The following is a collection of five Presidential Addresses delivered by Claude Rawson, professor of Yale University and former President of IAELC, at the opening ceremonies of the annual international symposiums of IAELC. In his addresses, Claude Rawson celebrates Ethical Criticism as an attempt to liberate the study of books and restore the centrality of the literary text as distinct from the excesses of theory-driven abstraction. According to Claude Rawson, good criticism is ethical in so far as it transcends paraphrasable ethical doctrines and seeks to capture a larger unparaphrasable human totality. He approves the interdisciplinarity in literary studies, while proposing that interdisciplinary approaches to literature should be backed with reliable expertise, and should be ancillary to literary texts. Ethical literary criticism is an admirably challenging enterprise, that carries with it a responsibility to the texts of the literatures we study. Our business as professors of literature is the knowledge, understanding and analysis of creative works of literature, and of what they have to tell us about ourselves and the world around us.

The emerging post-1970s Chinese contemporary writer Li Shijiang’s novella Dumplings (2018) describes in a minute way the escape from the real world into the utopian world of classical Chinese culture. This essay analyzes its complicated time sequence and its intermittent use of stream of consciousness. Its style can be characterized as a mixture of bitter irony and meticulous description. Dumplings is founded on the opposition between the cruel reality and literary allusions to romances, mostly three classical Chinese novels A Dream of Red Mansions, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio and A Journey to the West. In Dumplings, the theme of escape is presented through an original use of time and language, also via echoes from classical Chinese novels.

This article contextualizes the trope of cannibalism as it developed in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Tracking the trajectory of this trope, so the article argues, illuminates the colonially-driven, hierarchy-induced violence demonstrating China’s modernity (re)entering into crisis even after a century of revolution and modernization. In the shadow of Western colonial invasions and domestic disorder, May Fourth intellectuals realized China’s need to modernize to survive the threat of being colonized—or consumed. This existential crisis, in turn, drove a desire to consume and colonize others; thus, modern subjectivity came to be built on consumption, becoming, in essence, a “consuming identity.” This consuming identity reflects violence in various forms of hierarchy, be it feudalistic, revolutionary, or capitalistic. May Fourth literatures of cannibalism envision the potential salvation of awakening modern subjects by portraying modern subjects’ ambiguity in, and anxieties about, cannibalism. Contemporary literatures of cannibalism, in contrast, present a doomed conception according to which consuming identities and desires for objectification and cannibalistic consumption prevail over—or consume—all.

Ali Bader’s The Tobacco Keeper is one of the first texts which deal with Iraqi Jews. It is the story of exclusion, confiscation, deportation and physical extermination. Taking into account the socio-political, historical and cultural circumstances that Iraqi Jews experienced up to their final departure to The Promised Land, this article investigates the process of identity transformation that the protagonist undergoes. Deploying postcolonial theory and theories of identity, and a close reading of the novel, this study shows how politics problematizes and destabilizes notions of identity construction, sense of belonging and life in the third space. Further, it sheds light on the motivations of Iraqi Jews to live behind Islamic masks and cross religious boundaries, the role of host society in shaping one’s identity and the active role of the subject in the process of transformation. Moreover, the article seeks to ascertain the impact of assumed conversion and forged documents on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Iraqi Jewish identity.

This study examines the representation of disease in the form of leprosy through a reading of O.A. Bushnell’s Moloka’i to address damage, trauma, inequality in a postcolonial Hawai’i landscape. Bushnell’s novel criticizes the stereotypical view of Hawai’i as paradisal archipelago through a narration grounded within the socio-historical circumstances of leprosy outbreak and the ensuing discrimination and segregation towards its sufferers. Moloka’i problematizes colonizer/colonized dichotomy by placing the disabled lepers’ body in the entangled aspect of colonial hegemony and indigenous resistance within the interconnected nature of disease, disability and colonialism. This paper underlines how an econarratological perspective deconstructs readers’ own presupposition concerning Hawai’i through the construction of virtual storyworld narrated from contrasting settlers/natives binarism in a polyvocal narration. An econarratological perspective actively invites readers to retrospectively shift their outlook from the dominant discourse rooted within colonial authority toward the emergence of indigenous voices, previously submerged in the narrative of diseases and disability. The use of first-person narrative personas problematizes the subjective consciousness in imagining material realities on how similar spatial scenes are reimagined and then contrasted from a settler/native perspective. To conclude, Bushnell’s Moloka’i challenges the colonial construction of the indigene’s diseased body as non-human Others through the emergence of polyvocal native voices established upon indigenous cosmology.

Robinson Crusoe and Foe are generally read through comparisons made to highlight marked contrasts between the ways Defoe and Coetzee treat colonialism. However, this article undertakes a comparison of both novels by representing them as analogous with an emphasis on the debilitating effects that the tropical climate produces on Europeans. Both Defoe and Coetzee deal with the harsh climatic conditions on the tropical island in a way that ultimately leads to severe impairment and deterioration in the body and mental health of the European characters. The extremes of the tropical climate such as the torrid heat, heavy rains and violent storms not only tend to be conducive to ill-health and a relapsing fever but also provoke the feelings of fear, distress and anxiety. The central focus of the Europeans shifts from fulfilling their basic needs to surviving the extreme weather conditions and protecting their health from the tropical diseases. According to both narratives, colonial stereotypes such as white-black and master-slave might be deconstructed on the grounds that the superiority of the Europeans is shaken through representations of tropical invalids whose body and mental condition are vulnerable to tremendous harm and threat that the tropical environment poses to their health.

In the present contribution, we will focus on the archetypal motif of the doppelgänger and its basic typological classification in the world cultural tradition. Our material base will be made up of ancient narratives, primarily myths, magical tales and religious texts from various civilizations and cultural circles. The doppelgänger character is primarily fixed as a narrative phenomenon, but its origins can be traced back to the primitive magical-religious ideas of man. Through their intertextual and intercultural confrontation, we will try to reveal the constitutive principles of depicting the doppelgänger and find out in which narrative situations and subject-motive constellations it is iconized. Based on the results, we will clarify his function and archetypal meaning in the metaphorical code of ancient stories, which have contributed to the formation of the cultural background of humanity since the ancient times. We believe that the universal motif of the doppelgänger represents a distinctive and significant anthropological-narrative phenomenon that reflects the binary (opposite) thinking of man in a traditionally based society, but is also significantly related to the deeply rooted human need to explore and reflect on one’s own identity. The doppelgänger in the metaphorical code of ancient stories represents one of the basic existential semantics of human experience.

This study investigates how Samuel Clemens sheds the liberal skin of Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) to achieve whites’ utopia. By setting the narrative of Tom in the 1830s, Clemens alters the past of pre-Civil War society to create future remembrance of the past. By doing so, he makes the white class vigilant toward the impending disaster of black overtaking whites, if the problem of color conflict is further ignored. It reveals the author’s struggle to conceptualize the narrative style as a blend of “historical realism” and “minstrel tradition” to deride blacks’ attempt to imitate whites. Therefore, they do not deserve realistic treatment. Clemens repudiates the instances of historical reality to debunk the scope of narrative fallibility; however, it persists in the difference between the actual and the textual reality. Through Tom’s narrative, Clemens counters Roxy’s desire for blacks’ utopia to realize whites’ utopia. In the broad spectrum of reader-response theory, the active reader’s response discourse aims to bring forth the implications behind Clemens’ writing style and how through the scientific invention of the fingerprint, he creates a paradigm to achieve eugenics (whites’ utopia). It paves the path to restore whites’ status quo by eliminating the scope of blacks’ dissent.

This paper argues that studying Orientalism from a bibliometric perspective is of great significance. This paves the way for a new field in Oriental studies, which could be coined as Orientometrics. This study defines this concept as the textual references to the Orient in Western texts. Such a field helps identify whether references to the Orient are influenced by nationality and historical contexts. In being in a league of its own, this study draws on Said’s Orientalism by carrying out an Orientometric analysis of Jordan-related motifs in English poetry. Using desk research, I have searched anthologies, books, websites, and catalogues of university libraries looking for about 50 Jordan-related places in English poetry for a long period of time. Different spellings, other variations, and other names of the places have been considered. The results show that 43 places are celebrated by English, American, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australian, and Canadian poets. 119 poets refer to those Jordanian places in 225 poems. By way of concluding, this paper shows that Jordan has taken English poets by storm per excellenza due to its Oriental import, strategic location, and historical and religious significance.

Matt Haig in The Midnight Library depicts Nora’s dissatisfaction with her life choices, and this crisis in Nora’s life was so devastating that she wants to commit suicide. This sense of malaise experienced by the majority of human beings due to the sense of disorientation attracts the attention of the audience. Suspended between life and death, Nora found her way to a library where she discovered different versions of her life as if she was living vicariously. She could read about her different roles in life as if she was living in a parallel world, and she saw her life with so many different choices. After all, she realized that all those choices did not bestow her the contentment she was pursuing; instead, her lost contentment was retrieved. This epiphanic event reminds her she can be happy with her choices in life, and it acts as a trompe l’oeil for Nora to distract her attention from the slough of meaninglessness and hopelessness. This paper highlights that the sense of finitude in life can make it more meaningful, and Nora’s Being toward death gives her a phoenix-like rebirth to affirmatively embrace her destiny as it is.

The article deals with the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and aims to show that although the colonisation program to Mars or other colony planets saves the humans from extinction after World War Terminus (WWT), the remaining human population on earth suffers from alienation and class conflict in the aftermath of the nuclear fallout. On the one hand, the colonisation program classifies the humans clinging on to earth to be biologically acceptable and a threat to the race, and on the other hand, the earth’s populace who were physiologically and psychologically affected by the dust are rejected from the normal society. The article also shows that in order to cope with the loneliness and silence, humans resort to technological aids and entertainment devices which ultimately make them even more isolated from each other and tend to infuse them with certain egocentric ideologies. The article further shows that in order to survive and reclaim their shattered identities, humans pick up and try to mend the fragments of ideas and objects which they consider to be indispensable to their existences. Additionally, they tend to transmit their memories, ideas and experiences to the next generation to ensure that the things they believe in and fight for would survive even after their physical demise.

In her memoir Love in a Headscarf, Shelina Janmohamed embarks on a project of presenting a feminist view of Islam. She draws on her experience to claim that Islamic foundational principles essentially empower women but have been misappropriated so much so that they appear to be misogynistic. She borrows from various canonical Islamic sources to present what she believes to be true Islam, which is pro-women and far from being patriarchal. This article aims to provide a dissenting view to Janmohamed’s argument. It seeks to prove that the evidence the author provides to support this argument is far from being solid. Her text shows a clear misunderstanding of canonical Islamic sources in addition to unfamiliarity with other important sources. Additionally, she exhibits a clear confusion between Islamic and pre-Islamic history. In the same vein, the author supports her claim by misquoting some Islamic sources. By explaining these shortcomings in the author’s argument, the article aims at showing that Janmohamed fails to achieve her goal in this project.