We are in a time of rapid change, a time that ethical issues are addressed by various disciplines: philosophy, economics, medical science, art and literature, to name only a few. Terence Hawkes rightly points out in his General Preface to the New Accents series that a time of rapid and radical change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to change it and he perceptively realizes that such changes are nowhere more apparent than in the central field of literary studies, because the erosion of the assumptions and presumptions that support the literary disciplines in their conventional form has been proved fundamental. What, then, are the assumptions and presumptions that are central to literary studies? A survey of the tradition of world literature exhibits that there has been a clear line of ethical concerns in both literary writing and literary criticism ever since the ancient time. To many, literature serves as a moral library or an illustration of philosophical ideas and actual moral life by supplying “the kind of experience needed to develop a person’s faculty of moral judgment” (DePaul 563). The idea of literature has “civilizing values” and “teaching values” was proposed by many authors, thinkers, educators as well as critics like Mathew Arnold, who in his Culture and Anarchy suggests that culture seeks “to make the best that has been thought and known in the world” and “to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” Here, quite conspicuously, Arnold binds cultural value with ethics. Undoubtedly, ever since the rise of literary studies ethics has been the conventional “assumptions and presumptions that support the literary disciplines.”

Tobin Siebers has famously stated that “the heart of ethics is the desire for community.” The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I will discuss how world literature is responding to the “ethical turn” (Michael Eskin) in relation to the long tradition of inclusion of the Other within comparative literature. Whereas comparative literature was born twice in western Europe in the aftermath of war conflicts — the Napoleonic Wars and WWII — it is with the world literature paradigm/discipline that the idea of community has become more visible in the form of the “human family” reflected by works of world literature and by the “human family” that works of world literature address. On the other hand, I will address the issue of the “desire for uncommunity” as expressed by hermits and anchorites. I will analyze the case of Christopher McCandless’s simple living and how it may be related to “heremitic literatures,” that is to say, literature by uncontacted peoples. The obvious ethical question is whether such “isolated literatures” should be part of the fieldwork of the comparatist and, hence, integrated in world literature.

If the term “ethical” means the attitude open to every being in the world without exclusion, a literary work is “ethical” so long as it expresses that attitude and so is a literary criticism that appreciates and evaluates it. Mikhail Bakhtin’s polyphonic theory offers a basis to such literary criticism and Anton Chekhov’s plays are good realizations of “ethical” literature.

This paper tracks the identity and choices of Rosalie Chou based on Dr Han Suyin’s autobiographical series. Han Suyin had rejected her maiden name Rosalie Chou, but learned later that she was to embrace it after all, since it marked a significant period of her regretful past. Nevertheless, the adoption of a Chinese pseudonym “Han Suyin” was also necessary for the reconstruction of her new identity. By revisiting identified ethical chaos and confusion in her family saga, as well as delineating competing moral imperatives against Eurasians in China during the 20th century, Han Suyin showcased a reconstruction of the ethical order in her world. The accounts of Rosalie evoked the ethical consciousness of any reader who would like to stand for her in her cultural displacement and identity complex at a time and locality where the East clashes with the West.

This paper studies the Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, finding that this novel, in a dual narrative structure, displays how Amabelle, a Haitian woman who suffers from a serious sense of non-existence, struggles to juxtapose, through narrating, pieces of her own past experiences together into a complete identity, and how she endeavors to offer testimonies to the existence of those killed that she has come across in life. Amabelle’s sense of non-existence results from two events: she was orphaned at eight, and she lost her lover Sebastien and most of her friends in the 1937 massacre. When finding no place to lay down her sufferings, she turns to language, telling her dreams, describing her childhood life, narrating her lover’s story and those deaths she witnessed. This paper claims that Amabelle the orphan seeks a sense of being through narrating her dreams and memories, while Amabelle the survivor of the massacre regains a sense of existence of her lover and, in the meantime, testifies the historical truth of the massacre through narrating her experiences, “to find a safe nest” to lay down it “where it will neither be scattered in the winds, nor remain forever buried beneath the sod.” And in a conclusion, both Amabelle and the author Danticat have found the safe nest, i.e., narrating, through which the former gains and testifies existences and the latter records a historical event and passes it on.

In Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), Timothy Morton introduces a term that is well known among ecocritics: “dark ecology.” He tells us that “dark ecology” is a “melancholy ethics,” or the “refusal to digest the object into an ideal form,” and an acceptance and even a love of “the thing as thing.” In effect, this preserves the artificiality of the other and does not try to naturalize or collapse the other’s “otherness.” It also assumes there is no exit from what is not us (or what we believe or construct as “not us”). It does not attempt a “sadistic” distance from any object or thing or any human or nonhuman being and it does not in effect understand or regard these entities only in “aesthetic” terms. It is a commitment to recognizing that acceptance and love are as much about loss and separation as about amalgamation and unity, and it is a commitment that Morton brings to bear on his ecocritical arguments in defense of what many of us think of as second to humans: nonhuman beings. I compare Morton’s “melancholy ethics” to posthumanism scholar Cary Wolfe’s reference to the Derridean notion of vulnerability. The latter is similar to Morton’s melancholy ethics insofar as both concern the issue of the shared suffering between human and non-humans. I bring Morton’s term and Derrida’s notion of vulnerability together in my discussion of the novel Power (1998) by the renowned Native American writer, Linda Hogan, a novel that sheds new light on the themes of judgment and sacrifice and proposes a non-human perspective of ethics.

One of Yeats’s most reliable biographers, Ann Saddlemyer, after spending years editing the letters of Yeats and his wife George, gives an insight into Yeats’s character. When Yeats died in 1939, George was 46 and left alone to care for two teenage children. She would always miss Yeats, “the strange, chaotic, varied and completely unified personality,” “with whom she had shared so much ….” It is a precise and definite character analysis. Yeats had had many Romantic involvements, and, like Picasso, his works change with different friendships with women: from early fairies to real women and to final fictional women; generally and chronologically, the thematic and technical aspects developing from the ethereal poetry to the symbolic, and to the realistic and post-Modernistic poetry. The paper will make an attempt to read some of his representative poems in order to know whether they are ethical, aesthetical, or both. This is not a simple question, because Yeats claims that poetry is to make things happen, whereas in fact they look pure for most readers. This reading will help define the nature of his poetry by studying his representative poems.

This article deals with questions concerning the relationship between literature and ethics, in particular paying attention to different kinds of genres and artistic expressions, which aim at obtaining a moral effect and a mental change. It takes as its point of departure the ancient theater’s notion of catharsis, which connects the impact of the dramatic plot on the audience with mental purification. The article shows that questions of good and bad can be related to both the content and form of literary works. Most common is that moral awareness is revealed on the level of a literary work’s content, but ethical questions may be attached to the work’s formal structure as well. The work is good as far as it meets the requirements of the contemporary aesthetical standards, it is bad if it does not. (By the way, quite opposite to modern reception theory, which claims that a work of art need transcend the expectation horizon in order to be considered pioneering.) The article underlines that what I call the ethics of aesthetics do not do justice to the serious catastrophes of our time, which calls for a new ethical turn in artistic writing.

We’re still trying to figure out what academic activism means. In a recent PMLA article, Randy Martin begins with the diametrically opposed, if tendentious, OED definitions of “academic” and “activism,” the former defined as “unpractical” and the latter as “practical.” Positioned as “not leading to a decision,” what is “academic” stands “opposed” to “activism,” defined as tending “to outward action” (Martin 838). Yet, it is academia out of which much activist involvement in contemporary affairs grows, as Martin explains: “There is a long history of universities as sites of student activism and political ferment” (841). Moreover, that the reactions to voices from academia “are so strident” (844) strongly suggests that “activist voices” from academia require a re-thinking of what is meant by the term “activism.” The four articles in this Special Issue address the matter of activist intervention, a topic that has been both a key motivation and one of the most enduring issues for ecocriticism from the beginning. In very different ways, these four authors address what it means to have measurable material effects on the environmental problems we are increasingly creating.

Climate change narratives in the United States have appeared in many genres: literary fiction and science fiction, literary nonfiction, children’s environmental literature and film, environmental documentary films and science fiction films. Yet by shaping their narratives primarily with techno-science analyses and solutions, these narrative genres have not inclusively portrayed the additional facts of climate change — namely, the underpinnings of colonialism, neoliberalism, speciesism, and gendered fundamentalisms — and thus the activist and systemic solutions they present are partial and ineffective. Moreover, mainstream U.S. ecocriticism has failed to notice the raced, classed, and gendered perspectives in these climate change narratives. A feminist environmental justice perspective can restore analysis of the additional features of climate change root causes and effects by expanding the genres and geographies of ecocritical analysis to include artists of color and of diverse sexualities, as well as by including the practices of animal food production and consumption that are exacerbating climate change. A feminist restor(y)ing of climate change narratives is one of ecocriticism’s best strategies for confronting the root causes of climate change and suggesting solutions with real potential for enacting climate justice.

This essay considers the relationship of literary production and environmental activism through the lens of the theories of propaganda and agitation developed by Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke in terms of critical praxis. Using these concepts it analyzes the literary production of a variety of writers, including Edward Abbey, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Patricia Grace, Ishimure Michiko, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Indra Sinha. It briefly treats the debate within ecocriticism about the role of theory in the analysis of nature-oriented literature. And, it addresses the early debate within the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) about whether a literary studies organization should also be an activist organization, as well as recent decisions by ASLE to support financially member projects that work directly with activist organizations.

This essay critically examines eco-activism as commitment to various forms of engagement with the earth, and with literary narratives that feature often romanticized conceptions of nature and contemplations of place attachment, environmental awareness, and ecological values. The argument is that activism, as in the case of the Occupy Gezi Movement in Istanbul, would be more effective if supplemented with theory. Activism in ecocriticism is also associated with thematic interpretations of literary-environmental texts according to which experience articulates nature. The essay contests this idea that nature finds its best expression in texts that supposedly transparently reflect human experience in natural surroundings. It proposes instead a material ecocritical way of integrating ecocritical activism with its theoretical dimension to complete the activism-theory circle in a meaningful way. Thus, theory emerging from material expressions entails a new understanding of activism as part of theorizing, and theory as part of activism in a complex world of interrelations and border-crossings.

Ecocritics hired to deliver English language and literature courses in universities and other post-secondary education institutes confront at many junctures in their careers social and political imperatives to teach English language and literature by actively bringing into their teaching and research content that is related to environmental activism, or by committing to what will be called here pedagogical literary environmental activism. In this article, I discuss an ongoing project aimed at contributing to this kind of activism as the latter is reflecting the opening out of English language and literature to concerns that once were considered separate from these two subject areas. The project ecocritically relates work by environmental activists situated outside of English and the humanities to the work of scholars who analyze literary texts and it does so by addressing one of the most pressing issues confronting humans and other planetary species today: the loss of tree species and the ecosystems that they contribute to and depend upon. The literary text that is discussed is the anonymous Old English poem, “The Dream of the Rood” (ca. 700–1000 CE). I argue that it addresses deforestation in the specific ecological and environmental contexts of massive planetary deforestation caused by humans in the current so-called Anthropocene era. In making this argument I draw on definitions of ecocriticism by Lawrence Buell, J. Scott Bryson, and Ursula K. Heise. I also make some brief but necessary remarks on ecofeminism and I refer to biosemiotic theory (Wendy Wheeler) and to an argument that Sharon O’Dair makes in defense of reading and teaching texts from “presentist” perspectives.

Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism (2014), the crystal of ten-year painstaking efforts of professor Nie Zhenzhao, the founder of ethical literary criticism in China, offers a new approach to literature studies. The book, composed of two parts and appendixes including glossary and definition of ethical literary criticism, seeks to illuminate the working mechanisms of ethical literary criticism and its terminology and claims that literature takes its origin from ethics, and moral enlightenment or teaching is the primary function of literature. The first part discusses some basic theories and answers the feasibility and necessity of ethical literary criticism as a methodology. The second part demonstrates how ethical literary criticism works with his innovative reading of a series of literary classics. The appendixes are the list of terms and their definition and explanation. A striking merit of this book lies in its close combination of theory studies and critical practices.

Ma Xian’s On Alexander Pope’s Poetry offers new insights on Pope based on thorough readings of his major works coupled with a new perspective on ethical literary criticism. In her engagement with Pope’s poetry, Ma provides a comprehensive, invaluable survey and summary of scholarship, research, and problems that have been tackled by the previous scholars, which serve a strong critical point of departure of their critical work. The book is a wise and hopeful attempt to guide research in directions that will genuinely articulate and advance our knowing of Pope and his poetry. It is no exaggeration to claim that much of Ma’s work has opened new areas of analyzing Pope and, in many respects, set the scholarly agenda for the rest of us in the field.