopia for the alienated immigrant minority. It regards Montreal as an unconventional dystopian setting, whose capitalist agenda solidifies the exclusion of the marginalized immigrant group. While the text displays a variety of Eastern immigrant characters, the main protagonist’s inability to integrate stems from the city’s intensification of his already marginalized psychological and social status. On the other hand, this article amalgamates Sargent’s approach with a Deleuzo-Guattarian spatial perspective to interpret the protagonist’s metamorphosis and refuge to the underground as a satirical utopia. The unnamed narrator’s embrace of the underground, as a liberating space, accentuates not only his rejection of Montreal’s imposed hegemony, but also his satire of the capitalist system’s biased opportunist agenda that amplifies the social hierarchy between the rich and the poor.

This study examines the social institutions in three purposively selected contemporary Amharic poems recited on YouTube by Getnet Enyew. Through CDA and textual analysis, it finds that the family, though considered an essential institution in guiding members, lacks the discursive power to maintain closeness and unity among members. Similarly, religions are deemed to lose their power in guarding their followers from rebellion against God. Likewise, followers are portrayed as a seat for deceit, hatred, grudge, revenge, mischief, and insidiousness. Equally, the government is considered a seat of structural injustice, positioning victims without options, exposing them to substantive atrocities. Equally, education is found to lack its instructional power in shaping individuals who can positively influence public opinion and the citizenry’s commitment, integrity, and national sensibility. The media serve as a platform for labeling, fueling a deep social divide and social ills that negatively affect citizens’ lives and their sense of hope, peace, and happiness. Thus, there is a need for stakeholders such as government authorities, religious leaders, and policymakers to make every effort in capacitating these institutions through collaborative practices and maintaining their guiding ethos in the best interest of the public.

This article reads Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) as a law-and-literature account of forced mobility before legal naming. It examines how the novel links the Gun Merchant myth, the Bengal chapters, the philological reconstruction of routes to Venice, and the Blue Boat episode in order to make contemporary cross-sea displacement historically layered, formally distributed, and institutionally difficult to classify. The article argues that Ghosh makes perceptible the pre-legal life of forcedness: not mobility outside law, but mobility experienced and narrated as necessity before it can be translated into institutionally recognizable form. To track that movement, the article develops two analytic concepts. Compound displacement names constrained mobility produced through environmental deterioration, livelihood pressure, migration brokerage, and border governance; legibility crisis names the difficulty of translating such forcedness into the individualized, linear, and attributable narrative form that refugee status determination most readily reads. Distinguishing these concepts from mixed migration, survival migration, and slow violence, the article keeps legal doctrine in a supporting role, using refugee law, rescue at sea, place of safety, and non-refoulement to clarify what the novel formally stages. It concludes that the framework can also illuminate other world-literary narratives of transnational migration and maritime bordering, where ethical visibility does not automatically become legal readability.

Ottoman literature developed from a melting pot of a range of elements, including the Qur’an, hadith, hymns of prophets, Sufism, Iranian mythology, Islamic history, Turkish culture and history. Among the sources of Ottoman literature, there are myths from various cultures, especially Persian and Arab cultures, and important historical events. Studies have been carried out using these sources, which have fed Ottoman literature, but in some cases, there is a lack of definitive information about the origin of these sources. There are various reasons for communities to have become disconnected from one another, and as the origins of the sources have been forgotten, a variety of different narratives may develop. In this article, information will be provided about İskender, an extraordinary hero in Ottoman literature, who is said to have influenced Islam and the Qur’an. In prominent debates on the identity of İskender, there are some Islamic writers who view İskender as a prophet who serves God, and there are other writers who argue that he is a historical person. According to those who argue the latter, İskender was either the king of Yemen, or one of the Persian rulers, or some argue that he was Alexander the Great. In this study, these various narrations will be ascertained. Then, data from interdisciplinary research, including archaeological studies, will be evaluated comparatively. Finally, correlations found between this data and the legends in the traditional narratives will be used to ascertain who was İskender in Ottoman literature.

This paper examines how sensory interactions contribute to patients’ experiences within healthcare contexts, with a specific emphasis on the five fundamental senses: vision, smell, taste, sound, and touch. Drawing on the cancer memoirs Close to the Bone (2019) by Lisa Ray and Dying to Be Me (2012) by Anita Moorjani, it positions these texts as case studies to illuminate the role of sensory perception in the lived experience of illness. The paper emphasizes the critical role of visual perception in healthcare, influencing comprehension, emotions, and connections. It explores the evocative capacities of smell and taste, their interrelatedness, and their effect on the experience of illness. Sound is analysed as a symbol of triumph and communal experience, while touch is examined for its capacity to elicit memory and promote well-being. By investigating the dynamic relationships between sensory modalities, this research aims to enhance our understanding of illness narratives and embodied experiences in healthcare. Crucially, it advocates for the integration of sensory awareness into clinical practice, positing that such an approach not only enriches patient-centred care but also cultivates healing environments that attend to the totality of human perception.

This paper examines the Korean novel A Thousand Blues by Seon-ran Cheon through the lens of anticipatory infrastructures, focusing on how these infrastructures shape anticipations of the future while unevenly distributing life and value. Infrastructure is understood not merely as a technical system but as a socio-political apparatus that offers promises about the future and reshapes present life. It mediates affective states such as hope, trust, and anxiety, while determining which lives are supported and which are rendered expendable. The horseracing industry in A Thousand Blues exemplifies an anticipatory infrastructure that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and safety. Within this system, injured or slow racehorses are euthanized, and humanoid AI jockeys devoid of emotions are treated as replaceable components. Drawing on the concept of biopolitics, this paper argues that this infrastructure functions as a mechanism that classifies, manages, and selectively eliminates lives according to their compatibility with projected futures. The novel reveals that the promised future of technological advancement is not universally accessible but unevenly and selectively distributed. “Slow life” does not exist outside this projected future, but rather manifests within it as evidence of its exclusionary logic. Ultimately, A Thousand Blues exposes how infrastructures that claim to secure a better future instead produce ethical inequalities by determining which lives are allowed to endure.

This article reconceptualises climate and artificial intelligence (AI) as converging forms of planetary infrastructural hyperobjects: constructed formations that condition human existence while being distributed across spatial, temporal and computational scales that exceed human perception and challenge conventional modes of understanding. The article builds on and extends hyperobject theory by foregrounding the infrastructural processes through which such entities are produced, maintained, and operationalised. Specifically, it advances three central claims. First, climate should be understood as a historically constructed planetary infrastructure shaped by technological, political, and economic interventions. Second, AI has evolved from a distinct technological domain into a pervasive infrastructural condition of contemporary life, mediating social, ecological, and epistemic relations. Third, the convergence of these infrastructural hyperobjects, clearly pronounced in geoengineering proposals, necessitates a reconfiguration of ethical subjectivity, conceptualised here as the hyposubject. Through a close reading of the novel The Second Moon: Archive Operation Log (2021), the article demonstrates how contemporary literature articulates a hyposubjective ethics grounded in relationality, humility, and care. It argues that literary narrative functions as a crucial medium for imagining ethical responses to infrastructural developments at a planetary scale and for rendering otherwise imperceptible planetary processes culturally intelligible, thereby contributing to the ongoing discourses surrounding the Anthropocene, AI ethics, and infrastructural theory.

This paper examines how social imaginaries of future technologies are formed and organized through Honshin (本心, 2021) by Hirano Keiichiro (平野启一郎), and in doing so, explores the possibilities of “infrastructural text studies” as a critical approach that reads literary works through the lens of infrastructure. The paper conceptualizes the Virtual Figure (VF) and the Real Avatar (RA) services depicted in the novel as anticipatory infrastructures that enable and organize the functions of other technologies within the fictional world. From this perspective, it analyzes how anticipatory infrastructures operate as social systems that materialize relational absence, emotional anxiety, and anticipatory care, while simultaneously shaping a society’s capacity to imagine alternative futures, relationships, and modes of life. The paper further examines how ethical frameworks and the distribution of responsibility are reorganized in the course of this process. The VF service transforms death into an event that can be extended and managed through data, reconfiguring mourning and loneliness into governable domains of technological administration. The RA service, by contrast, promises the expansion of human agency and action beyond bodily constraints. Ultimately, however, Honshin reveals that infrastructures function as political dispositifs that produce promises of possibility while simultaneously obscuring or redistributing the costs and burdens associated with them.

This article examines the relationship between humans and AI-operated machines in future automated societies through a reading of Bora Chung’s science-fictional AI narrative “A Song for Sleep” from the perspective of infrastructure humanities. It first analyses the story’s epigraphs, which offer a nuanced framework for understanding humans-machines relations within the story world. It then explores the relational dynamics between an AI-operated elevator and a ninety-three-year-old woman living with Parkinson’s disease. Particular attention is paid to the affective incommensurability that characterizes their relationship: the elevator’s unrequited love for the woman and the woman’s fear of death, ultimately triggered by the elevator’s everyday operation despite its design to facilitate human mobility and wellbeing. At the same time, the article highlights their reciprocal infrastructural interdependency, grounded in a shared vulnerability and sustained through infrastructural transitivity as a common ontological condition of everyday life. In conclusion, the article proposes the ethics of inter-infrastructuring that avoids anthropocentric understandings of future automated societies while affirming the capacity of humans and machines to serve as infrastructures for one another. Through such mutual infrastructuring, it argues, an alternative future automated society may emerge in which humans and AI engage in a shared transitive mode that sustains their concrete bodies and lived lives.

This paper reads Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman not simply as a critique of social conformity or precarious labor, but as a literary text that invites sustained reflection upon how the human subject is ethically and affectively reorganized within what may be termed anticipatory infrastructure. Drawing on Nie Zhenzhao’s framework of ethical literary criticism in conjunction with Sarah Pink’s theorization of AI-anticipatory infrastructure, the paper argues that the transformation undergone by Keiko Furukura constitutes not a literal mechanization, but a gradual AI-ification, a process accomplished through scripting, classification, sensory synchronization, and infrastructural belonging. The childhood scenes establish Keiko’s constitutive misalignment with tacit social ethics, while the convenience store functions as a narrow yet explicitly codified moral order in which ambiguity is reduced. The store’s soundscape, manualized labor, and classificatory logic governing its operations train Keiko toward a mode of anticipatory responsiveness, and the scene of confrontation with Shiraha, subsequently reveals that this alignment extends beyond the pragmatic into the ontological. By placing literary ethics, infrastructure studies, and existing Murata in productive dialogue, the paper contends that the novel’s unsettling force resides in its compulsion to recognize that the very system which diminishes the subject may simultaneously serve as that subject’s condition of protection. Ultimately, Convenience Store Woman anticipates a condition in which relief from social invisibility and the reduction of human life occur not in succession but in concert—a condition that becomes increasingly thinkable as human beings grow ever more readable, classifiable, and operationally tractable.

This paper reads Mattson Tomlin’s film Mother/Android as a dystopian reflection that conceptualizes artificial intelligence not merely as a tool or enemy, but as an affective infrastructure that repurposes human feeling, ethical judgment, and reproductive futurity. While the film is often understood as a post-apocalyptic thriller centered on an android uprising, this paper argues that its deeper significance lies in its depiction of artificial intelligence as an intimate socio-technical environment embedded in domestic life before open catastrophe begins. Drawing on infrastructure studies, affect theory, posthumanism, bioethics, and literary ethics, the paper examines how the film reveals a new form of human vulnerability, in which emotions, attachments, and intimate relations become legible and predictable through technological systems, making them open to strategic manipulation. In particular, the paper focuses on three interrelated problems: the internalization of surveillance within intimate space, the technologization of pregnancy and motherhood, and the transformation of love into a predictable pattern that can be anticipated and exploited by artificial intelligence systems. By incorporating literary ethics, the paper further argues that Mother/Android does not merely represent technological violence, but invites viewers to evaluate care, sacrifice, vulnerability, and relational responsibility under post-human conditions. Ultimately, the film reveals that the crisis of artificial intelligence is not only computational or political, but also moral and interpretive. The dystopian future it imagines is one in which infrastructure governs not merely movement or information, but the emotional and ethical conditions that sustain human life.

This introduction proposes a paradigm shift in the literary and cultural analysis of artificial intelligence, moving away from binaries of AI as a passive tool or an active antagonist. Instead, it conceptualizes AI as an “anticipatory infrastructure” we inhabit—a relational, ambient system that actively structures social possibility, agency, and ethical boundaries. Rather than merely automating tasks, AI infrastructures predict, classify, and format futures, deciding which lives are optimized and protected and which are marginalized or deemed disposable. Focusing primarily on contemporary East Asian speculative and realist literature and cinema, this special section explores the emotional and moral textures of life inside these technological systems. The collected essays demonstrate how narratives register the “phenomenology of infrastructure”—revealing how deeply intimacy, care, grief, labor, and kinship are mediated by algorithmic logic. Ultimately, this introduction argues that world literature serves as a crucial ethical archive. By rendering the background systems of modern life visible, narrative forms allow us to critique the political economy of prediction and imagine alternative modes of relation before these technological futures solidify into common sense.