Recent interest in globalizing literary studies has largely involved attempts to locate conjunctures between contemporary literature and the economic formation of global capitalism and thereby to name a new literary structure of feeling—structure in terms of the organization of various literatures into a world system and feeling in terms of the literary production of new affects in new forms, styles, and genres. Its precedent is the idea of “world literature,” first articulated by Goethe in 1827 and recently recuperated. While many scholars resuscitating this concept offer a nominal apology for its Eurocentric origins, this Eurocentrism's constitutive hierarchies and asymmetries are seldom analyzed. Twenty-five years after Edward Said's Orientalism and the book's specific criticism of Goethe, it appears that the critique of Eurocentrism in general has exhausted itself, that one only needs to show awareness of it because it is predictable. Instead of working through the problem, one gives recognition to it, which serves as an expedient and efficient strategy of displacement, a tropological caveat, able to push aside obstacles on the path to globalist literary studies of global literature.

The theory of exile as a form of intellectual empowerment strongly influenced writers of the Romantic and modernist periods, when major figures from Byron to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett sought to take advantage of a dissociation from native customs to embrace the authenticity of their art. More recently, however, displacement from indigenous cultures has become such a commonplace that it appears difficult to credit the process of migration with any special qualities of critical insight. Nevertheless, literary scholarship remains to some degree in the shadow of the idealization of “exiles and émigrés” that ran through the twentieth century. Edward Said, a Palestinian in the United States, consistently linked his “politics of knowledge” with a principled alienation from “corporations of possession, appropriation, and power,” while looking back to the exiled German scholar of comparative literature Erich Auerbach as a model for transcending “the restraints of imperial or national or provincial limits” (Culture 335). Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian in France, associated a similar perspective of estrangement with Christian narratives of exile and purification, along with their negative correlatives, psychological traumas of disinheritance and depression; but she also attributed to the foreign writer a levitating condition of “weightlessness”: “since he belongs to nothing the foreigner can feel as appertaining to everything, to the entire tradition” (32).

Any multicultural evaluation of difference— for example, my experience as a professor of Latin American studies in front of American students—should be preceded by a questioning of not only the places but also (and principally) the times of that experience. For me, this questioning refers to the transformations that I underwent on the road from student to professional. I offer some biographical particulars to ensure an accurate interpretation of my reading.

Responding to a reader's inquiry about what second language to study, the Vanity Fair columnist “Dame Edna” stated, “Forget Spanish. There's nothing in that language worth reading except Don Quixote, and a quick listen to the CD of Man of La Mancha will take care of that. There was a poet named García Lorca, but I'd leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you… . Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German.” I am aware that Dame Edna is a ficticious persona, but I disagree with the so-called entertainment value ascribed to this column. Whom does it entertain? The readership of Vanity Fair is largely upper-middle-class and upper-class white. The Hispanic community, outraged by the remarks, demanded a retraction, reminding Vanity Fair that if the whole Hispanic labor force went on strike, the US economy would break down. Readers cited as well the number of radio and TV stations broadcasting in Spanish, sixty to seventy percent of whose audience can follow programs in Spanish and English (the United States' bilingualism, much to Dame Edna's grief, is not English-French). Additionally, more than half the students in schools and universities who enroll in a second language choose Spanish. The voices calling for retraction were not leaf blowers but architects, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, writers, moviemakers, painters, journalists, governors, and bankers. And, last and most obvious, Hispanics make up the largest minority group in the United States (at present some thirty-seven million, or thirteen percent, and probably some fifty million by 2010 [Klineberg]).

Americans living in England are sometimes inspired by a sense of belated recognition, a desire to claim the place as their own through an imagined return to an ancestral or a spiritual homeland. Nathaniel Hawthorne was hardly enamored of English life when he took up residence in Liverpool in 1853; nonetheless, after two years' stay he writes of a “latent” recognition: “I suppose there is still latent in us Americans (even of two centuries date, and more, like myself) an adaptation to the English climate, which makes it like native soil and air to us” (121-22). But even as Hawthorne became more at home in England, his contentment was disturbed by the political realities of living in the United Kingdom-an imperial entity created by an act of Parliament in 1801. Appearing at the edges of the detailed travel descriptions in the notebooks are lingering resentments over previous British-American conflicts and a dislike of the colonizer mentality. Writing in October 1854, during the CrimeanWar, Hawthorne adopts the tone of an expatriate's disdain: “Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion to this war, the Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help” (91). Hawthorne's reference is to two Times articles that are worth citing here, in that they seem to prefigure our era of “precision warfare” and triumphalist national self-regard: “The incidents of this [Crimean] war have already immeasurably increased the mutual confidence and respect of two nations [France and Britain] which have just shown they are the most powerful states in the world,” declared the Times on 4 October. The following day it stated:

Women's studies in english departments in germany have developed in a special and, when seen from an Anglo-American perspective, rather peculiar way. The irregularity, which seems to have been overlooked up to now, is caused by institutional and ideological conditions characteristic of German universities.

The extent to which we in east-central europe ACquire proficiency in new languages and develop the capacity to communicate in the new international environment without translators or interpreters has significant consequences for our economic efficiency, living standards, and general welfare.

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformist Monthly Magazine shortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire's flâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.

Anthologies of literary theory, the backbone of courses on literary criticism, rely on viktor Shklovsky's “Art as a Device” or Boris Eikhenbaum's “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method‘” to broach the subject of Russian formalism. The canonical status of these essays is well deserved. Written when the author was merely twenty-four, Shklovsky's 1917 essay bristles with a polemical fervor, wit, and knack for example that announce him as a critical prodigy. Marked by the mixture of embittered pride, rigor, and self-conscious malaise typical of later formalism, Eikhenbaum's dense history of the formal school is remarkable for its titanic effort to marry historical considerations to a systematic analysis of the evolution of key formalist doctrines.