Charles Darwin’s biological selection offers a forceful explanation of biological evolution. With reference to Darwin’s concept of biological selection, the article puts forward its counterpart: ethical selection. While biological selection answers how humans are different from animals physically, ethical selection explains the distinction between human beings and animals in a cognitive sense. The riddle of the Sphinx can be viewed as a story about the evolution of ethical consciousness, the progression from natural selection to ethical selection. The feature of the Sphinx’s combination of a human head and an animal body implies that the most important feature of a human image lies in its head, which stands for the reason of human beings emerged in the evolutionary process, and that human beings evolved from animals and thus still contain some features belonging to animals. The “Sphinx factor” is composed of two parts: the human factor and the animal factor. In literary works, it is exemplified in the combination of natural will, free will, and rational will in characters. The interplay of the three wills is embodied in individuals as contrasting yet interrelated forces in determining their ethical choices and moral behaviors.

This essay studies Korean literature produced in the era of Enlightenment in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Korea and looks at the characteristics of the origination and development in comparison of chiefly the British literature in the Age of Enlightenment. It studies the ideas that permeated the whole of the society in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, and ascertains that the literature at the time constitutes a new flow with its new ideas and modern styles quite distinctive from the outdated in the past. The origination and development of the literature produced during in the era of Enlightenment in Korea turned out to be somewhat different from its counterparts in Europe in the light of the specific socio-historical circumstances, creators’ makeup and their outlooks on world, though they were based on the science and reason as well as their confidence in the intellectual power, to say nothing but the patriotic mind, which resulted in the Kapsin Coup D’etat and the following struggles against foreign forces occupying Korea at that time.

This paper conducts a comparative study of the dominant English and American critical-literary scholarship and French criticism and theory (often simply referred to as Theory, with a capital T) in the twentieth century with a view to examining their reception in – and impact on – the Kosovo Albanian literary scholarship in the last quarter of the century, at a time when Socialist Realism was reigning in Communist dictator Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Modern Western literary scholarship was anathema there for half a century. The emergence of a modern literary scholarship in Kosovo, with ramifications eventually for the Albanian studies in general in both Kosovo and Albania, the two Albanian-speaking countries, shall be examined, and the seminal role of Kosovar scholars played in this emancipation appraised in terms of literary scholarship and the practice of the teaching of literature. Important consequences for the evolution of a more integral history of Albanian literature adopting a non-ideological, intrinsic approach, have arisen. There are prospects for the Albanian national literary history, gravely deformed by the dogma of Socialist Realism in Albania, which affected also literature and literary studies in Kosovo too, to be redressed.

This paper focuses on the power dynamics behind women’s solidarity, which has been overlooked in previous studies, to examine how violence surrounding women’s agency is expressed and what limits exist in their mutual support. The novel OUT by Kirino Natsuo shows that the oppression of women, which intensified under the patriarchal system of the post-war Japanese society, continues into the modern era with its newly developed form of patriarchal marriage, acting as a double oppression against women. In particular, this dystopian novel, which reflects the bubble burst that Japanese society has experienced since the early 1990s, features women characters, specifically who are facing a double burden of being a housewife, and reveals that there is a hierarchy and power relations even among those who support each other in pursuit of their shared purpose. Based on the examination of the text, this paper finds that the solidarity that women dream of in the novel Out ends up creating another form of patriarchy within itself. In the end, Masako, the only woman who achieves a hopeful ending, can be interpreted as the embodiment of Maria Mies’s statement that under the patriarchal system, “equality” for women only means that women become patriarchal men.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart has received different critical and theoretical interpretations that examined and reexamined the novel within the context of different social realities. This study therefore is an eco-critical reading of how the ecology is one of the “things that fall apart” in the novel. Through the eco-critical approach, the study interrogates and reveals the cultural orientations that induce environmental mistreatment and consequent ecological problems in the novel. The ecological problems manifest as both implacable forces and uncanny reactions. The discovery is that the characters subdue the environment with various socio-economic activities as the environment consequently reacts to the actions of the characters. The patterns of oppression and subjugation of the environment are traced, revealing the culpability of the characters in the environmental problems that threaten their existence. The study advances the process of rethinking African literature and criticism as it also advances the frontiers of the emerging discipline of environmental humanities.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s prescription in Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a healthy future economy after the abolition of slavery calls for an environment in which ex slaves will be free to make their individual contributions. The novel condemns all efforts of Antebellum society to punish slaves, with the noteworthy exception of the corporal punishment endured by the young girl Topsy, whose antics are not so much offensive as they are merely nonproductive. In this essay, Stowe’s seemingly ambivalent attitude toward Topsy is contextualized within the work of the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus, as well as in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The conclusion is that Topsy is not necessarily reformed by her overseer Ophelia St. Clare, but rather is content to engage in nonproductive activity (or “deterittorialized” activity, in Deleuzian/Guattarian parlance) until she finds a good reason to “reterritorialize.” Thus, corporal punishment has no effect and no relevance in her situation.

Till the middle of the twentieth century psychology, particularly the behavioral and psychoanalytical approaches, had a limited attitude toward human beings. In behaviorists’ eyes human behavior was predictable by his fixed reactions to some stimuli. Psychoanalysts, too, restricted human beings to their unconscious formed in childhood. With the appearance of humanistic psychology in America, psychology got into changes in theory and practice. Humanistic psychologists put emphasis on the limitless potentialities of human beings. They claimed that human individuals intrinsically tend to self-actualization. One of these humanistic psychologists was Carl Rogers whose ‘client-centered therapy’ helped patients with the realization of their potentialities. He associated some characteristics with a self-actualized or a fully functioning person. The present research discusses Roger’s concept of self-actualization in the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. It investigates the personality development of Stephen Dedalus, the main character of the novel, with respect to Rogers’ definition of a fully functioning person. The findings of the study lead the researcher to identify Stephen as a fully functioning person that has the characteristics including an increasing openness to experience, existential living, trust in one’s own organism, feeling a sense of freedom, and creativity.

Joseph Conrad paradoxically represents Imperialism and Insanity in his novelette Heart of Darkness. The paper aims to investigate the acts of the colonizers as they overpower and pretend to be enlightened. They target underprivileged people of the Dark Continent. In this research, the colonizers represent African as uncivilized and savage. Although the colonizers look civilized, their reality is different from their appearance. Greed for power, hypocrisy, and lust for Ivory lead them toward brutality to seize the natives’ land and wealth. The study discovers that Conrad’s purpose of using Marlow’s character is to bring out another agonizing truth that everyone lives in the illusions of more profit. Besides, the paper also deals with why Conrad has written against the racists where he is European. The purpose of this paper is to locate the way imperialism and insanity are closely related to Heart of Darkness. How Conrad’s life experience and political view inspired him to write his novel is prominent in the paper. This study finds that colonizers enter in the name of civilization and end up promoting savagery. The multilayered meanings of this multifunctional novelette brought out Marlow’s fear. It alarms the future generation to get rid of destruction for imperialistic acts.

Stevie Davies’s 1996 novel, Four Dreamers and Emily, is about the daily life of four ordinary people, Marianne, Eileen, Sharon and Timothy. Timothy is a widower whose initiatives to survive are the visitant of Emily Bronte’s ghost and his romantic correspondence with Marianne, a university lecturer. When they meet each other physically, the only intimate contact is a kiss which is overseen by Timothy’s deceased wife Jojo from afar on the hill. Such Panopticism in Foucault’s concept is also made by Eileen, a 63 years old spinster, who on the way to Top Withens accidentally observed the athletic sex between fellow-delegates on the moor, and reproached the “blind brutality” for violating the ethical principles of civilized human beings. With the ethical principles to abide by, both Timothy and Marianne repressed the “blind brutality” and regulated the relationship from sexual attraction to kindred affinity. At the end of the novel, Timothy gives his house to Marianne who has divorced with three kids to support. In the novel, the metaphorical Panopticism made by the ghost of Jojo and the spinster Eileen is in fact the ethical disciplines which may guarantee the harmonious interpersonal relationships in a civilized society.

This article discusses the meaning of queer harmony and possibility that can be found in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop published in 1927. In modern times, the term “queer” is used to describe all possibilities of various identities, dispositions, cultures, religions, places, classes, characteristics, and so on. Leaning on its elastic interpretation, this study aims to highlight the value of Cather’s use of the word “queer” in relation to human beings and places by constructing a stage for her ideals of catholicity, reconciliation, healing, harmony, understanding, and acceptance. In the process of it, Archbishop shows Cather’s primary ecstasy transforming eroticism beyond gender into spiritual freedom and value, and guarantees a model of the queer world for her other novels. In the novel, Cather’s gender crossing is the energy source for her creativity, progressive spirit, and a part of her power to inspire herself and her works to be valued. For these reasons, this study explores the possibility of the sexual, racial, local, social, sensual, emotional, and ethical queer suggested by Cather within the boundary of its semantic diversity and presents some of the queer models of generosity, acceptance, and harmony that recognize the possibility of looking at existence differently.

Death pervades in Christian Rossetti’s poems, while the sea serves as an image to construct Rossetti’s view of death. As a multidimensional image of profound implications, the unfathomable sea in Rossetti’s poems is an integrated symbol of life, death, uncertainty, as well as the possibility of eternity. Most significantly, for Christian Rossetti, the sea itself is a junction where “death is the beginning of life and life the beginning of death.” By studying the sea images in Rossetti’s poems, the paper aims to shed new light upon the poet’s view of death.