The paper is aimed at analysing the novelette Šaha partija [A Game of Chess] (1923) written by the pioneer of Latvian modern short story and translator Jānis Ezeriņš in the context of Latvian chess history and Latvian literature. By stepping out of the ordinary world around us, any play structures its spatial and temporal boundaries to eventually transform into a game. Games, specifically brain games, being both logical and creative situational activities, not only turn chaos into a systematic order, but by organizing reality they also map humans’ intelligence and unleash their instincts. While striving to reveal the great significance of apparently insignificant occurrences in human life, Ezeriņš reflects on the grotesque and absurd by delving into playful shifts and play-elements to depict both the plot twists and interchange of tragic and comic colouring, as well as the fusion of the binary oppositions the “past—present,” “good—evil,” “alive—dead.”

Literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of all Human spirit, in which all should worship. Eaglestone’s concept attaches great significance of humanity thought to Gorky’s novels. The Mother («Мать», 1906) and The Life of Unnecessary People («Жизнь Ненужного Человека», 1907) are both novels written by Gorky after the failure of Russian Revolution in 1905. However, the protagonist images in the works form a sharp contrast between “revolutionary” and “treachery.” Gorky’s unified and intercorroborated ethical illustration of the contrasted protagonists demonstrates the generation and extinction of the two characters’ ethical consciousness which usually goes through the ethical struggle of “humanity” and “barbarity,” presenting ethical intersection of “love” and “hatred” catalyzed by ethical identity and ethical environment, and strengthening the ethical choice of “justice” and “betrayal” of human nature. Based on the comparative studies of the two novels The Mother and The Life of Unnecessary People, this study highlights Gorky’s ethical thought in the two novels, traces its communicative footsteps in modern China, and explores the contemporary significance of “abandoning the evil and promoting the good” from the perspective of human ethics. Therefore, Gorky’s artistic form is considered a quality that makes art a unique and suitable carrier for audience political education. More than that, he is the creative producer of ideas. And the commonality of his works is the commitment to teaching how to think, rather than learning to think.

Studying affect in works of fiction can shed light on aspects which may remain hidden otherwise. Julia Kristeva is one theorist demonstrating the semiotic in language through scrutinizing affect in literary texts. This paper is an attempt to explore the semiotic dimensions of affect in Connie Willis’s neglected novel Passage. This novel is categorized under the NDE genre, which is the genre of literature concerned with near-death experiences. In this novel, disastrous and traumatic events related to the experience of death by various characters, especially the protagonist Joanna Lander, produce fearful moments. These can be captured through the type of genre of the text, silences and pauses, different sorts of deprivation in characters, and the features of poetic language in the text itself. In such situations, the readers’ identification with the characters contributes to the affective aspect of the text. A close reading of the semiotic aspect of this novel, utilizing the theories of Kristeva, demonstrates how characters’ death drive can put them in disastrous situations, contrary to those with jouissance. It also depicts how traumatic events can become more tolerable in human beings’ social life with the help of identification, reconciliation, social collectiveness, camaraderie, and emotional bond between characters, despite the casualties.

This discussion highlights aspects of Korean writer Yi Cheong-jun’s short story “The Wounded” (1966) which align with elements of Rachel Freudenburg’s theories on the fictions of friendship in 20th-century German literature. A comparison with Freudenburg’s analysis, as she applies it to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), exemplifies how the still-living older brother fulfills for Yi’s narrator the same function as the deceased Adrian Leverkühn for Serenus Zeitblom. The brother’s decade-long repetitive cycle of saving lives ensured that he presented as a stable, reliable site onto which Yi’s narrator could project his illusionary identity of war veteran. Only when the older brother began a cycle of violence did he shatter in the capacity of mirror for the narrator’s projections. In “The Wounded” the narrator’s preoccupation with assuming the problematic identity of Korean war veteran from the site of his still-living older brother is, ultimately, I suggest, an attempt to eclipse the crippling identity of economic non-entity, airbrushed out of the story yet evident in the blind spot—that is, in the double-speak of the female characters.

This article analyses the short story collection Un beduino en el Caribe (A Bedouin in the Caribbean), written by the Sahrawi author Ali Salem Iselmu and published in 2014. Although the Saharan desert remains at the core of the collection, representing the quintessential and predominant place in the author’s literary universe, these short stories also depict an amalgam of places, the cohabitation of different cultures, and thus, the Sahrawi migration as a multi-space phenomenon. Drawing on the idea that fictional literature can be an effective tool for political resistance, and that the negotiation of an alternative identity within a hegemonic order requires a space, this article argues that Iselmu’s short stories project resistance literary spaces where the author expresses his disapproval of the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara and vindicates a nomad and transboundary identity. This resistance is achieved through the construction (and habitation) of a borderland at a narrative level, characterized by a fluid and flexible identity and multiple and juxtaposed geographical spaces, where the Sahrawi narrative voices can reimagine their identity and their sense of sovereignty.

In this article, the analysis propounded is, on the one hand, phenomenological because it centers on the transcendental aspect of each main character in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints, and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Examining a character’s consciousness and psyche might help grasp the meaning of life and world as perceived by it. On the other hand, this literary investigation requires that O’Neill’s, Synge’s, and Faulkner’s characters be approached from a hermeneutic perspective in order to show the possibility of selecting or winnowing, from their emotions, reactions, and standings, new meanings and interpretations which might never have been anticipated by the authors themselves. Thus, this article proposes to bring about a probable and unpredictable relation between past and present in the lives of the major characters, and to demonstrate that these texts can manifest connectedness with the cultural and psychological concepts as developed by Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva, and Carl Gustav Jung. It is assumed that the new meanings, the heroic combats, and the often tragic experiences of the major characters may line up with the cultural materialist notions of Williams. Williams advocates that characters in literary texts ought to act like dissidents so that they might subvert and display fissures within the dominant cultural institutions of a society. They may also be engaged in unstoppable philosophical and intellectual questioning of the mainstream discourse. The delineation and portrayal of the characters in the three texts exhibit tangible embodiment of Jungian and Kristevan psychoanalytic concepts. Both of them advocate that a literary critic needs to activate and construct an archetype, and discover the several but essential presuppositions of economic, social, and political order in the analysed text, for they intercede between the reader and the text in the process of understanding its mythical and psychological rationalization of the inner life and of the world around each character. Henceforth, this article will assert the argument that archetypes, psychic troubles, and social (cultural) types are to be interpreted and examined in relation to some central issues like the gendered place of women, family, social status, and the cultural prejudices within modern society. Jung’s, Kristeva’s, and Williams’s psychoanalytic and cultural concepts will sustain our analysis, which is devoted to the effort of bringing into awareness the way female and male characters, though they might be rebels at miscellaneous instances, are obliged to submit to the patriarchal discriminatory cultural order of the society they live in. In sum, all the aesthetic inclinations throughout which Jung’s, Kristeva’s, and Williams’s different theoretical and philosophical views can interact and correlate with O’Neill’s, Synge’s, and Faulkner’s texts are also to be highlighted and given another significant artistic dimension.

German playwright Bertolt Brecht and his Nigerian counterpart Femi Osofisan are noted to propagate the epic theatre tradition riding at the back of avant-garde creative consciousness. They challenge the existing dramatic status quo and the tyrannical, Aristotelian, classical composition on stage. Given their epic theatre commitment, many critics interpret their plays from the prism of socio-political involvement, perceiving their works as social, critical commentaries with a Marxist bent. While these kinds of interpretations are valid and capture the playwrights’ ideological enthusiasm, they disregard the more enduring legacy of audience participation which in effect has granted their works global acclaim. Using The Good Woman of Setzuan and Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, I argue that audience participation is a practical theatrical technique which provides a genuine substratum for the two texts to flourish. I further submit that the two texts provide theatre practitioners an option to adopt audience participation technique to involve spectators on stage in a world caught viciously in the stranglehold of adverse social hegemony. By providing the option, Brecht and Osofisan uphold the argument that the playwright and the audience are active participants in restoring the theatre to its evanescing glory as an instrument of social reawakening.

Aeschylus in Persians (472 BC) employed binary opposition to prime its audience with the concept of “Otherness,” incarnated by their first threat, the Persians, instigating the seeds of Eurocentrism, which later embedded in the canon of classical world literature—particularly the one that solidified in the early modern period. Persians as “other” doubly-layered during the Renaissance when the West came to know more tangibly about the East via trades, expeditions, and/or colonization. West-East cultural as well as political confrontation evolved, most sordidly, in the representation of the exotic “Orient” and its association with Islam. In this article, Aeschylus’s Persians is juxtaposed to two early modern plays, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1588) and Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer (1676), in order to illuminate how easterners in classical dramatic literature have been portrayed wicked and dangerously threatening to civilizations and civilians of the West. Persians meticulously shows how drama contains political messaging and mirrored the contemporary historical issues of the polis. Along with its purpose to educate and entertain, Persians mapped out a way of understanding easterners that provided its audience with an inaccurate image of Persians. This discourse propagated through the centuries until the present day where we see evidence of it in films such as 300. This malicious representation has continued to modern and postmodern period, especially in drama, film, and cinema.

Among the three principal domains of the environment: air, land and water, land is most prized by terrestrial people while water is of utmost importance to coastal dwellers. A major consequence of oil pollution is that it deteriorises the marine capital of a fishery community which is vital for its fish economy. Using Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Helon Habila’s Oil On Water as its analytical touchstones, this paper contextualises the consequences of marine oil pollution on occupational fishery activities among Niger-Deltans within the framework of the people’s shared aspiration for economic survival and group identity. With ecocriticism as theoretical canvass and interpretive content analysis as methodology, the paper contends that the castration of the fishery livelihood of the delta underpins its environmental degradation with sundry collateral consequences.

This study explores the psychological effects of social and political stress on the common man and the role of corruption in committing crimes as depicted in A Crime at Restaurant Street. It traces the playwright’s prediction of social change to worse, suggesting that socio-political corruption creates pressure and deep trauma, which lead to psychological disorder and change the hero to worse. This study is a qualitative study that uses psychoanalytical theory as well as trauma critical theory. Findings indicate that the play is a reminder that corruption and injustice are still major problems in Yemen during the reign of Saleh and after, and that the struggle for justice is far-fetched. The destructive nature of corruption leads to psychological consequences, and the trauma experienced by the protagonist leads to post-traumatic stress disorder that makes him end up in terrorism. The study concludes that the playwright thus portrays both the necessity of a complete social transformation and an utter lack of belief that such a transformation would take place.

Biwu Shang’s monograph A Study of Ian McEwen’s Novels and Their Ethical Values (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2023), the first book-length study dealing with the ethical and moral issues in McEwan’s works in China, is a highly valuable and much-needed contribution to world McEwan scholarship. Shang’s book starts from the unsettled question of McEwan’s status as one of the finest and most controversial writers of his generation: How could a writer have achieved popularity and critical success with his works about paedophilia, murder, incest, and violence? Shang finds the very answer in McEwan’s claim of the moral role of the novel. In his monograph, Shang provides a comprehensive and systematic survey of ethical issues as explored in McEwan’s oeuvre. More ambitiously, as the author claimed, “the goal is to discover the ethical implications in McEwan’s works, reflecting Chinese scholars’ critical perspectives of Western literary works through dialectical analysis, thereby offering an alternative interpretation other than following Western scholars’ critical approaches and viewpoints.”