The local and the global are not as clear-cut terms as they might appear to our common sense or everyday use. But once we understand that where we stand or sit is part of the globe, we see that the globe is made up of many locales and that each depends on point of view, the vantage of the person that is in his or her locale. So the global is local, and the local global, even if we know that one is at the extreme of the other. Rather than try to impose anything on the issue, I have sought to open up vistas, so that the contributors can explore their interests and speak to the theme in this context. The Introduction briefly presents a few voices to suggest that the local and the global are still open for debate in various fields and not simply in literary studies. The literary, then, is just one field with which to examine questions of the local and the global, often under the guise of globalization. World literature will be the context in which this special issue explores the local and the global and related matters.

Anthologizing world literature and translation are inseparable from one another: most texts selected will always be inaccessible in the original to most readers. Translation, however, always brings with it the danger of “naturalizing” the foreign as domestic, and of appropriating the world to the target language culture. As anthologizing always presumes selection, the latter moreover risks being steered by target culture conventions or expectations. At the same time, anthologies, especially when overlapping, also — willingly or inadvertently — work towards a world literary canon. As such, anthologies in “world languages,” and in our day primarily in English, not only influence the idea of what the canon of national literatures other than English is for both native speakers of English but also for “third”-language and culture readers. In fact, they even cannot help but influence how non-English national literature readers come to consider their own national canon in a world literature perspective, possibly leading to a radical dissociation of an “internal” and an “external” canon of their literature. Concomitantly, the “national” literature of the anthologizing culture assumes almost inevitably greater weight and centrality in the thus-created world literature canon. A possible balancing act might consist in performing similar operations from other language cultures upon both English language and third-culture literatures, effectively “glocalizing” world literature.

Connected with the rise of Western modernity, globalization is an equivocal project. As it eliminates one set of inequalities, it deepens another. A considerable number of its participants are thus relegated to “zones of indistinction” (Agamben 63), the non-juridical states of exception that sentence them to inarticulate lives. Nonetheless, according to Agamben, their exclusion makes the citizens’ articulate lives possible. Following him, I propose these conjoined disjunctive realms of Western modernity, which not only condition but subvert and dislocate each other, to be taken as the point of departure for recent discussions of the “globalization of literature.” In my interpretation, traumatic constellations that violently separate their authors from their familiar community by directing them toward a new, remote one on the world’s looming horizon, nurture ethico-politically committed modern literary works. They open themselves to distant otherness in order to heal the traumatic experience of indistinction characteristic of their authors’ dispossessed present. To demonstrate the manner of this opening, I attentively reconstruct Benjamin’s idea of the traumatized subjects’ interlocking memory chips. Such involuntary globalization counters the dominant systemic models of today, which render globalization a Western strategical project. In such a way, the model of globalization from below, which characterizes alternative, postcolonial or post-traumatic conceptualizations of world literature, opposes the model of globalization from above, which characterizes the large-scale systemic paradigms. In the final part of my paper, however, I interrogate this rigid opposition itself.

The Japanese people have experienced many changes in their lives from frequent natural disasters, including earthquakes and tsunamis. These changes are reflected in the literary works after the occurrence of natural disasters, which touch on ethical changes ranging from individual reflection to sociopolitical change. This paper explores the ethical changes that have occurred in Japan after natural disasters from ancient times to the present, and examines their influence on relevant literary works. The emperor reflected on his lacking virtue and devoted himself to exemplary government after the occurrence of natural disasters in the Heian period or the last division of classical Japanese history. But authority moved to the warrior class and the social trend of linking disasters with the unethical nature of the emperor weakened in the Middle Ages. Disasters began to be considered not as a punishment by transcendent beings but as a natural phenomenon caused by the harmony of the elements in nature. The characteristics of disasters included humor and personal appearance in Edo era or early modern period. And then there was a movement to pass or shift the responsibilities of failure in disaster prevention on to specific subjects to overcome disastrous situations at the beginning of the modern era. A lot of disaster literary works were written after 3.11. It means disaster literature has recalled the ethics and values that should not be forgotten by Japanese society.

This statement refers to Turkish studies carried out in Ukraine in order to initiate a systematic analysis of artistic and literary phenomena in Turkey. The aim of the paper is to analyse historical periods of development of ancient Turks’ drama, review the stages of Ottoman folk theatre’s evolution, investigate the preconditions of Turkish author’s drama’s appearance, define the influence of European dramatic tradition on Turkish drama, distinguish the periods of Turkish drama’s development and point out the main trends of Turkish author’s drama’s evolution. It is used such research methods as analysis and synthesis, functional, systematic, comparative, historical methods. The research revealed that Turkish dramatic tradition traces back for many years as there are many references to ancient Turks’ dramatic performances of pre-Ottoman period, that the tradition of dramatic performances enriched with the elements of Sufis’ rituals originated at the times of the Ottoman Empire, displayed that the basics of Turkish author’s drama had been formed between the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century under the influence of Ottoman rulers’ reforms and gradual Westernization of Turkish culture. Having combined the achievements of folk drama and B. Brecht’s “epic theatre,” Turkish drama managed to create its repertoire and gained fame abroad. At the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century Turkish drama acquired a range of new themes and genre innovations, became really national and took its place in the world’s dramaturgy.

Mirror neurons are active both when an action is performed and when one is observing another’s action. They can simulate the perceived action as mirrors. Mimesis in drama, based on mirror neurons and connected with the basic instincts, provides much pleasure. Mirror neurons form the basis for understanding and learning in drama and make empathy possible, with some other neurons separating the action of one’s own from the action of others. Inspiration comes when someone’s action is mainly directed by mirror neurons; inner feelings and outer expressions are closely connected; drama purifies the feelings of the audience in the short-term, but strengthens them in the long-term.

Beside China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the development of the Malaysian Chinese Literature is the most vigorous among the other. The Malaysian Chinese literature becomes remarkable due to the outstanding performance of the travel writers living in Taiwan, but in the era of globalization, there are also many up-and-coming non-travel writers, which one of them is Zhou Ruotao. Zhou’s poetry are dramatic, some of which are typical ones. When the reality becomes a virtual stage and dramas are staged every day, Zhou’s poetry turns out to be an emotional, intellectual, history-carrying, reality-interpreting and image-shaping virtual space (stage). Zhou’s poetry also reveals social phenomena like the Malaysian political grimace, the costs of corruption, negligence of the historical ruins and undone justice that seem to be common in developing countries. The poet’s writing allows us to see the tension in the dramatic poetry, not making common occurrence equivalence to insensitive. This article aims to discuss how the Malaysian young poet, Zhou’s first collection of poetry The Secret Songs constructs a world full of dramatic properties and tension.

The author analyzes narrative strategy of lyrical discourse, referring to David Der-wei Wang’s The Lyrical in Epic Time. Wang’s lyrical discourse is critical to discussions of enlightenment and revolutionary traditions of twentieth century Chinese literature, and amplifies the logic of “getting beyond differences” to existing discourses on the lyrical. Overall, this paper reads the signification of the lyrical tradition as related to the “modernity” and “modern subjectification” of China, reconstructed by the modern subject and shaped by ideological stances. The Lyrical in Epic Time outlines Wang’s own logic on lyricism, based on texts by three different authors. His central point is that all the texts of three authors bring revolutionary lyricism into lyrical discourse. For example, the revolutionary romanticism of the leftist narrative is described as revolutionary lyricism, while Red Poetics, instrumental in firing the national imagination, is rendered as Mao’s lyricism of epic time. This paper explores the cultural politics of Wang’s lyrical discourse, with its aim of checking mainland-centered academic achievement. Wang invokes Bakhtin’s dialogic sphere to support his discourse, culminating in the concept of a “Sinophone literature.” Described as an “imagined community,” his proposed “Sinophone literature” combines Sinophone (Hua 华) and Xenophone (Yi 夷) works, embracing mainland China. To explain the grounds for this Sinophone concept and nourish his discourse, he additionally proposes “Feng” (风), or “mutual antagonism,” comparable to Bakhtin’s dialogic heteroglossia.

The nurture/nature dualism inherent in Marxist theory would be modified and updated in this paper by linking it to Antonio Damasio’s notion of social homeostasis to clarify Septimus’ suicide and Clarissa’s will to live, despite their similar characteristics, in Mrs. Dalloway. The issues of consciousness, self, and “social homeostasis” proposed by Antonio Damasio would be joined to Marxist class distinction critique to update this Marxist theory in order to analyze Mrs. Dalloway. In this way of adjusting and updating, Damasio’s notion of basic homeostasis, core and extended consciousness would be introduced because social homeostasis is provided by extended consciousness to expand the function of basic homeostasis (well-being and survival) into the realm of society. In the end, the revitalized and updated Marxist cultural critique (invigorated by assimilating the neuroscientific notion of social homeostasis into it) would be utilized to depict how in Mrs. Dalloway social homeostasis, in the unhealthy culture with exclusiveness of power to a particular class, contributes to the survival and well-being of the dominant class, to which Clarissa belongs, and deprives Septimus of his freedom and of gaining optimal life situation.

In The Book of Evidence (1989) John Banville makes apt use of his unreliable narrator, Freddie Montgomery, to elicit a subtext on the inevitable “madness” of the colonizer trapped in an anachronistic identity of superiority in a changing post-colonial environment. This argument suggests two ways of interpreting the madness of the outdated superior colonizer as depicted by Banville. On the one hand, the anachronistic colonial discourse of the colonizer appears to become categorized as madness by the new dominating discourses of a changing society. Meanwhile, the inability to discard the identity of superiority in an environment in which the colonial structures of Manichean allegory and mimesis no longer prevail leads to the colonizer’s alienation and ultimate mental degeneration into a disorder akin to Fanon’s descriptions of colonial psychosis in The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Sangam literature is a characteristic feature of Tamil literature. In the annals of Tamil Nadu, the Sangam Age is termed the golden period, and it is widely known for its five types of thinais (landscapes) namely Kurinji, Mullai, Marutham, Neithal and Paalai, each with its own flora and fauna, and other distinct traits that find a due place in the literary works. Kurunthogai, a Tamil literary classic, which is more than two thousand years old, forms a part of Sangam literature. This research paper seeks to trace a few aspects of thing theory in Kurunthogai. Introducing the classic with its historical context which specifically encompasses an account of the Sangam thinais and their poetic attributes, the paper examines the significance of things in the contemporary world, and presents a succinct portrayal of the focus of thing theory, followed by a short note on the key implication of the word “thing.” Subsequently, it proceeds to analyse the aspects of thing theory in Kurunthogai, exploring how objects become things and how things form, transform and shape the human subjects. It also distinguishes between things and ideas, with an emphasis on the role and physicality of things in Kurunthogai. Finally, it explicates the concept of methodological fetishism, and highlights the need for looking through things.