Wolfgang G. Müller (Email: womu@gmx.de) is retired Professor of English Literature at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena. He received his academic education at the universities of Mainz, Manchester, and Leicester. He taught as professor at the universities of Mainz, Leicester and Jena. Book-length publications include Rilke’s “Neue Gedichte” (1971), The Lyric Self (1979), The Political Speech in Shakespeare (1979), Theory of Style (1981), English and Scottish Balladry (1983), Dialogue und Conversational Culture in the Renaissance (2004), Edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2005), Don Quixote’s Intermedial Afterlives (2010) and Genre in Shakespeare (2015). He published articles on rhetoric in Renaissance literature, the tradition of Don Quixote in English literature, narratology, intertextuality, iconicity, the letter as a genre, ethics in literature and detective fiction. At present he runs a research group on the flaneur in English and American literature. On behalf of Forum for World Literature Studies, Dr. Zhang Tian, when attending the 6th Conference of Ethical Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature and World Literature (Oct., 2016, Tartu, Estonia), interviewed Professor Wolfgang G. Müller on the issues concerning ethical literary criticism and ethical narratology.

The present article makes an original and wide‑ranging contribution to scholarship by examining, for the first time comprehensively and in the context of what the author defines as the “post‑romantic syndrome,” Hermann Broch’s position vis‑à‑vis Romanticism. The focus is on Broch’s trilogy The Sleepwalkers, but the article also considers the relevant essays on Hofmannsthal, on kitsch, and on myth and late style.

Colonization is a term common to many disciplines, from political science to anthropology, from sociology to microbiology. In all of these cases it has evidence-based historical or scientific roots. On the contrary, when this term is referred to the Outer Space, its use still draws from the realms of imagination, since no colonies exist as yet outside planet Earth. Nevertheless, we know that this might happen soon, and believe that the realms of imagination have played — and are playing — a fundamental role in the matter. It is the object of this essay, the authors of which belong to three different disciplines (Anglo-American Literature and Culture, Ecology, and Philosophy), to discuss and problematize the cultural, environmental, and ethical implications of the project of Mars colonization, a project which is rooted in politics and economics. It is not our aim to advance any doubts about the consistency of the current agenda concerning the mission of colonizing Mars. However, we want to underline the absolute necessity of adopting a truly sustainable and multidisciplinary vision which involves a deeply ethical, ecological, and cultural approach. By ethical we mean that we ought to be aware that a new phase in the Anthropocene has come, since we are challenged to enlarge the semiosphere so as to include the Outer Space, which means proposing new ecosophic paradigms; by ecological we mean that owing to a change in our Umwelt we should follow an ethical management of the environment, that is respectful of Mars territories as well as of those we will continue to inhabit on Earth; by cultural we mean that it has to take into account all of the following: the literary narrations of the past, both utopian and dystopian; the intuitions of Sci Fi fandom and scholarship; and the perspective of post-colonial studies, which problematize the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism and analyze the consequences of external control and economic exploitation of people and lands.

Latvian literature, by revealing the most significant tendencies of the state development, contributes to the discourse of cultural diversity, simultaneously boosting the idea of national unity. The aim of the paper is to investigate the expressions of hybrid identities in Latvian contemporary literature. In the research, cultural-historical aspects that determine the representation of intercultural dialogue in literature are outlined. Contemporary Latvian literature reflects processes related to existence of people among different cultures. Such interaction results in the development of dialogic relations, which characterize an individual’s simultaneous belonging to different cultures, and contributes to the creation of a new, namely, hybrid identity.

The paper is focused on detailed reading of Foucault’s chief methodological work The Archeology of Knowledge. Analysis show that Foucault never prioritizes discontinuity over continuity, but rather thinks of the conditions from which they both arise. This approach is called quasi-transcendental since it eludes any binary oppositions. For example, what Foucault calls episteme is in fact historical a priori of an epoch (which can be, then, thought of either as necessary historical unity or as partial social construct). Structurally, it can be demonstrated that this reasoning, although somewhat paradoxically, has affinity with Heidegger and other phenomenological and hermeneutic oriented philosophers of history. Such a philosophy of history breaks neither with continuity nor teleology: what it breaks with is merely the romantic illusion that the final subject may be positioned in the place of the absolute subject. The lesson for contemporary literary history is that it should be written from fundamental hermeneutic and ethical perspective: literary historian is led to an understanding of his own position and to opening up the space of freedom, to conceiving his ever new unstable subjectivations. And, moreover, literary history should not be subordinated to cultural history (or any other histories). The history of literature qua literature should advocate that it is literature that somehow produces culture and not the other way around. Or, as Walter Benjamin lucidly put it: literature should be an “organon of history” and not its mere material.

This article considers the meaning of the Zainichi Korean narrative, focusing on The Cloth-Fulling Woman, written by Lee Hoesung. Lee won the Akutagawa prize for this novella, causing a sensation in Japanese society and abroad. The heroine, Chang Suri, is represented by the synthesis of three axes: her mother, her husband, and her son. The mother’s narration of Suri recalls her active image against the background of colonial Chosun in the 1920s. The image of Suri in relation with her husband, however, shows the typical process of Koreans being driven away from their homeland to wander and suffer, reflecting the phases of the colonial period. Meanwhile, to her son, Suri as a mother remains in the realm of childhood, with constant flashbacks to that period. The narrator controls these three narrative viewpoints through the lens of postwar Japan. That is, the synthesized image of Chang Suri represents the very historicity of the lives of Zainichi Koreans. Ultimately, Chang Suri’s narrative does not remain personal, but becomes representative of the common Zainichi Korean experience.

Around 1950, middlebrow novels and “adultery films” enjoyed enormous popularity in Japan. Primarily targeting female audiences, both genres became more common as various social and cultural changes occurred in postwar Japan. This growth in adultery-related storytelling is particularly interesting in light of the fact that Japan was under U.S. occupation and unethical themes such as adultery were discouraged by the Motion Picture Code of Ethics. Furthermore, these popular adultery genres were thought to represent the unspoken “inner minds” of the women they targeted. Focusing on “adultery films,” this paper argues that although they offered vicarious pleasure by pretending to deviate from oppressive social norms, they often reinforced the dominant ideology of the time. The majority of adultery films follow a similar plot pattern: (a) The heroine is generally a victim of the feudalistic marriage system of old Japan; (b) she meets a man who respects her as an independent individual; (c) with his help, she is “liberated” from a repressive husband and marriage life. Focusing on the above features, this paper examines how the theme of adultery was represented in cultural spaces under the ethical standards built upon postwar American democracy.

The main ethical line of Shimazaki Toson’s Broken Commandment is a conflicting process of keeping or breaking the commandment for civilian intellectual Segawa Ushimatu, who was born with an eta background. Through the description of his mental anguish, the novel reveals an intense ethical conflict between the modern concept of eliminating class distinctions, advocating the equality of human rights, and the traditional concept of maintaining feudal hierarchy in a period of social transition after the Meiji Restoration. Under the influence of modern enlightenment, Ushimatu’s self-consciousness was awakened and he finally chose to break the commandment. He exposed his real identity in public and repented his past concealment. Through his ethical choice, the novel shows a strong appeal for social justice and highlights his consideration of individual moral transformation.

Pulitzer Prize laureate Jane Smiley’s novella Good Will tells a story of a man named Bob who lives a self-contained as well as self-deceiving life in a valley. His interactions with nature and people are hindered by his greedy anticipation, egotistic imagination, and male chauvinist domination. The pastoral life he imagines turns out to be a bubble in the end. Mainly from the eco-ethical and ecofeminism angles, the paper probes into Bob’s intentional attempt at living a green life and his later failure caused by his greed for absolute personal power over his family and environment; meanwhile, Smiley’s ecological poetics can also be discovered through a series of ironies of ecology in the story, which differ from the ecological implications in traditional fictions.

Censorship rules and laws are important in a society to avoid the circulation of objectionable or offensive contents. Whereas misusing such laws to suppress the nonconformist artists is unjustifiable and is an instance of exploitation and manipulation of law and principle by those in power. The anticipation of persecution discourages writers or the artists even to think against the authorities. Eric Maria Remarque is just one among the writers who have undergone grave situations for raising a separate voice through his novel All Quiet on the Western Front. This paper analyses the workings of ideologies and use of laws as means to suppress the revolutionaries. It also analyses how history is manipulated and a fictitious version of history is propagated by the authorities by suppressing dissident ideas with reference to the novel All Quiet on the Western Front.

To examine any social condition, it is essential to understand that subject-object equivalence of the society which lies “… [in] the denial of difference” (Mark Bahnisch). The article employs this critical approach to examine the situation that sprang forth with the practice of conservatism in postcolonial Britain. Cultural Nationalism is an intermediate point between ethnic and liberal nationalism. It is a byproduct of the dissociation of the immigrant population from the host society and acts as a motivating factor for separatist movements. The article attempts to analyze the discourse of Cultural Nationalism which is seminal in the works of Hanif Kureishi. Social theories such as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the creation of “Cultural Capital” and Derrida’s notion of “Desire” prove useful in examining the political-literary narratives of post-World War Britain. This article argues that humans are cultural products, and the process of thinking about their social recognition is a fulfilment of the generated “desire.” The article also examines the problematic of cultural assimilation and how it cultivates minorities’ problems, social disintegration-degeneration, and cultural fundamentalism.

This paper tries to explore the marginality of women to public life in Kerala, an issue which is increasingly coming under critical scanner, the question of modernity and the representation of the popularly known Malayali women, in the popular televisions serials in Malayalam television channels and to trace the changes in the depiction of women characters in Malayalam television serials. Most of the Television serial in Malayalam are best known for being melodramatic and for its sentimental plot revolving around trivial day to day life of the Malayali women, especially, the rift between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, the adopted girl child and the step-mother, drift among sisters and so on and so forth. In this paper, we argue that though most of the television serial are based on trivial happenings and events, but some of these melodramatic serials subtly project and share the anxieties of lost innocence, traditions and tries to retell the necessity to regain the lost Malayali values and ethics to the new generation. For the purpose of this we choose to discuss popular Malayalam serials like Bhaghyalakshi, Saaryu, Balamani, and Parasparam.

American Ethical Criticism: A Survey by Prof. Yang Gexin is a pioneering monograph that studies the rise, development, and demise of American ethical criticism diachronically and synchronically. It argues that American ethical criticism since the 1980s has inspired and enriched contemporary ethical literary criticism, which ultimately transcends the limitations of the former as an established literary approach. Besides evaluating the merits and demerits of American ethical criticism, the book illustrates how it is critically integrated into contemporary ethical literary criticism. Based on the study, the book also outlines the current problems and future direction of ethical literary criticism. This paper firmly believes that the monograph will open up a new territory for literary studies in China and beyond.

Eco-narrative in literature is now understood as an effective way to examine the problematic relationship between our postmodern landscape and mindscape. A case in point is Ji Xiuming’s A Study of Eco-Narrative of Chinese Contemporary Novels from a Comparative Perspective which carries out a comparative analysis of both western and Chinese views in ecocriticism and literary expressions.