Collected in this special issue are papers delivered at the international conference on Ethical Literary Criticism held at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines on April 27-28, 2019. Understandably, the papers mostly came from the Philippines, but also elsewhere in Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea.

In The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell explains anthropocentric thought that renders the human dominant over his or her environment. This ideological influence is a key concern in the poetics of Marjorie Evasco. Her acknowledgment that humans are subject to the weaknesses of anthropocentric thinking inspires a pursuit of an ecocentric perception where the poet can see and translate the world in language that is capable of comprehending the multiplicity of nature in its organic state. This paper considers Evasco’s poetry in Dreamweavers to represent an ecopoetic style that conveys real nature. This specific style showcases nature that is freed from perceptions anchored on anthropocentric ideals. It is a way of blending nature and poetry and uses a language capable of expressing organic reality.

Much has been written about the problematic theme “Filipino philosophy” but it remains to be seen how much of this idiosyncratic pursuit has in fact contributed to the furtherance of Filipino intellectual tradition. On its own, the notion of a local philosophy appears to be harmless but when the same notion is assumed as a foregone conclusion rather than an ideal which must be critically nurtured, it becomes an invitation for a philosophic praxis that can only be described as parochial. To a certain degree, the perception that philosophy is a sterile intellectual terrain derives its validity from the propensity of this kind of doing philosophy to be a ready victim of its own domestic concerns. The need for philosophy in the Philippines to overcome this myopic orientation is a genuine concern. In this paper, I shall try to explore an alternative way by which this can be achieved. In my discussion, I shall propose, as a potential constructive strategy, the creation of an interface between philosophy and its kindred discipline, literary criticism. My basic claim is that such interface is crucial in prompting philosophy in the Philippine context to be more different, critical and inter-disciplinary. The whole paper is guided by the question: What can the interface between philosophy and literary criticism contribute to the advancement of doing philosophy in the Philippines?

This paper aims to articulate the performative dimensions of Jean Baudrillard’s theory, and to problematize the seemingly separate domains occupied by philosophy and literature. I argue that attention to the style of philosophical discourse is important not only because it is that which presents and reinforces the strength of theory, but also because in cases, such as Baudrillard’s, “philosophical discourse” is the style. Criticisms directed against Baudrillardian philosophy assume the seriousness of his social theory, while the most sympathetic readings call for a selective forgetting, gleaning the academic from the performance. Instead, I argue that to read Baudrillard is to take a double-bind that primarily operates on the context of fiction, the acceptance of which enables a better understanding of theory. A recognition of the validity of poetry and literature as theoretical musings allows us to recognize the possibility of philosophical discourse as form, or genre.

On 8 November 2013, super typhoon Haiyan wreaked havoc in the Philippines, killing over 6,000 people thus making it one of the most powerful typhoons in recorded history. One of the literary works that have since tried to make sense of this climate trauma is the well-acclaimed novel Les mains lâchées by Anaïs Llobet published by Editions Plon, Paris, 2016. Les mains lâchées recounts the story of Madel, a reporter who realises she just survived a “triple tsunami.” She is plagued by survivor’s guilt, having let go of the hand of a child she was entrusted with and leaving the body of her lover, Jan. Forced by her editor to cover the catastrophe for the TV news, the persona finds herself listening to survivors, while dealing with issues on voyeurism, witnessing and ethics. I am interested in exploring the ethics of witnessing in Les mains lâchées. Thus, in this essay, I propose to first define trauma and witnessing, then theorise ethical listening and clarify why survivors resort to writing. After close-reading, I examine why the novel can be an appropriate medium in order to do justice to witnessing. Lastly, I explore translation as a form of “listening again” and interrogate the role of the reader, especially as receiver of trauma fiction. Ultimately, I argue that Les mains lâchées, as a literary form, allows for empathic, ethical listening, and postcolonial witnessing.

The study of media is a very young discipline but its roots in literature can be traced as far back as 60 B.C.E. with Rhetoric by Aristotle. From the early days of print, to the age of social media, and with the new technologies that are expected to grace the fourth industrial revolution that is now being felt by the current generation, the discipline of media studies has consistently worked around frameworks and methodologies drawn from both the humanities and social sciences. However, it is from literary criticism that it draws its incipient and later on, deeply entrenched, theoretical and methodological impulses. More specifically, the literary roots of critical media studies may be identifiable in the following elements: 1. The continuing use of rhetorical criticism; 2. The influence of linguistic theory and the semiological tradition; 3. The role of narratology through the constructionist and the phenomenological-hermeneutic traditions; 4. The influence of phenomenological hermeneutic tradition on reception studies; 5. The emphasis on textual analysis using critical theory and poststructuralist approaches; 6. The commitment to expose the interplay between power and communication; 7. The openness to the link between theory, criticism, and social action. It is therefore the contention of this paper that the basic tenets of ethical literary criticism have influenced too the supposed ethical framework of media studies. The proof of such assumption may be linked to the rhetorical, semiotic, constructionist, phenomenological, hermeneutic and poststructuralist traditions that continue to propel and animate the discipline.

The contemporary phenomenon of globalization or the transnational circuiting of goods, information, capital, people, among others, has engendered untold and radical consequences on the people’s way of life, one of which is diaspora. Migration and diaspora have enabled people to settle in different parts of the world for various reasons. While the opening up of countries, like Japan, Korea, Singapore, Europe, Canada, and Australia, etc., has offered more job openings and choices for Filipinos, our colonial and neocolonial relations with the US render the latter as the classic destination for a large number of Filipino immigrants. Filipino American narratives and discourses revolve around assimilationist aspirations, border crossings, departures and returns, and the construction of “home.” They are written from diasporic realities and consciousness. This diasporic identity and consciousness is not limited to the oscillation of subjects in transnational spaces but is formed and produced by US hegemonic norms, racialized immigration laws and policies, and the discourse of “white ideal,” rendering a diasporic subjectivity that is dialectically complex. Though the “American dream” or “desire to be white” can be elusive, it remains an overarching mythos and aspiration for Filipinos and Filipino American immigrants. The chasing of the “desire to be white” and/or “middle class” status (read as American dream) is contingent on a US citizenship, its award of which is underpinned by adherence to US’s regulatory norms. But while the compelled character of regulatory ideals that Filipino immigrant subjects are constrained to abide and identify with renders closer to the realization of the “American dream,” subjects are never totally constituted and that resistance against these norms and standards is possible. Thus, by its diasporic circumstance and condition, Filipino American literature, as demonstrated by selected texts, consciously or unconsciously write from an “ambivalent” position and subjectivity which can be recuperated to serve as a site for questioning the constitutive power of the American dream and the ensuing Filipino American immigrant’s realization of what is right and principled.

Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart captures the struggle of Filipino peasants in the United States. Even at the wake of the “American century,” when globalization has taken the façade of a US neocolonial capitalist ethos to the disenfranchisement people in the diaspora and the Global South, the novel continues to be socially relevant. This paper is a revaluation of Bulosan’s classic novel from an ethical literary perspective by focusing on the relationship between the internal and external worlds of Allos/Carlos and his brothers, especially Macario. Without neglecting the context and informed by Bulosan scholarship, the paper argues that Allos’s brotherly feeling toward Macario and his brothers is the primary condition and drive for his social and ethical self-making and search for “America.” The paper also argues that an ethical literary perspective will further highlight new themes and meanings in Bulosan’s other multi-genre works.

By adopting the notion of the “middleman”—how the Chinese migrant merchants had straddled between the Spanish conquistadors and the local indigenous peoples in colonial New Spain, this paper investigates the representation and intermediation of the “middleman minority” in Nick Joaquín’s seminal novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961). While the mysterious Chinese deity adds spice to “pagan fatalism,” there is no doubt that the intermediation of the middleman minority plays an important role in the narrative tapestry. In this paper, by drawing on the work of David Parker, Nie Zhenzhao, Shirley Lim, Rey Chow, and Emmanuel Levinas, I look into the intermingling of ethics, ethnicity, and the representation of the Chinese “middleman” in Joaquín’s work. Moreover, I apply Edward Said’s thoughts on postcolonial exile to the setting in Hong Kong and investigate how the island space, as a site of Foucauldian heterogenic intermediation, is also a “middle place” that provides Filipino expatriates with a sense of postcolonial exilic agency.

Herman Melville’s famous novella “Bartleby” has been circulated and consumed in the terrain of philosophical discourses aptly demonstrating the problematic status of a literary text within the realm of critical theory. Plenty of literary and critical theorists from Agamben to Deleuze like to take the figure of Bartleby as a political symbol supporting their arguments, but they often ignore the way he is represented as a part of a singular literary narrative. They tend to separate Bartleby from “Bartleby,” capitalizing exclusively on his peculiar implication as a resistant political subjectivity which is supposed to signify something subversive in the systematic order of global capitalism. As a result, the figure of Bartleby, isolated from the literary context, has been easily reduced to a free signifier representing what the critical theorists desire to prove. But Bartleby in “Bartleby” is constitutively described by the unnamed lawyer to be a pathetic melancholic or a man of mental disorder whose inscrutable commanding presence with enigmatic formula, “I would prefer not to,” is thought to configure a certain political potentiality. Reformulating the way Bartleby is co-opted and pathologized by the discourse of the lawyer, I would like to re-situate the figure of Bartleby within the contextual representation, taking the issue with theoretical and philosophical appropriation of a literary text. Taking example of recent critical analyses of Bartleby, I hope to demonstrate how theoretical analysis of a literary text often depends upon the cursory reading of the syuzhet of the text and how it drives the whole argument into its own ethical abyss.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Green Tea presents an ethical issue of Reverend Mr. Jennings who commits suicide because of a black monkey ghost. The death of Jennings is a tragedy caused by double predicaments in which a man strives for the meaning of human existence both in natural and social dimensions. Jennings’ excessive intake of green tea indicates that his ethical identity required by the Victorian society is undermined; his interest in paganism and knowledge of the black monkey constitutes a doubt about his existence as a human in the context of Darwinian evolutionism. Jennings gradually loses the rational will and ethical consciousness in the chaos of ethical identities. Dominated by the irrational will, he thus makes an ethical selection prone to the beast factor which is represented by the black monkey. Sheridan Le Fanu depicts a process towards an unbearable passion for death when the rational will vanishes in the face of challenges from the spiritual world. During this process, green tea, the exotic which enters the human body, becomes the embodiment of the conceptual evolutionism that intrudes into human mind, and hence the entity green tea involves ethical considerations.

Postcolonial reading is a popular and interesting perspective to study Shakespeare’s classic work The Tempest. Yet the discriminating images of the aboriginal people in this book impedes its circulation and its teaching due to ethnic issues. Is a postcolonial critique really incompatible with, and unfriendly to, the context of world literature? Martinican politician and author Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, an adaptation of The Tempest in French Language, seems to offer a good solution to answering this question. By replacing the word “The” with the word “A,” Césaire’s adaptation rebuts the attempts to make postcolonial reading exclusive and superior, and indicates the possible and inexhaustible diversity in rewarding various perspectives when interpreting the classic. This applies to not only specific classical works but also to national literature studies. In Chinese literature studies, diverged voices argue about which is the more representative: Chinese ancient literature or modern literature, and Chinese scholars’ studies or those of overseas scholars. To anoint only one particular means, as the privileged method to understand and present Chinese literature and culture, is questionable. In this paper, the rebuttal against the ghettoization of classic works and literature will be examined and illuminated to prove that it is easier and more suitable to make links rather than build fences among different perspectives, times and people.

This article is based on the premise that one of the crucial aspects of the diasporic subjectivity is that its negotiation depends on an acknowledgement of the presence of an enigmatic desire to return to the homeland (in the present case, Mother India). This overwhelming desire, if not a compelling need, to return to roots, though, is highly aporetic since it is structured by an urge to reunite with but also, paradoxically, to abandon the motherland as an object of desire. To address the literary representation of this enigmatic desire as well as its possible transmutation and ramification in the life of the diasporic subject, the present article reads “Ciphers,” the opening story of Ginu Kamani’s debut collection of short stories Junglee Girl (1995), in the light of the mother/child trope developed within the context of Jean Laplanche’s “General Theory of Seduction.” It then posits that Kamani’s story, if read allegorically, seems to enact not only the enigmatic urge to return to the traumatic wound of the initial departure-as-rupture but also the desperate attempt on the part of the diasporic subject, to re-translate and to suture the trauma of displacement which structures all various modalities of the diasporic subjectivity.