When asked to write a short piece for the PMLA series entitled “The Book Market,” I muttered to myself, with a nervous laugh, “What book market?” More and more often I and others in academic publishing have been asking ourselves whether there exists a viable book market for literary studies. Almost every university press has a long history of publishing works in literary studies, and yet recently the frustrations of the market have begun to sour the relation between the field and its publishers. I regularly hear of one university press or another declaring that it is “getting out of the field.” Could a discipline with so many strengths, so much talent, and so much sophistication—in fact, the engine of the humanities—find itself for the most part unpublishable?

The Passage I've Placed at the Head of this Essay should be Committed to Memory and Taken to Heart Taken to heart. It says in brief nearly everything that needs to be said, not only on the question that rubricates this essay—the question put to me by the editor—but on the larger implications of that question.

Discourse on globalization regularly sells itself as the next big thing. If we read before buying it, however, it may seem that the novelty of globalization has been oversold and its enduring features underestimated. Against the tendency to oppose global processes to local practices (e.g., as future to past), the essay argues for seeing literary studies hitorically as a form of “glocalization,” reworking the topics of locality and place while recalling the forms of their dislocation. Recognizing this historical implication in the global should keep us from being stampeded by market-driven scenarios of globalism and allow us to recover ways to configure alternative futures. What is needed are tactical (in Certeau's sense) responses to globalization and a renewed commitment to practices of disciplined skepticism.

At one Minute to Midnight on New Year's EVE 1999, my Wife and I Were Eating Goat Curry on South Andaman island, in the Bay of Bengal. Our motel had set up card tables for buffet diners—Americans, Europeans, and Indians—on a dilapidated tennis court. Nearby stood a large glittering display that read, “Feel 2000 Very Happy New Year.” We had come to India the week before to visit my son, Adam, in the Himalayan village of Dharamsala, home to the Tibetan government in exile. Adam was studying the recent emergence of a Tibetan secular literature, the New Writing that had sprung up in response to Tibet's dual encounter with Maoist China and the exigencies of deracination. He discovered on arrival that, since his last visit, several New Writers had left for places like London and Indianapolis. In serendipitous coincidence with the new millennium, New Writing had just completed its first period of growth and was beginning its diaspora.

Written by charles frederick briggs and published in the may 1853 issue of Putnam's monthly while Briggs was an editor there, “Elegant Tom Dillar” mediates a persistent tension in United States culture between working-class nationalism and highbrow culture. As a cofounder and coeditor of Putnam's, Briggs must have negotiated this tension often as he made managerial decisions at the magazine, which promised quality native literature, earned “unparalleled respect” in the literary and publishing world, and delivered some of the best American writing of the century. On the one hand, Briggs was a cultural nationalist. He supported copyright legislation, he repeatedly lampooned Harper's for its use of pilfered English material, and he enthusiastically endorsed the magazine's policy of publishing only original American work. On the other hand, as a former conscience Whig, he condemned annexation and the extension of slavery, valued elite culture, and was wary of jingoistic nationalism that could be used to foment working-class resentment.

“Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take,” announces Charles Mason in Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason and Dixon. Taking that cryptic comment as a starting point and drawing on Giovanni Arrighi's account of the recurrent organization of capital by metropolitan “spaces-of-flows,” this essay investigates what it might mean for Mason's comment to be true of both his late-eighteenth-century moment and the late-twentieth-century moment of the novel's publication and asks what such a reading of the “form [of] the world” implies for contemporary attempts to rethink literary study under the sign of the global. The essay offers “laws” of such a global form (expansion contracts, contraction enriches, enrichment haunts) and deploys them to read the two modes of globalized literary study that have achieved dominance of late: global literary study as method and as project—the key method in question understood here as a type of global historicism and the key project as the appeal to reconfigure literary study as the study of something called global literature.

What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

Gertrude stein wrote the twenty-five-page manuscript “the modern jew who has given up the faith of his fathers can reasonably and consistently believe in isolation” for a composition class at Radcliffe College in 1896, when she was twenty-two years old. The essay is distinctly occasional and reads like an early work. It is, nonetheless, one of the few known pieces in which Stein treats directly the question of Jewish identity and the only one to link that question to a specifically political description of the public sphere. The manuscript thus sheds a remarkable light on a number of the most contested questions in studies of Stein's life and works—the problem of her later protofascist political allegiances, of her sense of her exiled Americanness, and of her treatment of writing as an asemantic medium for sketching mobile identities.

It's almost too convenient that carve evolves, via middle high german (kerben), from the greek graphein: “TO scratch, to write.” Ham-fisted or artful, the verb is the mark of desire, of a craving to inscribe. Given a century, carvings display cravings of the mind, motivated assignments in a march of years all beginning 18—. Figuring out how to carve one's shape in history, or how to carve history into shape, was a perplexity, a founding question even, at the dawn of the century:

Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
[………]
Hard task to analyse a soul in which
Not only general habits and desires
But each most obvious and particular thought,
Not in a mystical and idle sense,
But in the words of reason deeply weigh'd
Hath no beginning.

Nuria Amat's view of literature between borders places her in the arduous trajectory of Spanish women writers, who have written their works from the periphery of Spanish fiction. Historically, few women have been among the canonical writers of Spain, and those who wrote were known for their ambivalent representations of their role as authors. Marginal writers of both sexes were forced to engage in literary disguises and subterfuges, “common and necessary practices for those who deviated from orthodoxy and convention” (Levine and Marson xxi). With the death of Franco in 1975, women writers of Spain such as Ana María Moix (b. 1947, Catalonia), Esther Tusquets (b. 1946, Catalonia), Marina Mayoral (b. 1942, Galicia), Lourdes Ortiz (b. 1943), Montserrat Roig (b. 1946, Catalonia), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945, Barcelona), and Rosa Montero (b. 1951, Madrid) began to explore their personal and national histories as the censorship ended. There soon followed a boom of female writers, who, “encouraged by the feminist movement and by all the changing atmosphere of the seventies, were able to find marketing success that soon made them visible” (Nichols 11).