When I was asked to address the role of the personal in contemporary scholarship, I went back and did a quick word search through the various things I've written over the past few years and learned that since 19891 have used the word / in my work no fewer than 7,300 times—and that's not counting this sentence, in which I've managed to use it another 6 times already. So I feel qualified to speak about the use of personal narrative in scholarship—or, more accurately, compelled to speak, since I'm actually too shy to volunteer a response on my own.

“The fate of reading,” a heavy phrase for which I bear some responsibility, suggests at least a subprophetic talent for anticipating future developments. When things get out of hand, when they seem to speed up, it is tempting to master by very large claims one's panic at being left behind, at becoming obsolete. In literary criticism too, someone redraws the map each year, but new movements quickly become as obsolete as those they displaced.

A collaboration between poetry and nationalism, exemplified by the tutelary border guard or “genius of the shore,” accounts for the interest of many Renaissance poems; redrawing the map, poets express the myths and grievances that hold their nations together. In “Lycidas,” Milton tries to redeem the fatal voyage of Edward King, his Anglo-Irish friend, by renewing the ideal of a missionary spirit, joining poet, saint, and soldier in a protectorate to bridge Ireland and England. In The Lusiads, Camões personifies the Cape of Storms as the titan Adamastor (“Unconquerable”), who curses the audacity of da Gama's voyagers and predicts their future calamities; hence the figure represents both the glory and the self-pity of Portugal and of its national poet. Though Milton and Camões hope for a bright colonial future, they turn their faces, like Benjamin's Angel of History, toward memories of shipwreck in the past.

Terence remarked that books have their fates. Many are one day in fashion, the next day discarded. A quick look at the remainder tables at Barnes and Noble or at Chicago's Powell's reflects last week's or last month's reading. The fate of these books—our books—is clear. Books have their fates, but so do their authors and their readers, and it is the fates of those authors and readers that I want to speak of. Ours seems to be a time of transition, and this transition has created much fear and anxiety within our ranks. We see the possibility that younger colleagues will be displaced, tossed away much like the books on the remainder table. Or if they do find work, they will be employed marginally—employed part-time, underpaid, and exploited. This fear has had both personal and political repercussions over the past year for many of us. Yet we are a profession that reads, and the act of reading is an optimistic one, especially in the cold, dark night of the soul.