It was a great pleasure and experience for me to participate in The 8th Convention of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism: Ethical Literary Criticism and Interdisciplinary Studies at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan (July 2018). I found it very interesting to meet colleagues from Asia and North America who study world literary texts from an ethical perspective. World literature, for that matter all literature, contain discussions on values. This is self-evident. However, in the field of ethical criticism scholars address how literary artifacts give form to the question of human values in a modern world where the humane in itself is not a given thing.

My paper is about Hans Christian Andersen and his Fairytales. I want to discuss some ethical aspects of the fairytales and Andersen as a writer of ethical tales. In my paper I am going to analyze stories or tales as The Little Mermaid, The Little Matchstick Girl, The Piggy Bank and Thumbelina — all by Hans Christian Andersen — to point out how Andersen’s work and art are dealing with both existential and ethical questions. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) lived in a time where European cultures were changing into modern forms and Andersen registers that changing as a kind of tension between light and darkness or between light and shadows in an existential way. Andersen depicted in a way the ethical choices of modernity and he did that in stories reflecting both social circumstances and a great hope for upcoming humanism.

We all know H. C. Andersen as the writer of wonderful and enchanting stories. Many people have also pointed to H. C. Andersen as a writer that touches on ethical issues, such as the critique of hypocrisy and blind allegiance to authority in The Emperor’s New Clothes (Kejserens nye Klæder). In this article, we want to pick up on this last point and argue that ethical reflection is an integrated part of many of H. C. Andersen’s stories, and that this reflection often takes a form that is directed at moral education and development. This article has two major parts. In the first, we open with an argument for the role of literature in moral development, and then move on to argue for the special status of H. C. Andersen’s stories within this field. In the second part, we present new readings of three well-known fairy tales, The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweep (Hyrdinden og Skorstensfejeren), The Swineherd (Svinedrengen), and The Little Match Girl (Den lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne) with the aim of showing how reading these stories from an ethical perspective opens up new dimensions of H. C. Andersen’s magic work.

Hans Christian Andersen is staged as a national icon in contemporary Danish political and cultural contexts, where certain affective perceptions of the Danish community are attached to him and his authorship. In this article, we discuss the content and function of some of these constructions by use of cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed’s term killjoy (The Promise of Happiness). It is our main argument that while Andersen’s oeuvre represents a complexity of meanings, this complexity is sometimes lost when certain interpretations are extracted from his texts. Our analytical focus is on such polarized receptions and readings of Andersen and his authorship, and it is our aim to accentuate the complexity of the intermediate layer where different values are negotiated. Thus, we argue that Andersen’s own texts contain a killjoy-potential that can be brought to the fore through analysis of his texts and different stagings of him.

Hans Christian Andersen is a cultural icon, and his fairy tales are famous around the world. But despite the positive ring to this description, his status as a canonized author poses a challenge when he is passed on to new generations of readers. In this article, we show examples of how this challenge reveals itself in Danish primary school teaching where Andersen is an obligatory figure in the subject Danish in which he is frequently framed as a national romantic author of morally unambiguous texts. Taking the current use of “The Ugly Duckling” (1844) in primary school teaching materials as a point of departure, we aim to show Andersen’s potential to be presented as an element in primary school teaching that draws on dialogic inquiries rooted in Philosophy with Children. Philosophical inquiries are characterized by an open mindset that incite teachers as well as school children to engage with the rich ethical themes and literary qualities of Andersen’s fairy tales. We conclude the article with our own inquiry manual to “The Ugly Duckling” to illustrate a way to overcome the current hegemonic framing of Andersen and reopen his fairy tale for future discussions and interpretations.

This article aims to show how Rostam, the legendary hero of Iranian mythology, have witnessed ideological alterations in the formation of Persian epic, Shahnameh. Among different oral and written Shahnamehs, this paper focuses on Asadi Shahnameh written during the 14th or 15th century. Though he is a pre-Islamic hero, Rostam and his tasks are changed to fit the ideological purposes of the poet’s time and place. A century later, under the influence of the state religion of Safavid Dynasty (1501–1736), Iranian pre-Islamic values underwent the process of Shi’itization. Scarcity of literature regarding the interpretation of Asadi Shahnameh and the unique position of this text in the realm of Persian epic are the reasons for our choice of scrutiny. In Asadi Shahnameh Rostam is both a national hero and a Shi’ite missionary. By meticulous textual and historical analysis, this article shows how Asadi unites seemingly rival subjects like Islam with Zoroastrianism, philosophy with religion, and heroism with mysticism. It is concluded that Asadi’s Rostam is the Shi’ite-Mystic version of Iranians’ popular hero who helps the cause of Shi’itic messianism and performs missionary tasks in both philosophic and practical levels. Although the epic hero is not Shia, the literary text recasts him as the covert representative of the emerging and developing ideology of its time.

In the past decade, the third generation Niger Delta poet, Ebinyo Ogbowei has jettisoned the poetics of passivity associated with J.P. Clark Bekederemo, Gabriel Imomotimi Okara and side tracked Tanure Ojaide’s ecocritical poetry subscription, to embrace a fierce and militant poetics of nationalism in his poetry. Arguably, Ogbowei deploys resistance trope in his poetry, to address the social contradictions besetting the Niger Delta communities. This paper problematizes the dilemma of Niger Delta nationalities, although subdued, but are determined in their struggle to have a fulfilled life in an ecologically degraded environment. The paper is focused on the analysis of poetics of resistance in Ebinyo Ogbowei’s six poetry collections: the heedless ballot box (2006), the town crier’s song (2009), the song of a dying river (2009), marsh boy and other poems (2013), let the honey run (2013) and matilda (2018). Voicing the worsening plight of the Niger Delta, Ogbowei’s poetry not only engages the region’s enduring poverty, ecological degradation and despair but also explores a generational resistance against its persistent subjugation. In this paper, attention is paid specifically to the linguistic analysis of representative poems from the six collections purposively selected for the delineation of poetics of anger, belligerence and resistance in Ogbowei’s poetry. In fulfilling its aim, the analysis is achieved with recourse to the dictates of Critical Discourse Analysis which postulates that language in use is not neutral, but is rather used in the performance of power, ideology, identity and hegemony.

The aim of the paper is to show in the historical perspective the development of the genres of the Turkish drama by analyzing more than fifty Turkish authors’ plays, define the influence of European dramatic tradition on the formation of Turkish drama’s genders, identify a modification of genres and point out the most popular genders of modern Turkish drama. It is used such research methods as analysis and synthesis, functional, systematic, comparative, historical methods. Analyzing Turkish drama, we stated that it embraces such genres as comedy, tragedy, drama, melodrama, historical drama, historical and biographical drama, children’s drama etc. The research revealed that historical and biographical drama are the main genres of the modern Turkish one. The majority of modern Turkish dramas embrace creative and quasi-biographies of famous figures etc. (T. Özakman, R. Özçelik, T. Oflazoğlu, D. Sümer). The genre of biographical drama is also widely represented by works telling the life stories of historical figures who made a strong impact on culture’s development (Selim III, Suleiman the Magnificent, Mevlana, Yunus Emre, Roxelana, Mimar Sinan). Such writers as T. Özakman, T. Oflazoğlu and Ö. Yula added new topics and diversified the genre paradigm of drama by means of almost full elimination of traditional genres. While such types of drama as children’s drama (Ü. Ayvaz, H. Erkek, Ü. Köksal) keep developing, the topics that are typical for Turkic culture are being rethought.

This essay discusses two texts by two literary avant-garde women writers in terms of their use of literary metamorphosis. Although coming from different geographical, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, interestingly, Turkish author Sevim Burak (1931-1983) and Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) share a common interest in their tendency towards the modernist aesthetic geared towards an experimental literary style. This essay aims to bring Lispector’s experimental novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.; 1964) and Burak’s short story “The Window” (“Pencere”), from her short story collection titled Burnt Palaces (Yanık Saraylar; 1965), together in light of their use of the metamorphosis trope. Both texts challenge desire in fixed signification and closed interpretation, calling instead for a decentered and displaced hermeneutics. In this study, I discuss the use of metamorphosis as a literary trope in The Passion and “The Window” as their major literary tool in the deconstruction of subjectivity in different ways. The study argues that the trope of literary metamorphosis can also be an effective narrative vehicle for opening oneself to different forms and positions of alterity, be it ontological or epistemological alterity.

The article deals with analysis of typological similarities of the English social-criminal novel and Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Its relevance is conditioned by the opportunity to extend the background of Russian-English literary cross-cultural relationships in order to specify the points of attraction and repulsion between the English criminal novels and that by Tolstoy as well as their different national traditions and literary epochs. The similarities of English and Russian novel models are obvious at various levels: focus on a fact, social determinism of the heroes, criticism of unjust social system, trial scenes, origin of hero-criminal, system of characters, oppositions in time and space depiction, descriptions of prison. However, taking into account the differences in historical periods, conditions of literary evolution and individual development, one could say that these features were incorporated into a new context of the Russian classical novel with great modifications.

Coetzee’s Disgrace is a controversial novel as it rakes over a past haunted by memories of rape, racism and the fight for land ownership. By depicting the lingering instances of injustice, Disgrace seems to be holding fast to the memories of a troubling past that cannot be easily erased or ignored. This unwillingness to let go of the past is problematic because it keeps interfering with the remedial process of nation-building pursued by the TRC and implemented under the aegis of the Constitution after the collapse of apartheid. The publication of the novel seems ill-timed, as the nation is going through a healing process. My argument in this paper is concerned with the way the novel challenges the conciliatory efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) by undermining the idea of nationness and restorative justice. The novel, I would like to argue, seems to present two opposing views about nationness and justice: one ethical, the other non-ethical. These opposing discourses are reflected in the beliefs and the attitudes of the two main characters, Lucy and David Lurie. My purpose is to show that Disgrace tends to valorize an ethically-informed approach to the question of nationness and justice. By an ethical approach, I mean the rejection of totalizing and impersonal views which is often reflected in the construction of nation and the implementation of justice. The paper is divided into sections devoted to the exploration of ethical and non-ethical views represented by the ideas of Homi Bhabha, Emmanuel Levinas and Zygmunt Bauman.