At an annual series of talks on current books, titled “Books and Coffee” and held at Purdue University in 2012 each Thursday from February 2 to February 23, Carolyn Johnson, the director of the Diversity Resource Office, made the point that what she called “cultural literacy” was required of readers who would make sense of the various viewpoints represented in the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, a white woman who wrote about the unacknowledged use of a black woman’s DNA for medical research.

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks is a sophisticated example of recent historical fiction that mines the archives of colonial America. Brooks persuasively imagines the experiences of women and Native people, figures who are rarely represented in our special collections and history books.

Stieg Larsson’s best seller is purportedly about the violence men inflict on women, but it also can be read, at least humorously, as an essay on the recent cultural phenomenon of tattoos. It turns out The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more about Elvis Presley than ink.

A version of this paper was delivered on February 23, 2012, as part of the Books and Coffee Series at Purdue University. This paper presents Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and it discusses the role of biography in both the writing and receptions of her novel. In addition, it argues that Durrow’s novel revises and expands received ideas concerning the black women’s literary tradition in the U.S.

The continuation and innovation of Poe’s handling of landscape and landscape gardens in Romantic and Gothic traditions can best be found in his construction of both the landscape of Gothic nightmares and the landscape of paradisiacal gardens. This article investigates Poe’s poetic visions — dreamscape, Gothic landscape, and the paradisiacal landscape garden, and reveals that these features thread through Poe’s poems, Gothic tales, and sketches, weaving Poe’s view of man, nature, and the universe into an aesthetic theory of unity.

In issue 4/1 (April 2012) of Forum for World Literature Studies, we presented a collection of five essays focused on a comparative reading of some of the main European and Latin American referents of the vast literary output of Ramón del Valle Inclán (1866-1936), one of the most important Spanish writers and playwrights of his time. The essays by Darío Villanueva, Robert Lima, Margarita Santos, Antonio Pedrós-Gascón and Rosario Mascato-Rey allowed us to delve into the prose, the stage works, the thought, the poetry and the interartistic links that characterize Valle Inclán’s work and make it so current. At the same time, we were able to show the unique way Valle-Inclán’s aesthetic integrated the key points of the historical reality that the author experienced personally and intensely. It is an aesthetic that continued to be reformulated over the years. The author did this to gain the public favour, but he also felt a need to interpret with the most effective tools the historical and cultural changes he was living, as well as their direct consequences in the public and political spheres and the private and local ones.

This study investigates Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s view of war in the Carlist series (three novels and a tragedy) that appeared between 1908 and 1911. The subject of the series was the Spanish civil war of 1872-1876 known as the last Carlist War, a conflict in which insurgent troops and peasant guerrilla bands revolted to defend their traditional forms of life against modernizing trends: secularization, republicanism, and bourgeois economies. Central to the argument is the focus on situational irony, a device that structures all four works and calls into question readings that discover an heroic exaltation of war in the series. This essay proposes that Valle-Inclán “disenchants” such a view by presenting war as rooted in fratricidal murder, political corruption and the passion for revenge, a vision that influenced the shift in his art toward a poetics of the grotesque.

The aim of this paper is to develop a comparative thematic reading regarding the two Don Juan versions created by Valle-Inclán. In order to do so, three factors will be taken into account: those related to intertextuality, the different interpretations of the myth at the end of the 19th century, and the modernization Valle Inclán subjects the myth to at different stages of his writing.

In this paper I propose a reflection about the relationships between cinema and literary texts in which I emphasize the difficulties that texts with a clear predominance of discourse over story present in the process of translation to the screen. I also explain how Valle-Inclán’s narrative work is characterized by an appreciable degree of creativity which almost entirely disappears in its transfer to the cinematographic format. After this, I proceed with an analysis of the seven adaptations that have been made of his works up until now, explaining the different solutions adopted by the respective directors and investigating the cold reception they had.

In current debates on world literature the low degree of attention paid to the issue of translation is in sharp contrast to the advocation of its centrality by scholars in translation studies. David Damrosch is one of the few scholars who has resorted to translation for one of his definitions of world literature. The aim of this paper is to test his definition of world literature as “writing that gains in translation.” Whereas it is clear that one of the ways in which works circulate is interlingually, one should not overlook the fact that the power of languages is unevenly distributed. For a work to reach the wider world, two conditions need to concur: a) a large number of speakers and b) a widespread distribution of the language community. In the Western world, two languages meet these conditions as a result of imperial expansionism—Spanish and English. Both of them are the media for two world-literatures. In this landscape, I will approach a very specific case study, the 1929 English translation of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s novel Tirano Banderas, originally published in Spanish in 1926. One lesson that this case study provides to world literature from a translation perspective is that going global is not simply a matter of interlingual switch.

亨利克·约翰·易卜生（Henrik Johan Ibsen,1828-1906）作为一个对世界剧坛产生深远影响的人物，其作品的丰富性和复杂性一直是研究者们津津乐道的原因。百十年来易卜生相关研究资料可谓瀚若星晨，但是这并不影响我们对易卜生戏剧进行重读和再阐释，比如《浙江工商大学学报》2013年第1期刊发了“文学伦理学批评：重读易卜生”1的专栏论文，以及《世界文学研究论坛》在2012年第刊发了“易卜生戏剧的文学伦理学批评”2专栏论文，相关研究论文采用文学伦理学批评方法，结合文本细读，对易卜生戏剧的再阐释有着十分重要的意义。因为“用文学伦理学批评的方法研究易卜生，显然可以深刻揭示出易卜生戏剧的新特质，发现被我们忽视了的价值存在，这就是不同的伦理冲突导致的一系列各种各样的伦理问题……无论是易卜生的社会问题剧还是其他的戏剧，无不以提出伦理问题和伦理思考为特征。无论剧中的人物如何活动，他们都无法超越伦理选择的过程……易卜生戏剧的价值不仅在于充分揭示了他那个时代不同社会的人所经历的伦理选择的复杂性，而且也揭示了整个欧洲文明是怎样在自身的伦理选择过程中形成的”（聂珍钊 22.

Lady Inger of Ostrat tells the story of a Northern heroine who struggles between patriotic duty and maternal love. Through the creation of this character and her tragedy brought about by her own wrong choices, the play shows to the audience and readers the conflicts between national interests and personal interests and thus warns us: at the critical moment when a nation is in danger, it is wise to abandon personal interests for the interests of our country.

Drawing upon history Emperor and Galilean revolves around Julian’s life from prince to Caesar, from Caesar to the Emperor of Rome, and to his final tragic death. The changes of his identity and his understanding of humanity are the underlying reasons for each of his ethical choices, which in turn constitute dramatic transitions in his life. Staging Julian’s apostasy and destruction, this play presents the Sphinx Factor and the important role ethical choices play in the life of individuals.

Pillars of Society satirizes the bourgeois ethics and morality through the representative Bernick, implying that ethical morality has become a restriction on people’s freedom. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, this paper attempts to analyze how Bernick, the typical character, chooses to act when faced with ethical dilemmas and moral redemption. Structurally, the climax is Bernick’s public penance, which seems to provide a final answer and leads to a happy ending. In terms of writing techniques, the contrast between Bernick and Lona, who represents the new woman, symbolizes the contradiction between old and new values and morality. Therefore, the theme of the drama centers around redemption as the ethical line and conveys moral education during the character’s deconstruction of ethical knots. Meanwhile, the drama displays Ibsen’s ethical desire to reconstruct the social and moral systems.

Chong Yag-yong’s “Howling of a Woman, with the Penis Cut Off Her Husband” written in Chinese characters is a poem that we call people’s poetry. The poem contains in it some subjective emotion and intellect, which I analyze in this paper. I translate the whole poem into Korean for the readers.

A Selection of Literary Essays by Korean Writers Living in Manchuria is the only anthology of the Manchu essays in Manchukuo, the puppet state of Japan. We find two themes. Geography is one. The literary space is expressed by juxtaposing the present (Manchuria) and the past (Korea) when the essayist talks about geography. Mythology is another to discover the identity of old and current Korea. And several others, who take different ways to express themselves, tend to keep distance from the time and place they are in, and instead focus on literary problems seriously and realistically, to cope with their rages and tragedies in Manchukuo.

Sol Jongsik (1912-1953) began writing poetry early, in 1932, at age 20, but he did not write much until 1947. During the five-year period from 1945 to 1950, he published about 60 poems, releasing three books: Bells (1947), Grapes, and Rages of Gods (1948). He is a key to understanding Korean literature just before and after the Korean War.

Korean Sŏn poetry displays many formal traits and profound content, in highly condensed poetic ideas, paradoxically more expressive by omission of sundry epithets. Its ideational quantum is so speedy and reductive but powerful as to strike out sparkling imagery. Its aesthetic elegance is a little rough and tough, but its enlightenment resounds with vast seismic vertical depth silently to its origin. Its frequent use of rhetorical condensation, conceit, disconnection, paradox, parallelism, physical figuration, the union of opposite qualia, indefinite reality, and transcendental metaphors makes Sŏn poetry strike down to the essence of the mind, usually called the Buddha’s Nature.

陈众议先生的新作《塞万提斯学术史研究》（凤凰出版传媒集团，译林出版社2011年12月第一版）出版了，可喜可贺。在对《塞万提斯学术史研究》评说之前，不能不先说陈众议为“外国文学学术史研究”撰写的总序。这篇文章从外国文学学术史研究的视角，在世界政治和经济演变的大背景里，对外国文学研究的发展进行纵向和横向考察，对文学研究中的种种现象进行归纳总结，对学界一些重要问题进行深入反思，放眼世界，纵论天下文学，真知灼见，尽显其中，是近些年来难得一见的精彩文章.

Art and Morals: Iris Murdoch’s Fictional World is one of the most beautiful flowers due to the “Ethical Turn” in the garden of Chinese literary criticism in that its author “speaks as an individual” and that it is characterized by revisiting literary ethics, revolting against the convention of theory-first and interpretation-second, and focusing on art and morals in Murdoch’s fiction.

Carol Shields, as one of the most eminent authors in Canadian literature, is famous for The Stone Diaries, which won her both the Governor General’s Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This paper aims to study the novel’s structure, content, theme, genre, narrative skills, and so on in order to present its writing features and the artistic effects achieved by the author’s implementation of the techniques. The Stone Diaries is a combination of determinate and indeterminate features, including indeterminate genre, narrator, and self-erasure, which increases the tension in the interpretation of this work.