It is notoriously the case that there is no satisfactory English equivalent for the German Literaturwissenschaft or the Russian literaturovedenie. On the cusp of a new millennium, we are a profession that cannot say its name. This onomastic homelessness is reflected in the spate of recent books that mention borders in their titles, such as the MLA's own Redrawing the Boundaries, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, or Giovanna Franci's Remapping the Boundaries. The suggestion in each is that the comfortable boundaries of our old disciplinary territory have eroded: we have somehow lost our place. If our profession were a person, it would be an orphan in exile. This condition is also legible in the current broad interest in the history of our profession's formation. There is increasing—and increasingly urgent—concern to know who we are and how we got here.