Ethical Literary Criticism addresses important issues in literature by taking the literary text, which is a transformed and materialized version of the brain text, as the main object of criticism. The ethics of the literary text are shaped through the interplay of competing forces including the text, materialized from the author’s brain text, the ethical environment of the chronotope itself and the moral judgment of the reader. This article examines Alfred Tennyson’s patriotic war poetry to illustrate the formation pattern of the ethics of the literary text. Tennyson transformed his brain text and encoded his ethical stances on patriotism into the text of his war poems. Readers process and decode the ethical chronotopes of the text to make moral judgments and get moral enlightenment.

The AI-generated literature reconfigures numerous philosophical inquiries, related for example to authorship, subjectivity, the aesthetic experience of the text or the ethical perspectives of literature. This paper explores the convergence of literature and technology through the prism of 20th-century French poststructuralism and interrogates the ethical and aesthetic implications of AI-generated literature.

From Derrida’s grammatology to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic models of textuality, French thought has long questioned the centrality of the human subject in writing. These philosophical frameworks prove visionary today, as AI-generated texts further challenge the notion of the centrality of the author. If, as Derrida suggests, writing is always already inscribed within a system of différance from which the subject becomes absent in postmodernity, then the emergence of machine-generated literature may not mark a rupture but an intensification of the paradigmatic shift analyzed by post-structuralism.

From an ethical standpoint, this compels us to reassess the notion of responsibility and intention in the literary act: who is accountable for meaning, and what forms of agency are at play in literary texts devoid of lived experience? On the other hand, from an aesthetic point of view, these developments raise critical questions about originality, style, and the singularity of literary voice.

Positioning AI not merely as a tool but as a participant in the literary field, this paper interrogates AI-generated literature as a symptom of a broader de-centering of the human in the discursive order – a movement already anticipated by French post-structuralism.

Based upon the author’s recent article “War and Temporality: Walter Benjamin’s Redemptive Allegory and William Faulkner’s *A Fable*” (*Criticism* 2025), this presentation enlarges Benjamin’s Western examination of the creation of value in a world at war by understanding the dialectic of violence and redemption by comparing the Western worldview, shared by Faulkner and Benjamin, with the development of a cyclical dialectic of violence and redemption in Mo Yan’s Chinese novel *Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out*. Faulkner’s novel, focused on World War I in Europe, is a backwards looking account of violence and meaning in war-torn Europe. It presents itself as an elaborate allegory of Western redemption in the face of violence by tracing peace-loving soldiers, whose week-long behavior during World War I allegorically calls up Christ’s ministry and death. Such a narrative offers *retrospective* redemption as described by Benjamin in *The Origin of German Tragic Drama* and elsewhere throughout his work. In contrast to the retrospective redemption, Mo Yan pursues a *prospective* sense of redemption in *Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out* by tracing the various reincarnations of the novel’s protagonist, Ximen Nao, as a donkey, a cow, a pig, a dog, a monkey in turn, and finally in 2000 he is reborn as a baby with a very large head. These reincarnations allow Ximen Nao to grow more and more close to compassionate humanity, a condition he aspired to and partially achieved in his first lifetime before he was executed as an enemy of the people soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The clashing worldviews of Faulkner’s America and Mo Yan’s China is nicely achieved in both of these more-or-less historical novels and in their different narrative strategies. For Faulkner – as for Benjamin – history is swallowed up, so to speak, in allegory: allegorical meaning overwhelms historical facts. For Mo Yan, history is opened up in his multi-voice cyclical narrative – replete with mammalian and human voices – so that what is redeemed are not past events but future promises. This contrast gives rise to a sense of the ethics of fictional discourse: that is, the comparison of American and Chinese novels present two senses of ethics: that of a closed value-system and that of value as possibility.

Alan Ford is an Italian comic book series which has been published in newsstands since 1969. Its creators, writer Luciano Secchi (aka Bunker) and artist Roberto Raviola (aka Magnus), intended it to be a satire of James Bond, as its protagonists are a group of secret agents called "gruppo TNT" (TNT Group), operating from a third-rate flower shop in New York City. Though set in the United States, the comic quite evidently hints at the ills of Italian society, which may explain why it was not successful outside Italy (with the remarkable exception of Yugoslavia, where it became quite popular, being still published today in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Unlike Ian Fleming hero, who is equipped with hi-tech gadgets, drives luxury cars, and wears expensive designer clothes, Alan Ford, the main character of the series, is always short of cash, wears patched-up clothes and is definitely not a man of the world, even though he is modeled on a famous Irish actor, Peter O'Toole. All in all, he is an anti-hero, like the other members of the group, led by the cynical and dishonest Numero Uno (or Number One, a caricature of Bond's M).

This comic is a brilliant example of black satire, based on a successful cast of characters (also including two pets, Cirano, an Italian pointing dog, and Squitty, a hamster) and their interaction, which frequently entails cheating their colleagues, and featuring a collection of grotesque villains, which repeatedly appear in the stories. Alan Ford can be seen as mixing two different genres, inasmuch as it draws from the conventions of spy stories, but also adopts some of the protocols of superhero comics, such as recurring masked enemies like Superciuk or Il cospiratore. This allowed Magnus & Bunker to overturn the conventions associated to two modern embodiments of the hero, the secret agent and the masked vigilante (including their counterparts, i.e. supervillains), and subvert the traditional protocols of narratives that feature them.