This article is an introduction to the thematic cluster “Ethical Literary Criticism: International Perspectives.” It begins with a brief overview of recent works on ethical literary criticism in the West and those produced in the East, suggesting a necessity for a dialogue between Western perspective and Oriental perspective. The bulk part of the article is devoted to explicating the major arguments of all the contributions. In doing so, it reveals that Western ethical literary criticism, assimilated either by philosophy or by narratology, has hardly developed into an independent school of critical theory, while Chinese ethical literary criticism, with its distinctive terminologies and critical frameworks, has emerged as an exciting new critical theory.

Nie Zhenzhao is professor of English literature and comparative literature at Central China Normal University and editor of Foreign Literature Studies. He currently serves as Vice-President of the China National Foreign Literature Association, the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC), and the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP). As the founder of ethical literary criticism in China, Nie focuses primarily on literary theory, especially ethical literary criticism. His publications include Ethical Literary Criticism and Others: An Anthology and Introduction to Ethical Literary Criticism, among many others. In this interview, Nie elaborates on the theoretical frameworks and core concepts of his ethical literary criticism, particularly the distinction between natural selection and ethical selection. Natural selection, he explains, is a biological process that differentiates human beings from other animals in their physical forms, while ethical selection makes humans fundamentally different by granting them ethical consciousness. To illustrate this point, Nie draws on examples such as the Greek Sphinx and Shakespeare’s Hamlet as examples.

Exploring the relation between narratology and ethical criticism, this article argues that these two approaches to the study of narrative fiction are neither strange bed-fellows nor as incompatible as the fact that most of their respective practitioners tend to ignore each other’s work may suggest. It is argued that narrative theory and ethical literary criticism could and should be seen as natural allies in that their respective concepts and perspectives present complementary and mutually illuminating approaches to an understanding of the ethics and politics of narrative form. The essay provides a brief overview of both the different trajectories of narratology and ethical literary criticism, and of recent attempts at reconciling and synthesising narratological and ethical approaches. Moreover, it attempts to sketch out some of the premises and concepts of an ethical narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narrative theory to the service of context-sensitive interpretations of novels that focus on the question of how narratives serve to disseminate norms and values. An alliance between the two approaches could arguably be an important force in the current reconceptualisation of literary studies and the ongoing development of new forms of ethical literary criticism.

This essay connects two strands of psychological research with insights from narrative theory in order to explore the cognitive and ethical potential of fictional narratives. After a brief introduction to psychological research on the persuasive power of fictional stories to change readers’ beliefs and to improve readers’ abilities of understanding other human beings, this essay examines which kinds of stories and which features of fiction can have such an impact on readers’ minds. The essay focuses on the potential of fiction to enhance readers’ abilities of social cognition, since they form a crucial basis of ethically informed behavior. The last part of the essay highlights further fields of research opened up by this combination and interrelation of psychological research and the theory of narrative.

Stylistics is the study of linguistic choices. Ethics is the study of moral choices. Both disciplines attempt to understand and explain the choices individuals make and the significance the most fine-grained choices can sometimes make. The two disciplines, indeed, both originate in classic Aristotelian rhetoric, which fully recognised the ethical import of the words we choose. Choice is unavoidable in language and life, and choices matter. The awareness that comes from engagement in ethical choices through literary reading is one important way into this desirable moral education. Classic English literature of the late 19th century seems particularly concerned with the moral choices characters make and their consequences — fictions like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Jekyll and Hyde come immediately to mind. One of the finest discriminators in the English language in that period was Henry James, noted for his distinctive stylistic elaborations as well as for his moral concerns. In a recent Handbook chapter I argued that literary criticism could benefit from a closer, more systematic and better informed attention to language. Here I take instances from ethical and stylistic studies of James’s fiction to suggest what a stylistic awareness or at the least an awareness of stylistics might offer to literary criticism’s pursuit of what Blake valued as “Minute Particulars”: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer” (William Blake, Jerusalem).

In the late 1930s the German ethnological scholar and sociological thinker Norbert Elias published a book, in which he describes “the process of civilization” in the European countries since the Middle Ages and in which he draws the conclusion that in term of long-distance development there has been a significant decrease of aggressive behavior, both on the psycho-genetic and the socio-genetic level of manifestations. In this article I discuss the validity of Elias’ finding with a special reference to Hans-Peter Dürr’s repudiation of his theses. In Dürr’s opinion Elias’ account of the civilizing process ignores the fundamental crises of civilizing achievements and consequently he describes Elias’ perspective as a mythical one not compatible with real life experiences of ordinary people. In my paper I want to examine how the contradictory observations made by Elias and Dürr are dealt with in literary documents hereby focusing on changing ethical evaluations. Hereby I intend to approach the textual concepts from two opposite angles: 1. Has literature in the course of the civilizing process changed its character and adapted the ethical improvements maintained by Elias? or 2. Have the many setbacks into barbarian behavior and de-civilizing manners overshadowed the acquired ethical standards and paved the way for a kind of literature that shows the need for a radical ethical change of perspective through focusing on events showing the opposite of what ethical ways of conduct demand?

Questions about ethics continue to exert a profound influence upon the direction of contemporary literary criticism. In addition to tracing the evolution of ethical criticism as an interpretive form, this essay explores the ways in which the critical paradigm’s twenty-first-century manifestations continue to address literature’s ethical motivations and import. As a form of case-study, this essay examines Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End both in terms of the ethical framework in which the novel’s characters coexist as well as the moral crises following the Great War and the conflict’s substantial influence upon the abidingly complex interrelationship between French and British culture and society. Through this lens, we can understand the manner in which Ford’s tetralogy encounters a number of revealing aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophies of the self, alterity, and otherness. Drawing upon Levinas’s critical matrix of alterity, a reading of Ford’s ethical imperatives in Parade’s End demonstrates the author’s considerable humanistic agenda for “altering” our perspectives of war and atrocity via his well-honed and influential Impressionistic techniques.

At the end of 2012, a new international association of literary scholarship was founded in China by the initiative of Chinese scholars, especially Professor Nie Zhenzhao of Central China Normal University, editor of the journal Forum for World Literature Studies. The main aim of the new International Association of Ethical Literary Criticism was to initiate a new trend of international literary scholarship that would form a certain counterweight to Western literary studies, which at least since the last quarter of the 20th century have indeed oscillated between two extremes: on the one hand, linguistic-formalistic research (including narratology, cognitivistics, language philosophy applied to literature, etc.) and, on the other hand, sociological approaches (discourses on power relations, postcolonial scholarship, gender studies, etc.). As Nie Zhenzhao puts it in his pivotal speech (largely coinciding with Nie 2010), there was very little hope that big or small “peripheries,” if they continued to follow the main fashionable trends proceeding from Western “centers,” could ever contribute to universal literary scholarship or world literature studies by their own, original points of view, reflecting realities beyond “centric” Western literary currents and criticism and their faithful imitations in the “periphery.” The following is a reflexion about the possible origin of Western ethical literary criticism (in the following abbreviated as ELC) in Dante Alighieri’s philosophical treatise Convivio. My main claim is that the formation of a theory/philosophy of ethical literary theory ran in parallel with ethical practice in the first great European literary masterpieces of the budding new era — Dante’s own monumental Comedia and the following creation of the early Italian Renaissance writers. On the other hand, I will try to show that ethics in literature in the Western tradition has been from its very beginnings till our days essentially conditioned by the presence in literary works of aesthetical dimension, sensual beauty, and arts.

This article reads Timon’s tragedy against the socio-historical background of early modern England. While examining the links of Timon’s generosity together with the subsequent downfall to the cultural forms that constituted patronage and usury in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the article suggests that in Timon of Athens Shakespeare explores the conflicts between feudal ethics and the ethics of contract in the transition from feudal economy to modern capitalism. Shakespeare’s un-classical treatment of Timon’s catastrophe addresses the ethical anxiety of early modern England, where the forces of commercialism disrupt the ethics of the feudal order.

This paper discusses the ambivalence behind Carlyle’s change from radicalism to conservatism, mainly by exploring the inner contradiction of Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s semi-autobiographical figure in Sartor Resartus, while citing Carlyle’s other writings to demonstrate how his early Calvinist family background and his later distinguished years shaped his appeals for social order as well as the Gospel of work as a remedy for the moral degradation of his time. The paper concludes by suggesting that at the core of Carlyle’s change and ambivalence lies the agony of a prophet of modernist consciousness, one who was acutely wary of the potential chaos, contradiction, and even absurdity that extended far beyond his own era.

In this article, I attempt to read Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gipsy along with such thinkers as Nietzsche, Deleuze, Lévinas and Derrida, focusing on the central character Yvette. The issues of morality, ethics, desire, and otherness are recurrent topoi in Lawrence’s oeuvre. In The Virgin and the Gipsy, they are intricately enmeshed, and mainly revealed in Yvette’s struggle for a new life. In unraveling Yvette’s struggles with her desire, her quest for her true self, and her encounter with the gypsy, Lawrence masterfully interweaves the narrative of the novella with philosophical and ethical themes. My reading of The Virgin and the Gipsy aims to extrapolate the ethical performativity of Lawrence’s literature. This paper first discusses Yvette’s struggle for a new life in terms of Nietzsche and Deleuze, and then moves on to Lévinas’s and Derrida’s ethics of alterity so as to elaborate upon Yvette’s relationship with the Other.

Sponsored by School of Foreign Languages, SJTU, Foreign Literature Studies and the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC), the 4th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism was successfully held from 20th to 21st December 2014 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.

In order to promote international academic exchange in the field of literary criticism, the East-West Comparative Literature Association of Korea will collaborate with the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism (IAELC), the College of the Humanities and Institute of Trans Media World Literature of Dongguk University, the A&HCI scholarly journal Foreign Literature Studies and the International Center for Ethical Literary Criticism at Central China Normal University (CCNU, Wuhan, China), Konkuk University, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Hanyang University, Yonsei University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Dankook University, in hosting “The 5th International Symposium on Ethical Literary Criticism” at Seoul and Busan, Korea, from Oct. 1 to 7, 2015. Scholars all over the world are warmly welcome.