From the perspective of perpetrator trauma, this paper analyzes the traumatic representation, memory, and healing inflicted and experienced by Native Americans and white people as perpetrators and victims in Louise Erdrich’s novel Larose. Erdrich reproduces the historical entanglements and practical difficulties between Indians and whites in the form of traumatic narrative, and proposes a religious and ethical approach for healing the trauma. It reveals the absence of western justice system in humanistic care and the cultural significance of the Ojibwan sweat lodge ceremony.

In their 2019 speculative novel, Pet, author Akwaeke Emezi had portrayed a new world, seemingly perfect. A teenage Black trans girl, Jam, is at the centre of this adventure story. Jam accidentally releases a creature who was painted by her mother, Bitter.In the prequel of the series, Bitter, the mother is shown as a teenager herself. She is a child born from rape; thus, she is shunned for having monster blood, brought up in foster homes, bisexual, living in a home for gifted artists in a city that is troubled by oppression and reactionary violence.Bitter has the power to create blood art alive. After a friend of hers is wounded, enraged Bitter creates a massive blood art. The blood art, however, asserts itself to be an angel and gives the revolution the much-awaited inhuman violent push.What becomes important for scholars of arts, literatures and cultures while studying this young adult popular series is the idea of angels and monsters. Humans can become monsters; they can harm other people, nature, or even abuse children. But the angels are beings who can be summoned or created by art, yet biblically accurate.

The role of the creator has been preserved for God. God is an all-encompassing being with immense power, thus post-human. But what happens when a human makes an angel? Are those angels post-human in the same way human-made technology is? Can words that originated in the cultural strata from theology ever be secular enough to be grouped in the same bracket as a Roomba?

Speaking of Roomba, one of the most talked-about art installations from the same year features a cleaning machine, similar to what these angels want to do; this machine also wants to clean but creates a more bloody scenery. The industrial robot, who is programmed to make sure that a thick, deep crimson liquid is cleaned, is fixed within a specific area and is flexing and turning restlessly in Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Can't Help Myself. The robot is housed in a translucent "cage," resembling a captured creature on display, as part of the international art exhibition "May You Live in Interesting Times," which Ralph Rugoff curated for the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. This art installation portrays the helplessness faced by the robot to do the one job it is programmed to do; rather, it smears everything, and the viewer almost feels bad in an eerie way, which supposes an anthropomorphic identity of the robot. The robot's gestures have a captivating human grace to enhance these feelings since the artists have "taught" it 32 human-like moves. Comparing these two art pieces, created by three artists from across the globe, one can maybe observe the translations of ideas regarding posthumanism. With the exceptional amount of ‘blood’ in both of these works, a sacrificial element related to birth can be read. With Emezi's own blood art and their ideas regarding religion and god-beings found in their other works, it becomes extremely intriguing to study such narratives with posthuman theories.

This paper discusses how the themes of human emotions and experiences—joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—are addressed in literature, and explores how Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism can contribute to resolving the dilemmas often faced in these narratives. Buddhism and Hinduism, in particular, emphasize the ethical dimensions of human life, offering valuable tools for literary exploration.

Buddhism's focus on enlightenment, including the early Abhidhamma's concepts of mind (citta), mental factors (chetasika), matter (rupa), and nirvana (nibbana), helps explain human cognitive processes. In Mahayana Buddhism, themes like the true self in Zen Buddhism and the theories of Yogacara and Madhyamaka, along with Huayan Buddhism, can be incorporated into literary contexts.

In Hinduism, the notion of Brahman and Atman being one is central to understanding the essence of human life and its purpose. This can be reflected in literature as a deep exploration of inner conflicts and self-discovery.

Confucianism, on the other hand, emphasizes moral growth and the regulation of emotions through the principle of Zhongyong (the Doctrine of the Mean). The state before emotions arise is termed as 'Zhong,' and the harmony that follows is 'He.' These concepts can be applied to literature to portray the balance and moral development of characters.

This paper aims to explore the interconnections between literature and religion, particularly focusing on Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism. It discusses how these religions influence literary themes and expressions and suggests ways in which they can be used to address internal conflicts and moral growth in literary works.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath vividly portrays the Dust Bowl refugees’ plight during the Great Depression, sparking controversy and scholarly debate. Initially celebrated as proletarian resistance, later analyses reveal deeper mythic and symbolic layers, drawing parallels to the Exodus narrative. Beyond historical hardship, the novel delves into profound questions about human existence, survival, and ethics, remaining relevant today amidst global crises like COVID-19. Steinbeck’s writing career evolved from objective observation in his ‘Trilogy of Migrant Peasant Workers’ to impassioned advocacy, culminating in a neutral lens influenced by Edward Ricketts’s non-teleological approach. This allowed for a deeper understanding of the migrants’ struggles and the social injustices they faced, impacting the novel’s lasting influence.

The survival crisis was fundamentally a product of human actions, including early excessive land cultivation, westward expansion, agricultural capitalization, and the concentration of land ownership that displaced tenant farmers. Natural disasters played only a minor role, exacerbating this pre-existing vulnerability. Government inefficiency and people’s decline in religious faith fostered a society where hardship and moral decay flourished. The novel explores survival ethics through moral dilemmas faced by the migrants. While self-preservation often takes precedence in situations of scarcity of food and job competition that tests people’s ethical limits, even within families; selflessness and sacrifice, even among strangers, highlight the presence of compassion, mutual aid, and a deep commitment to dignity, demonstrating the multifaceted nature of human responses to adversity. The Joads’ journey reveals the complexities of balancing personal survival with ethical principles like kinship, community, and reciprocal kindness. Ultimately, Steinbeck proposes the enduring relevance of compassion, unity and self-transcendence as the keys to navigate challenging times, inspiring future generations to reflect on ethical living in a globalized world.

Departing from the conjecture that literature has an object-form materiality, i propose an ethical view of literature as human agency in relation to a plural world of other beings, real and imagined subjects. The sensible or aesthetic quality of literature comes from its activity of manifesting/presenting human existence as actively engaged agential voice(s) in a detotalised, plural universe. i draw upon repertoires of signification from devotional poetry “residual” in modern(ist) poetry and literary cultures in Indian languages, to propose that cultural “modernity” as a structure of feeling is identified in literature with the realisation of the radical democracy of language, questioning various forms of unequal power operations in engagement with difference. The distinction between the intentionality of the word as literature and the word as religious speech forms the context of presenting Experience as one’s located relation or continued engagement with concrete, manifest difference ie the agential presence of others. The ethical view of literature as plural and relational thus marks modernity in a literary culture as resistance to bigotry and fundamentalism typical to commodified religion regardless of the time, place and language in which it is written.