Against the backdrop of the The 14th Convention of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, this paper explores the theoretical frontiers and paradigm shifts in ethical literary criticism in the age of artificial intelligence. As AI profoundly intervenes in literary creation, reading, and critical practices, the traditional critical theory centered on “brain text” is undergoing a transformation. Its object of study has expanded from the externalized products of the human mind to algorithm-generated “digital text,” thereby advancing the critical field from “natural mind” to “artificial mind.” This paradigm shift raises three core ethical considerations: first, the dissolution of creative subjectivity and the ambiguity of responsibility attribution; second, the ethical dimensions of human-machine relationships and their prospective exploration in literature; third, the erosion of traditional ethical boundaries and the reconfiguration of the critical domain. Confronted with the complex ethical landscape of the AI era, the paper proposes a creative integration of “distant reading” and “close reading”: on the one hand, leveraging computational perspectives for macro-level analysis of vast texts to uncover latent patterns and trends; on the other hand, maintaining a commitment to delving into the textual fabric to scrutinize its ethical implications and the depth of humanity. Building on this, the paper further envisions the future trajectory of ethical literary criticism in Japanese literature, emphasizing the need to construct a comprehensive critical system that balances theoretical insight with forward-looking perspectives, all within the creative tension between the humanities and technology.

In the era of generative artificial intelligence, literary studies face profound ethical and methodological challenges. Stephen Ramsay’s theory of “algorithmic criticism” and its concept of “deformance” require reexamination in this context. The opacity of algorithms not only poses technical difficulties but also triggers a hermeneutic crisis, marginalizing human agential subjectivity in interpretation. Technical explanations from “explainable AI” cannot substitute for humanistic interpretation, while the nature of algorithmic bias lies in the value ladenness of data and models, rendering data curation and model construction a form of concealed interpretive act that precedes coding. In response, there is an urgent need to construct a human-machine collaborative hermeneutic practice, regarding algorithms as dialogic partners with their own horizons rather than as providers of authoritative answers.

The intimate interactions between humans and AI continue to expand, yet the expression of desire remains tightly regulated by platform governance and algorithmic filtering. Existing research largely centers on paradigms of companionship, care, and simulated empathy, while paying insufficient attention to the structural mechanisms underlying erotic fantasy and evasion strategies. This article introduces the concept of “Scripts of Desire” to explain how users encode and reorganize intimate impulses through AI-mediated role-play. It further develops two key terms—the “Nested Script Model” and “metanarrative switching”—to reveal how multi-layered narrative domains emerge under algorithmic surveillance. Structurally, the Nested Script Model draws on and revises Genette’s theory of narrative levels to align with the recursive dynamics of AI dialogue; simultaneously, its layered spatial configuration constitutes a Foucauldian heterotopia, within which regulated expressions are displaced and re-situated in an interior space.

This study examines how non-human entities are represented in Japanese web novels and what ethical implications such representations entail, through a two-layered approach combining data-driven analysisand narrative analysis. Based on large-scale metadata collected from the web-novel platforms Shōsetsuka ni Narō and Kakuyomu, the study conducts morphological and keyword analyses to trace the linguistic patterns and grammatical combinations of non-human-related expressions. The results reveal that the non-human is not a fixed category but a relational Other defined by human perception and desire. Non-human beings are repeatedly verbalized as devices that supplement human growth, salvation, or deficiency, and their attributes are absorbed into or transformed by anthropocentric narrative logic. The subsequent narrative analysis demonstrates how this linguistic tendency is embodied in actual storylines. Non-human entities function not as peripheral ornaments but as structural centers that shape the direction of narrative worlds. In particular, within isekai reincarnation narratives, the inversion of nonhuman attributes through cliché inversion becomes prominent, appearing in both protagonists and companions depicted as non-human. Furthermore, the gamebased systems frequently employed in these works relegate pain and death to the background, converting the suffering of others into resources for the protagonist’s growth and transforming morality into a selective value contingent upon purpose or alignment. Ultimately, non-human entities operate as mirrors reflecting human desire and limitation and as narrative mechanisms that expose the boundaries of anthropocentric imagination. By integrating quantitative data analysis with close reading, this study elucidates how contemporary Japanese web novels construct the boundary between human and non-human and reveal the shifting sensibility of ethics within popular digital narratives.

This paper compares Hoe-sung Lee’s The Woman Who Fulled Clothes with Miri Yu’s Tokyo Ueno Station to examine how Zainichi Korean literature represents human alienation and explores the recovery of humanity through the senses. Both works transform structural exclusion into sensory experience. The Woman Who Fulled Clothes restores colonial memory through the rhythmic acts of lament and cloth-beating, while Tokyo Ueno Station redefines existence through listening amid urban invisibility. By depicting sound, touch, and repetition as sites of ethical response, these texts reveal how sensory practice enables the marginalized to reconnect with the world. This study argues that Zainichi Korean literature articulates an ethics of sensation that resists the mechanized vision of modernity and the dehumanizing logic of the data age.

R. F. Kuang, a Chinese American writer, received both the Nebula Award and the National Book Award for Babel. Set against the backdrop of the Opium War, this novel constructs a transcultural literary space that blends fantasy with a Chinese narrative framework. Employing the theoretical lens of ethical literary criticism, this paper examines how the novel generates a “Chinese narrative” of resistance against colonial hegemony. The analysis focuses on the core metaphors of colonial power embodied in “silver” and “silver-working,” the ethical dilemmas and identity formation faced by the hybrid-identity protagonist, and the subversion of the colonial ethical order by a revolutionary anti-colonial collective. The paper argues that by blending ethical inquiry with historical reflection, Kuang’s rewriting of colonial history and reinterpretation of cultural identity open up new theoretical and narrative possibilities for the Chinese narrative within Chinese American literature.

Li Zishu’s The Remaining Life enters the discourses of modernity through micro-narratives. By weaving animal writing and female subjectivity into an intertextual dialogue, it interrogates how ethical identities are formed and chosen within familial, social, and cultural spheres. The work utilizes animal imagery as a vehicle for trauma metaphors, and in situations where ethical identities lapse and disintegrate, these images steadily accumulate and magnify the narrative tension of trauma, thereby progressively unfolding contemporary ethical dilemmas. Its crossspecies ethical bond not only widens the expressive territory of Malaysian-Chinese diasporic trauma writing, but also, on the aesthetic plane, proclaims and defends the dignity of life.

Employing ethical literary criticism as its theoretical framework and integrating Foucault’s theory of bodily discipline, ecological ethics, and phenomenology of the body, this paper systematically examines the unique Excretion Narrative and its ethical implications in contemporary Chinese literature. It proposes and demonstrates the dialectical relationship between the core concepts of “the ethical body” and “the natural body.” The research reveals that Excretion Narrative serves not only as a focal point of micropolitics through which power disciplines individuals and constructs a civilized order but also as an ontological symbol for the exchange of energy between life and the land, affirming a sense of existential belonging. Within the context of modernity, these two conceptions of the body are caught in profound paradox and tension. Simultaneously, literature explores potential paths for their reconciliation and transcendence through the eternal cycle of the land, the practical wisdom of folk survival, and a postmodern stance of ridicule.

Focusing on Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, this article argues that the protagonist’s tragedy follows the logic of spatial contraction—deprivation of mobility—radicalization of ethical choice. Yeong-hye successively experiences patriarchal disciplinary violence in the domestic space, aesthetic objectification in the studio space, and ultimate confinement in the psychiatric hospital, during which her physical mobility is progressively restricted, forcing her ethical choices to become increasingly extreme. The article reveals a profound paradox within modern power structures: power attempts to discipline dissenters by compressing space and depriving them of mobility, yet it proves counterproductive. Under the extremity of physical confinement, the subject achieves radical spiritual mobility and escapes the existing order through the rebellious ethical choice of becoming a plant.

As an early representative work by Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun transcends the conventional female bildungsroman, offering instead a profound literary inquiry into the nature of death and the meaning of life. Adopting the lens of aging ethics, this paper examines the life metaphor embodied by the aircraft and the philosophical reflections prompted by the computer in the novel. By contrasting the ethical choices of the heroine Jean and her son Gregory in facing mortality, it exposes the limitations of technological rationality in alleviating existential anxiety, and explores how an ethical response to death may be realized through embodied lived experience. The study contends that Barnes endeavors to construct a form of aging ethics centered on “narrative courage”—a concept that reframes courage not as a heroic relic, but as an everyday attitude through which ordinary individuals confront aging and death, thereby transforming it into an intrinsic impetus for shaping one’s life narrative. This ethical vision vividly illustrates the evolution and deepening of Barnes’s thought from individual existential meditation to broader social ethical engagement.

Hogan’s affective narratology, which integrates cognitive-affective science and narratology, advocates for the establishment of literary universals through recurring affective narrative types, sparking extensive academic debate. Through an examination of Hogan’s theoretical foundations and textual analysis methods, along with a tracing of the theoretical trajectory of affective narratology and cognitive cultural poetics, this analysis identifies three internal contradictions within his affective narratology: First, the gradient-based plot classification method, adopted to enhance cross-cultural interpretive power, emphasizes the stability of emotional systems and the openness of plots while decoupling the necessary connection between emotions and narrative structures. This, in turn, leads to a tendency toward arbitrariness in emotional dynamics, undermining the theoretical foundation. Second, his theoretical construction aims to establish a universal narrative typology, yet simultaneously seeks to anchor textual interpretation within the realm of social ethics, creating a methodological tension that is difficult to reconcile. Finally, during his theoretical transition, Hogan treats texts both as sample data for constructing universal theories and as concrete exemplars to substantiate theoretical claims. This dual methodological approach further weakens the consistency of his arguments, exposing the deep-seated dilemma between universality and particularity in his theory.

Unlike Western representations of incest, which typically involve direct violations of consanguineous boundaries, the incest narratives in A Dream of Red Mansions are primarily articulated through quasi-kinship relations formed between male and female members of the same household who bear different surnames. Although such relationships do not directly transgress blood-based ethical taboos, they nonetheless construct kinship-like moral bonds that destabilize the traditional ethical order upheld by the Confucian patriarchal clan system. These quasi-incestuous configurations reveal the structural fragility of that system and register Cao Xueqin’s unconscious resistance to its ideological constraints. At the same time, they expose the expansion of patriarchal authority within extended family networks and its attendant objectification of women. Female characters respond to such domination through acts of resistance that frequently culminate in self-sacrifice, through which they attain a form of ethical redemption. Consequently, incest narratives in A Dream of Red Mansions possess a dual significance: they function both as a destructive force that erodes established ethical boundaries and as a subversive discourse that articulates resistance to patriarchal and genealogical domination. This ambivalent ethical–cultural logic offers a critical lens for reconsidering individual fate, gender relations, and moral order within the patriarchal clan system in the context of traditional Chinese society.

Bob Dylan is often regarded as an anti-war singer, yet his war narratives far exceed the confines of this singular label. Employing ethical literary criticism, this paper conducts a diachronic analysis of Dylan’s relevant works from the 1960s to the 1980s, revealing the evolution of his views on war and his inherent ethical dilemmas. Early works such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War” demonstrate profound skepticism towards the nature of war and critique the military industrial complex, reflecting a strong humanitarian concern. However, with shifts in his personal experiences and social environment—particularly his religious transformation and the complexities of his Jewish cultural roots—Dylan’s war narratives gradually transitioned from social protest to inward spiritual exploration. This shift sparked controversy in works like “Neighborhood Bully,” highlighting the tension between national stance and universal morality. This paper argues that although Dylan’s war ethics evolved over time, a persistent focus on individual suffering and a movement toward religious transcendence can be identified as its core trajectory. The framework of his thought is thus anchored in humanitarian care for individual suffering and extended toward theological transcendence, rather than being a mere expression of political stance.

The overseas dissemination and reception of Mo Yan’s works have long been a focal point of academic attention. However, research on Southeast Asian Chinese communities, particularly the Malaysian Chinese community, remains insufficiently examined. This paper first systematically traces the dissemination of Mo Yan’s literature within Malaysian Chinese communities from 1986 to 2024. It then argues that the ethical choices made by Malaysian Chinese within a tripartite ethical environment—comprising political security, cultural identity, and aesthetic preferences—largely influence the extent of Mo Yan’s local reception. More significantly, the paper concludes by revealing how Mo Yan’s literature, as a literary resource, has facilitated the construction of literary subjectivity among Malaysian Chinese writers such as Chang Kuei Hsing and Li Zishu. This study seeks to understand the particularities of literary reception within diasporic Chinese communities, offering concrete case studies and critical reflections for the “going out” strategy of Chinese literature.

In The Drought, contemporary British writer J.G. Ballard employs toxic discourse to depict an apocalyptic scene caused by a rare drought triggered by human disposal of nuclear waste into the ocean, presenting the various behaviors of humans in crisis and thereby unfolding a profound reflection on the ethical relationship between humans and the environment. Through toxic discourse, the novel reveals the severe damage that modern industrial waste discharge has inflicted on marine ecosystems, directly attributing the root of the drought crisis to the unsustainability of modern industrial civilization. This highlights Ballard’s ecological ethical thought of “harmonious coexistence between humans and nature” and implicitly contains a pointed critique of anthropocentrism. In the extreme circumstances of an apocalyptic crisis, both ethical environment and ethical identity undergo profound changes. The novel’s construction of the ethical identity of defenders of environmental justice and their ethical choice of “thinking with water” express Ballard’s blue humanistic vision of “revering nature and protecting the ocean.”

Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren constructs an ecological narrative with deep ethical concern by weaving interpersonal intimacy with human–nature intimacy. The narrative traces a four-stage journey from loss, illusion, disenchantment to reconstruction. While the dual disruptions of interpersonal and ecological intimacy await reparation, the novel reveals that the Romantic pastoral imagination of merging with nature is but an illusion of affective projection, and the lyrical poetic language is aestheticized without ethical concerns. Such disenchantment eventually leads to a reconstruction of double intimacy based on an acceptance of separation and a respect for pure existence. The novel transcends the nostalgic paradigm of “returning to nature” in Romantic views of nature and instead advocates an ethics of ecological intimacy grounded in separation, responsibility, and sustained responsiveness.