In the context of Levinas’ critique of Other in relation to the thinking and poetizing genealogy of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, one can construct an ethics of reading in which the speech act of writing exposes itself corporeally and sensibly to the Other, and therefore is unable to refuse the Other’s approach. The performative speech act proposes or expresses one’s own position facing the Other. This Levinasian critique transforms itself into a deconstructive reading, based upon the ethical demand and responsibility. Ever since the reading/writing subject positions are situated in the context of globalization, the two ways of reading—reading closely the cases of individual texts by dealing with the micro aspects of literature on the one hand, and reading distantly the constellation of the texts of the big data by creating a new space for macro literatures—have constructed an open structure of aporia in the field of literary discourses. The theory and practice of “distant reading” has been challenging against the hermeneutic authority of “close reading.” World literature represents such aporia structure in which literatures and cultures encounter those of the other(s), new geographic, historical, ontological, and epistemological reconfigurations and in which the contacting points of the two or multiple entities in the world will turn out to be the topics of literary discussions. The 2015 IAELC Global Symposium in Seoul, Korea represents these interfaces between ethics of reading and world literature. Among those 335 papers presented at the 2015 IAELC in Seoul/Busan, the following 5 papers were included in this issue of Foreign World Literature Studies, looking forward to publish more papers.

Every culture and period present certain models or expectations about what a poetic text is supposed to be and convey. For Homer it had to be a story of adventure and war, for Sappho the expression of personal sentiment and love, for the authors of the Bible’s prophetic books, stern moral reflection. In the American tradition, poetry has mostly been about the expression of self, generally in a didactic mood. Whitman wrote a very long Song of Myself telling us how he sees the world and how we should see it. I will glance at several poets to ascertain which models of poetry they practice, and in particular consider Wallace Stevens, who mostly avoids didacticism and established modes of poetic communication, and discuss in what ways his unpredictable writing and “essential gaudiness” (as he called it) respond to ethical concerns.

In the most representative ancient Chinese novels, A Dream in Red Mansions, Pilgrimage to the West, Heroes of the Marsh, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the main characters all possessed inherent special identities, or rather, special identities that could not be acquired through endeavor and effort. What embodied these identities were mainly such symbols as distinctive objects, exclusive powers, and exceptional appearances. There exists an obvious inclination in the narrative ethic of the Four Classical Novels: concerning the same action, one with a special identity could do it but others could not. If the latter did, they would be punished, whereas if the former did, it would be taken as the arrangement of destiny. What caused such inclination lies in the “differential sequence pattern” brought forth by Fei Xiaotong in Rural China. Due to the lack of a “universal criterion” or “general moral concept,” what rural society used to measure morality was a retractile ruler varied with different relationships. Even to this day, indifference to the fate of nobodies has remained the norm in our lives, and the fates of the weak and the losers have always been placed at the back of the macro narrative, with few people introspecting their “ethical positioning” in this respect. In a word, the consciousness of “destiny” is the origin of many unfair phenomena across all ages, and the Four Classical Novels have unconsciously become transmitters of this kind of consciousness. We should have a sober realization of it.

Different from the Chinese or Koreans, the Japanese have not cut themselves off from ancient mythology. Their system of the emperor shows it. However, modern civilization tries to give priority to history so that there is little room for them to keep the mythology safe and sound. One of the outcomes of this situation is the nationalistic ideology of the divine nation with the divine emperor invented out of ancient mythology. It failed, of course, with the national defeat at the end of World War II, but this does not mean the end of the mythical mind of the Japanese. Since antiquity until today, the Japanese have had a mythical vision of the world based on the idea of natural productivity. According to this vision, a human product called history is nothing compared to the productivity of nature. The Japanese ethics is not based on a historical vision but on a naturalistic vision, which distinguishes them from the ethics of the so-called civilized peoples.

In the short fiction “Crime of Han”, the author Shiga Naoya develops an ethical thought apparently similar to Nietzsche’s that goes “beyond good and evil. Through a story of a man who kills his wife in order to find his true self, the author tries to show us the importance of the body that makes part of Nature. This thought of his can be interpreted as a modern and individualized version of the ancient world vision of the Japanese, but it is also a new ethics that goes beyond social moral.

Edward Said and others have argued that V. S. Naipaul is a standard bearer for imperialism. But this paper argues that these scholars have misread the ethical implications of what Naipaul says about the future of Africa and its politics. By examining the ethical crises and crimes of “escapists” in Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, it can be argued that, according to Naipaul, the future of Africa depends on people’s sound judgments and choices. That is to say the future of Africa is ethical in nature.

The word “transnationalism” could be addressed by various disciplines. It was first popularized in the early 20th century to describe a new way of thinking about relationships between cultures. Later on, it was widely used by the field of economics in the 1960s to refer to the establishment of corporations with organizational bases in more than one nation (Martinelli) . In the latter half of the 20th century and the first ten years of this new millennium, scholars have been widening and enriching the meanings of the word in several different intellectual
traditions. In terms of geo-politics, it refers to the immigrations across the national borders and the immigrants “whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders” ́(Schiller 48); in terms of social sciences, it means the diminished significance of national boundaries in philosophical ideas and ideological expressions.

In the present essay I will continue to develop some of the ideas related to cultural globalization issues in my books A Call for Cultural Symbiosis (Toronto: Guernica, 2005) and Ten Letters to Montaigne: “Self” and “Other” (forthcoming in English in Cervena Barva Press, and in Estonian: Kümme kirja Montaigne’ile. “Ise” ja “teine,” Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2014), as well as in several of my recent articles (thus e.g. “Culture in the European East-Baltic Periphery: Embarrassed Coexistence of Fashion, Officialism and Resistance. The Estonian Case of K. J. Peterson,” Interlitteraria 20/1, 2015: 7–22). For my ideas I have found continuous support and inspiration in the ideas of some of the outstanding literary and cultural thinkers of Eastern Europe, like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri M. Lotman, in the work of European “creative humanists” of the Renaissance and Baroque era (Erasmus, Montaigne, Cervantes, Calderón, among others), and some early philosophically minded writers of my own “peripheral” nation, Estonia (thus, the first Estonian poet K. J. Peterson (1801 – 1822), the creator of the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg, F. R. Kreutzwald (1803 – 1882) and the poet – thinker Juhan Liiv (1864 – 1913).

Reflection on the human soul was not alien to the medieval thought at all but within that older trend reflection in poetic imagery would have resulted in an allegorical personification developed on the vertical plane towards divine values. In Renaissance poetry the vertical axis was not rejected but doubled in a new vision opened both to the heavens and earth related in a metaphoric analogy. In the sonnet, as nowhere else, this new vision was processed in the very generic nature of its word, reflective and metaphoric. The target of the poet reformers in England was not Petrarch but his imitators and exaggeration of the convention excessive in its metaphoric imagery. Then wit, another salient feature of the Renaissance mind, had flourished in sonneteering and brought into action the mechanism of anti-petrarchiam parody.

The Latin rhetorical triad (“historia,” “argumentum,” “fabula”) was actively used and reinterpreted in the Middle Ages. Macrobius, Isidore of Seville, Geoffrey Map — these are just a few of the authors who have used these categories both for the analysis of literature prior to them and for the analysis of their own works and the works of contemporary authors. This reflection on the form and function of the text also important for the literature written in the vernacular (Wace, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris, etc.). The authors of the first works of the so-called Arthurian cycle, trying to raise the status of their narrative, insisted on historical accuracy of their texts (this intention was one of the reasons for criticism from the so-called “professional historians,” one of them was William of Newburgh, the British historian of the 12th c.). First works of Arthurian literature (e.g. The History of the Kings of England by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Le Roman de Brut by Wace) were characterized by historiographic claims and by downplaying the proportion of invented elements. The latter was varying because of the language in which the works were written (Latin and Old French) as well as depending on the audience for which the texts were intended.

As a modern Chinese woman writer who valued traditional Chinese culture and female subjectivity, Eileen Chang (Ailing Zhang 张爱玲 1920-1995) has attracted more and more interest from academia and popular culture. Her literary fame has undergone dramatic ups-and-downs over the seventy years since she began publishing (1943-2013). Although she is now possessed of a respectable literary reputation, Chang was long considered merely as a popular story writer in China because of the bias towards the theme of women and love as well as women’s literature (1943-1952). Later, as a diasporic writer in America where Orientalism was prevalent, Chang was submerged in grey oblivion (1955-1970s). Her literary fame has been gradually resurrected by the gains in momentum made by gender studies and multiculturalism (1970s-present). This paper examines the inexorable connection between the vicissitude of Chang’s literary fame and social-political influences, and asserts that a canonical work is inevitably shaped by changing literary standards and social-political preferences.

With the increasing rise of global problems, cosmopolitanism has become one of the hot topics in contemporary academics. In Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma, Vladimir Biti claims that, to a large degree, the concept cosmopolitanism is derived from the personal or national traumatic experience, and explores the conception of cosmopolitanism and its impact on the European and non-European cultural and political space. As an alternative, he calls for a dispossessed cosmopolitanism, which refers to dispossessed belonging outside the established political space, aiming to maintain the form of dissensual politics and to reexamine nationalism, patriotism and democracy accordingly.

Comparing the script of The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman, its historical prototype, and Hellman’s later film adaptations of the play, this paper aims to analyze the nuanced treatment of the taboo subject matter in order to revisit the complicated question of the work’s attitude toward lesbianism. As critics have long noted, the lesbian theme is seemingly muted to the point that the sexuality of the characters is almost a secondary theme or even an afterthought. This paper argues, however, that the lesbian theme is clearly present in the work and that the various permutations, particularly those of the two film versions, do not marginalize its presence. The very title of the play refers to children’s story-telling, after all, and this includes attempts to “normalize” the myths and fables intended for the young generation. Therefore, the mutability of the different versions can be explained as an artistic demonstration of the social dynamics of attempts at marginalizing lesbianism rather than an overt effort of the text itself to force lesbianism into conformity.

This article aims to encourage a comparative approach to studying literature and film focusing on the decontextualizing, as well as recontextualizing, of masculinity. It emphasizes gender anxieties represented in male characters of Philip Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (1977) and Richard Linklater’s adaptation (2006). Within a comparative framework, it draws on the sociocultural and political similarities men encounter in the time of the novel’s publication and its adaptation. Although the novel has many themes, Dick’s depiction of men and his critique of traditional masculinity motivate Richard Linklater to adapt the novel almost thirty years later (2006). Interestingly, this crisis is traveling from one medium, literature, to another, movie. What Dick reveals about masculinity in the novel has been concealed for three decades in Hollywood. In the end, it is concluded that the sociocultural similarities in the setting are the cause of this adaptation and Linklater’s alterations.