In what ways can the coded literature that circulates in the digital realm be interpreted in light of the logic of change? At present, pre-individual hyperlinks and hypermedia, encompassing the internet, social media platforms, blogs, hashtags, Twitter, and the world wide web, are utilized to represent the database of encoded literary texts. The correlation between the internet and AI is a captivating subject in the age of artificial intelligence. The historical progression of the World Wide Web illustrates its genetic and developmental stages: from static text-based information that was easily navigable for users to the social web, which integrated user-generated content and web applications, and finally to the “semantic web,” which implemented artificial intelligence and machine learning. Transductive Intermedia, an emerging technology that integrates machine learning algorithms and user-supplied data via neural networks trained by artificial intelligence, facilitates enhanced “interoperability” and “hyper-connectivity” among diverse platforms and devices (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube). The touchscreen or electronic interface serves as an illustration that “code” can be considered an essential element of the “text” in the form of a digital world literature database. This is apparent in electronic literature, digital poetry, and digital poetics of the present day. The aim of this article was to reassess the consequences of the challenges that the convergence of artificial intelligence, intermedia, digital humanities, and digitized/born-digital world literature presents. Furthermore, it proposes the concept of the pre-individual within the realm of transductive digital world literature.

After the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1986, innovation and opening-up policies were implemented in many fields, including literature and the arts. The change in the ethical environment—along with the context of reform, the market economy and international integration—helped local novels to reap many achievements, but it also unearthed non-educational works. These two aspects of the issue relate intimately to how an author writes a novel. The characteristics of a novelist’s ethical identity are exceptional: novelists are both citizen and artist. Their writings are the textualisation of their brain texts and reveal the ethical choices made by each individual author while writing. If the novel is based on a valuable brain text, the work improves human truth, goodness and beauty. If, however, a writer’s brain text does not contain teaching value, it cannot be considered a genuine literary work but should be forgotten or banned from publication and circulation. This article applies the theory of brain text (脑文本), an exclusive invention of Professor Nie Zhenzhao, to analyse the ethical choices of Vietnamese novelists from 1986 to the present. This study demonstrates (i) the uniqueness of brain text theory, (ii) the novel as a fruition of the textualisation of a brain text and (iii) the didactic function of contemporary novels on the basis of the brain text of Vietnamese novelists.

For both practitioners and theoreticians concerned with literary translation, The Triumph of the Snake Goddess, translation of Manasamangal Kāvya, must be a classic. The earliest form of Mangal Kāvya, the epic narrates the story of Manasa, the snake goddess, who seeks everyone’s devotion, ultimately conquering the worshippers of other deities. The paper aims to examine how prose translation of verse retains the depth and appeal of the original text like Manasamangal Kāvya. The book is a composite translation from the medieval Bengali epic, which, of course, is not easy for a modern reader to unravel. Kaiser Haq, the foremost English language poet and one of the leading translators of Bangladesh, renders the poem into modern English, employing the creative translation process. The paper focuses on omissions and incorporations, and therefore on the consequent much deliberated issues of loss and gain. The paper also offers a meticulous comparative study between the source text and the translation, with an object of discovering if creative translation commits violence to or enriches the original. The paper further investigates how much the translation is relegated from the original, or how the original resonates with the translation, as far as meaning, form, and style are concerned.

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta starts with a preface put into Machiavelli’s mouth. This introduction has sparked a lot of controversy. According to scholars, Machiavelli was a genius, and Marlowe believed that Machiavelli knew of him. There is debate whether the preface is related to the rest of the play, or whether it is a sensational work that may have been added after the play was written. Marlowe seems to have achieved his goal of exploring Machiavellian ideas through Barabas and Ferneze and demonstrating some Machiavellian guidelines. This research attempts to explore various issues related to Machiavelli as well as Machiavellianism. A large number of discourses in the history of Western thought has been associated with Machiavelli as he is reckoned a philosopher of the first rank based on his ideas and actions which had a lasting impact on his succeeding philosophers and political thinkers over time. It also examined the character of Barabbas as his resistance is important to shed light on the struggle he had to make under Catholicism. On another, the massacre in Paris is compared because it contains a theme similar to Geese. Marlowe’s play touches on the subject of Machiavellianism and explains some of the religious and political influences of his time.

In the speech she delivered to the Modern Language Association in 1991, Mary Louise Pratt described contact zones as ideal spaces for cross-cultural interaction. This idealism, however, means not that contact zones are conflict-free spaces, since living in a place where cultures “meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (3) is expected to take the individual out of his comfort zone. This cultural instability, nevertheless, is what helps him acquire one of the arts which Pratt sees essential to successful social interaction in contact zones. Acculturation, the process by which the individual selects the aspects he finds suitable from the host culture and rejects those he does not find so without getting emotionally involved, helps him form a less culturally fixed identity and more socially successful relations across cultures. When read in light of a later article in which Pratt (1994) studies the relation holding the female to her nation, this speech can help give a better understanding of the formation of the female’s identity in culturally diverse settings, especially in the case of the diasporic female who, due to harsh political, social or economic conditions, has been forced to leave her home country and to settle in a foreign one. To this end, the study examines the impact contact zones have on the formation of the female’s identity in a diasporic context, specifically the Arab American diasporic context by analyzing four selected short stories by four Arab American writers: Mohja Kahf’s “Manar of Hama”, Laila Halaby’s “Hair, Men and Prayers”, Samia Serageldin’s “It’s Not About That” and Pauline Kaldas’ “He Had Dreamed of Returning”. The aim is to examine the extent to which the diasporic female protagonist in each of them is able to form a less culturally rooted identity and to establish more successful social relations with members of other cultures in contact zones.

This article reads Syrian playwright Adwan’s appropriation of Hamlet as a representation of the grappling of Arab youths against authority. Unlike previous articles on Hamlet Wakes Up Late (1976), this article considers Laertes as a central figure to this analysis, and hence, it views his fight, and by extension that of Arab youths, as an attempt to defy totalitarian regimes. By relying on the conception of the intellectual, as developed by both Gramsci and Said, we attempt to demonstrate how Laertes, a standout figure in Adwan’s rewriting of Hamlet, is the one who leads a revolution that gives voice to the youths in the MENA region. Notwithstanding this fact, Laertes remains unable to stand against the regime, which represses these youth-led revolts. This fact is historically proven as this article takes Adwan’s narrative as a counter discourse and a resistance to Shabiha, a group of thugs working to maintain the regime’s apparatus. The play represents the role Shabiha play in detaining and torturing dissidents such as Lorenzo; a character that Adwan adds to highlight how brutally totalitarian regimes reply to any attempt to change the status quo.

This paper intends to deal with Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh by focusing on the consequences of anthropogenic environmental degradation which leaves deep scars on members of both human and non-human worlds. Basing the theoretical framework on the term environmental refugee, which is also referred to as climate refugee or eco-migrant, the study focuses on how environmental derangement turns into a push factor in migration. Presenting the ecological mishaps arising not only in the Sundarbans but also in Los Angeles, Venice, and Rome as reflected in the novel, this study claims that as environmental degradation ultimately results in either internal or external migration, it is not a local but a global issue threatening the entire universe. To this end, firstly the study attempts to establish the conceptual underpinnings of environmental refugee as a term primarily because it is a topic which has been neglected legally and does not have an accurate definition. Then, it examines how environmental disruption and disasters leave human beings and animals with no choice but to flee from their traditional habitats. As such, the study analyses the novel’s text as a research methodology in order to present how environmental degradation leads living beings to migrate as it is conveyed through its human and animal characters and plot.

When postcolonial writers insert their Indigenous knowledges in the body of texts written in any of the Metropolitan languages, two things are achieved: a (re)enactment of Manichean dualism or the creation of texts that trade their monolithic cultural identity for a syncretised configuration. Binary politics is re-enacted within the texts as various local epistemologies expressed through Indigenous language(s) struggle with hegemonic European language(s). The texts become a site of linguistic and epistemological contentions, as the major battles with the minor for supremacy. Rather than having a completely English/French/Portuguese African text, the reader is left with a potpourri of languages and episteme. This article builds on the foregoing contentions to revalidate the concerns of critics on the imperativeness of using Indigenous knowledges in African literature so as to end the marginality of Africa languages and literature in global literary scholarship. Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives is analysed to expound this concern and indicate how an African writer employs linguistic/literary strategies to subvert Europhonism and prove that world literatures should embrace cultural plurality. The article submits that global knowledge production is not monolithic, but multifarious. It, therefore, calls for the recognition of other knowledge sources outside the purview of European epistemology.

This article explores the representation of cannibalism in contemporary Argentinian novels and reveals how the motif is employed as one of humans’ ultimate fears: to be treated like animals. As an anthropocentric point of view inevitably enables speciesism, and since through similar hierarchical structures humans justify their domination over each other through class stratification, the discriminatory discourses that perpetuate human aggression towards humans and animals do not stem from completely distinct psychological processes. Justification of violence, mass massacres, killing and exploiting animals, their transformation into normative human behavior requires the utilization of very similar defense mechanisms. Tender is the Flesh presents a world where animal meat becomes inedible after a pandemic and animal agriculture is transformed into a cannibalistic business. Humans who are raised for meat are called heads. Cannibalism and its maintenance, and the language used to refer to the practice are closely monitored by an autocratic government, and the cognitive dissonance people might experience as a result of their participation in a violent process is kept under control. The article provides a close reading of the novel by highlighting how cannibalism is rendered normal and natural through psychological mechanisms such as dehumanization, objectification, and deindividualization.

As one of the representative writers of the early romantic period in the United States, Hawthorne’s travel writing has obvious romantic characteristics. On the aesthetic level, he knows how to grasp the light and shadow effect projected on the characters and change the picturesque favor of ruins, irregularity and nature, creating the rules of the American picturesque landscape. At the political level, his vision not only looks abroad, but also gazes at the homeland, stripping out the political ecology and conception of ethnic integration of the United States through the comparison of the landscape. Finally, with the strategy of landscape writing followed by historical writing, he highly unifies politics and aesthetics, and carves the metaphor of national identity into the picturesque landscape, so as to achieve the purpose of easing national contradictions.

Ethical Literary Criticism, as a scientific and interdisciplinary research system, provides a wealth of academic resources for international academic studies, including those of Japanese literature. By comprehensively grasping the ethical characteristics of Japanese literature, and relying on the theories of Ethical Literary Criticism to re-read Japanese literary classics, a bidirectional interaction between Ethical Literary Criticism and Japanese literature research can be formed. Through cross-disciplinary research that involves Japanese literature and areas such as translation studies, ecology, and history, the interdisciplinary nature of Ethical Literary Criticism is further demonstrated.