Here are four articles on Japanese literature, each of which tries to elucidate its not‑well‑explained aspects from a different point of view. The first one, María Jesús De Prada Vicente’s “The self‑organization of Japanese Literature,” shows us the fundamental character of Japanese literature in terms of self‑organization through oscillations between two poles and shifting of central axes.

One of the things in Japanese literature that Westerners have difficulty in seizing is the notion of seasonal time it relies upon. Different from Western literature based either on mythology or history, Japanese literature has been split between the two and has arranged the antagonism by introducing a third element which consists of the circulation of four seasons. Thus, from the 10th century on, the main rule of composing a Japanese poem has been to express human sentiments by way of a thing or a phenomenon representing one of the four seasons. Now, this introduction of seasonal time is related to the other characteristics of Japanese literature: oscillation and shifting. Instead of making a choice out of them, it oscillates between the mythological and the historical, the primitive and the civilized, the domestic and the international, etc., shifting gradually from the original point in search of a new system of equilibrium. This self‑organizing movement is just like an apparently chaotic dissipative system described and explained by Ilya Prigogine, a world‑famous physicist. Different from Western or Chinese literary systems, it never takes root in the historical nor does it cling to the mythological, but just oscillates between. As for modern literature, we have to say it has difficulties, for the oscillating system does not work fully under the devastating modernization process.

Despite the cultural similarity and the common historical background of Korea and Japan, the two nations created quite different types of mythological heroes. Comparing the ancient texts such as Samguk Yusa in Korea and Kojiki in Japan, we find the following differences: 1) Japanese heroes were generally born rather in an ignoble manner without any superhuman character, while Korean equivalents were born in an extraordinary manner, with superhuman qualities; 2) Japanese heroes conquered lands and built up their nation with cunning and the help of local people, especially of local women, while Korean equivalents did it with bravery and honesty, usually having loyal subordinate men help him. For example, Susanoo, a builder of pre‑Yamato Japan, was born when his father wiped his mucus and did not cease crying all through his youth, while Korean Chumong, the founder of Kogryo, was born out of a giant egg and began to show his extraordinary strength and military skills at the age of seven. The former was expelled from Heaven and got down on Earth where he became a hero, but he conquered the land with cunning and the help of a local woman while the latter bravely fought against enemies and won the wars to be the first king of Kogryo. These differences are important because it is they that mark the fundamental difference in the narrative literature of the two nations.

Although the poetical works of Basho, one of the most eminent haikai poets, have exercised influence on Western modern poetry—whose most well‑known example is Ezra Pound’s imagism—they have often been interpreted wrongly by Westerners who put too much emphasis on Zen spirit. Of course, there are exceptions such as Octavio Paz or Yves Bonnefoy, who made successful interpretations of them by purely literary reading; they tried to understand Basho as a poet, as a linguistic genius, instead of looking for a philosopher in him. Nevertheless, before Lee Oryong, a Korean literary critique, there was no structural analysis of them which could reveal their real universal value. It is thanks to him that the interpretation of Basho entered a new phase. Following and advancing his analysis to a deeper level, we discover Basho’s poetry as a synthesis of structural dynamics deriving from the opposition of two elements and a keen sense of temporality coming from the unconscious in which life and death melt together. “Umi‑kurete / Kamo‑no koe / Honokani shiroshi” (“The Sea darkened / Voices of wild ducks / Vaguely white…”) is one of the best examples of such poetry that evokes the unconscious in which day and night, white and black, visible and audible, reality and dream, life and death melt together. Basho’s poetry is neither realistic nor surrealistic. It is one full of polysemy that derives from the language of the unconscious.

This paper examines the treatment of flowers and other natural elements in the paintings of the Rimpa style against the background history of the style’s description as “decorative.” Since this style was one of the first to be admired, collected, and studied during the period of Japonism from the late nineteenth century, the background of European and American writers led to a description of the style as “decorative,” a description that has not only endured but also migrated to Japanese art‑historical exegesis. In traditional European art, such elements from the natural world tend to be supplementary to a historical, religious, or mythological theme. Works of art on which these themes are presented on their own are classified as decorative art. In Japanese art, notably in Rimpa, such themes are featured as the main subject and derive overwhelmingly from classical literature. In this sense, the themes are more cultural than natural. Rimpa art is not only highly literary in its choice of themes but also in techniques. Artists made rhetorical use of poetic techniques to assert their connection to classical Japanese culture and to “classicize” the Rimpa tradition itself.

For the past forty years, mainstream American comics have openly invited discussions of biopolitics and bioethics, challenging the positivistic metanarrative that genetic engineering will yield tremendous benefits to humankind. Using Hobbes’ consideration of the monstrous sovereign in Leviathan and, by extension, Derrida’s recently published lectures on The Beast and the Sovereign, this paper investigates the ways in which science fiction comics—most notably Jonathan Hickman’s Transhuman—represent the field of genetic research as a force that eschews political and ethical boundaries in order to further a selective vision of the Enlightenment trajectory. Transhuman adapts the tropes of dystopian science fiction to the study of bioethics and offers a bold challenge to the Derridean conception that beasts and sovereigns function as easily interchangeable forces.

Romanian cultural identity emerged as a public issue only in the wake of the 1848 bourgeois and nationalist revolutions. The so‑called “révolutions à la française” kick‑started the split between Romania and the Ottoman world, in all possible respects. Over the last 150 years or so, the Romanian nation as a socio‑symbolic construct has constantly been reworked.

Marthe Bibesco (1885–1973), who lived and wrote under the sign of a double belonging—to Romania, her country of birth, and to France, her country of adoption—deserves an influential place in a European Francophone Literary History that is yet to be written. This essay approaches Bibesco’s work from a Francophone perspective that enables the examination of her double‑writing—a permanent negotiation between a set of dualities: between Paris and Bucharest, between new and old, between the aristocratic and the popular—which also speaks to the difficulty of establishing herself in one place or the other. A cross‑reading of her travel to Persia (Les Huit paradis, 1908) offers insight into the negotiations between Europeanism and Orientalism. Bibesco’s standpoint is “Oriental” when Romanian realities are under consideration, but “Occidental” when Persian realities are filtered through the French model. This separation between the two Orients—Persian and Romanian—triggers an examination of the voice of the young author that tells her first story. It also establishes a stage for the eccentricity of an “Oriental” princess in Paris, as Bibesco represents herself in writing. Behind the Eight Paradises’ “fabulous Orient,” one can detect the influence of the French writers’ exoticism but also the traces of repression of a Romanian reality that the author wants to escape from.

Romania, a young state at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, had to find for itself a convenient position on the European map. It was not a European power center, but a periphery that fought for being recognized. This periphery developed a strategy of seducing the center, based on emphasizing the picturesque, via which an area full of differences was poetically represented as pleasant, interesting, and relaxing. The picturesque diminished the differences that the eye of the foreign traveler discovered in both the human and natural landscapes: the differences became agreeable, without needing to deny or conceal them. Integration into another world could thus be made without giving up any particularities, which nevertheless had to become part of the communication, in order to create a discourse that would make them known and accepted. The present article is dedicated to the transformation of a cultural concept (the picturesque) in a cultural, economic, and political advertising strategy of the country and its provinces, in an age in which communication specialists or branding manuals were totally unknown.

The following article considers the reframing of cultural identity in post‑1989 Romanian literature, in response to the growing pressures of globalization. Based on a careful analysis of a range of recent literary examples, the author argues that the reflection of cultural identity in Romanian literature has often been balanced, however precariously, between global and local interests. At its best, post‑1989 literature emphasizes simultaneously transnational/intercultural aspirations and local specificity.

This contribution points to one of the main turning points in the cultural representation of Romanian identity: national communism. For Ceaușescu’s national dictatorship, the landmarks of Romanian identity were both products of a cultural effort and canny political instruments. Our analysis aims to highlight the main part assigned to the intellectual and artistic discourses of the time (para‑science, history, film, fiction, poetry, fine arts) in the construction of a fake collective memory meant to distort the public perception of the present and to legitimize the existing political power. The staunch communist campaign for the construction of a Dacian homeland was based mostly on an integrated dictatorial memory—unselfconscious, commanding, all‑powerful, spontaneously actualizing—a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition. From Ceaușescu’s perspective, the Master Trope of the “Dacian paradise lost” was designed to create a space for intellectual production and to become literally constitutive for academic disciplines such as history, geography, ethnology, philosophy, and linguistics, but first and foremost for the artistic associated practices as well as for the production of nationalistic‑oriented literature.

We dedicate this special column on Brazil to José Newton de Seixas Pereira Filho, who graduated from the Purdue University Comparative Literature Program in 2008, after defending his dissertation titled “The Non‑violent Desires of Street Orphans in Anglo‑American and Luso‑Brazilian and Violent Mimet‑eratures.”

Shakespeare’s Juliet is arguably the first woman of tragic stature to appear in Western literature since Greek tragedy or the death of Dido in the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Our first glimpse of Juliet’s active moral agency occurs when she coyly answers her mother’s attempt to persuade her to base her decision to marry Paris by looking him over at the party that night. By contrast, her mother, Lady Capulet, comes across as an uneducated, even bitter woman who struggles to explain the facts of life to her daughter. But in the Brazilian movie version, “O Casamento do Romeu e Julieta” (directed by Bruno Barreto, 2005), Lady Capulet is no longer shallow. As in several other adaptations of Shakespeare, the Brazilian version of Shakespeare’s most popular play solves problems of gender by updating them into a realistic setting where women are active moral agents despite living in a world where men are men.

This essay considers three cases of alleged plagiarism by three prominent postcolonial authors: Witi Ihimaera (a Māori from New Zealand, also called Aotearoa) and two Francophone authors, Yambo Ouologuem (from Mali, the former French Equatorial Africa) and Calixthe Beyala (from Cameroon, who now lives in France). Whereas the case against Ihimaera is a straightforward one of the misuse of intellectual property, the more serious offence in the case of Ouologuem and Beyala was the failure to deliver works sufficiently authentic to please their critics.

This essay connects a minimalist approach to Ekphrasis—the transfer from the visual to the textual as proposed by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an eighteenth‑century playwright, poet, and theorist of the image. Lessing influenced Bertolt Brecht’s approach to cutting devices for the sake of montage in the epic theatre of the twentieth century and Eisenstein’s stills in film, as discussed in the context of theoretical statements by Roland Barthes. Lessing’s minimalist approach to the visual can further be linked to condensation in film, such as discussed by Christian Metz and, more recently, Anton Kaes, whose observations on the omission of the traumatic in post‑WWII cinema are reminiscent of Lessing’s motto: “The more we see the more we must be able to imagine.”

Generalizations can be made about the role and status of English in socio‑cultural contexts where the language has long been considered the sole property of native speakers, taught as a foreign language, reliant on external linguistic norms, and privileging the canons of American and British literature. In sociolinguistic literature, these contexts are referred to as the expanding circle of world Englishes. However, a closer look at individual contexts—whether defined along national lines (e.g., English in Brazil) or regional lines (English in Europe)—shows that not only are these broad generalizations often inaccurate characterizations of the expanding circle as a whole, but also that each context, although similar in some respects to one another, has characteristics that distinguish it. Differences can be seen, for example, with respect to the history of contact with English speakers, the status of English vis‑à‑vis local languages, or the role of English in various domains of use. In many respects, these differences are a consequence of changes introduced by processes of globalization. This paper, following overviews, examines differences between and among three expanding circle contexts (Brazil, China, and Germany) and outlines the significance of their distinctiveness for implications of the world Englishes paradigm—not only for teaching the English language but for other areas of English studies as well.

This paper argues for the significance of Orpheus as a racialized body in Brazil. A consistent feature of Orpheus in Brazil throughout the twentieth century is his blackness. This is the case in each of the three variations of the Orpheus myth in twentieth‑century Brazilian drama and literature: Vinicius de Moraes’ play Orfeu da Conceição (Orpheus of Conception), Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus, and Carlos Diegues’ Orfeu. Thus, the Brazilian Orpheus fits into a context not only of twentieth‑century classical reception in Brazil and throughout the modern world, but also in discussions of Afrodescendent communities in Brazil and the Americas.

The past three years witness the growing‑up of FWLS. Thanks to all the members of Editorial Board and authors, FWLS has been included in MLA International Bibliography database, Annual Bibliography of English, and will be included in EBSCO’s English Language and Literature library. We expect all the articles published in FWLS will be available on EBSCO’s database called LITERARY REFERENCE CENTER PLUS in early 2012.