We are confronted today with a persistent tradition, whose veracity has been less questioned with the passing years, that Diderot not only contributed extensively to the thought and style, but also wrote many of the pages, of D'Holbach's works.

The relation of english to other language-oriented departments, though dense with complexity, is rarely talked about in the open. One explanation for the lack of discussion may be the difficulty of framing a relation that is moving in two directions at once: while over the last generation or so English and the so-called foreign languages have come to resemble each other in substance, they have grown apart in material resources and institutional prestige. Many departments of English are more or less thriving, while departments of other languages and literatures in the same places are depleted and struggling. And yet, in the view of many of the people who determine our condition—administrators, legislators, and students—we are largely all of a piece; my problems will soon be yours, yours will be mine, and scholars and teachers of literature will find that they have far more joining than dividing them. To revive one of the rubrics of our New York University conference, we literary scholars are much better at collating the many ways we are different than identifying and leveraging the ways we are the same. How much does our declining influence in academy and society owe to an incapacity to come together and announce our identity when it matters? I take the position that we now have an ethical obligation to do what inclination and training have so badly prepared us for: to measure our sameness and difference on one scale and talk about what we can do together. How can people in English departments address this condition? What might those in other literature departments do? Having spent a career moving between these settings, I offer some reflections.

This essay identifies “selling out” as an enduring yet evolving concern in anglophone literary history, from the late nineteenth century's divided literary field to the “program era” to the increasingly global circuits of contemporary literary commerce. It begins with Henry James, showing how his canonical statements on modern narrative form emerged from commercial negotiations—an economic prehistory of “craft.” Selling out becomes a salient concern as intellectuals come to see commercial success as antithetical to modern art. This cultural anxiety changes, however, once creative writing programs begin systematically reconciling craft and commerce. Turning to Nam Le's celebrated short story collection The Boat, the second section shows how selling out came to entail a fear that minority writers might betray group solidarity through reductive or essentialist portrayals of identity. Finally, the essay's third section closes by situating Le within a global market for postcolonial fiction and its attendant concerns over commodifying exoticism.

While Edmund Burke was a student at Trinity College, his native Dublin was rocked by the agitation of the celebrated patriot and apothecary, Charles Lucas (1713–71), who wished to restore the ancient rights of the freemen of the city which was then governed as a closed oligarchy by the Board of Aldermen. Tension was heightened when one of Dublin's representatives to the Irish House of Commons died on 16 August 1748 and Lucas quickly issued the first of twenty addresses in support of his candidacy for the seat. Lucas pandered to the mob—his “most thoroughly beloved brethren and friends”—and begged them to believe he was and ever would be theirs “with the utmost Sincerity, true Respect, unfeigned Love, and boundless Gratitude.” He avowed the noblest intentions: “No man, let his Pretensions, or his Places, be what they will, loves his Country better than I. It is this that prompts me to attempt the Restoration of her Constitution to its natural Strength and Vigour.” His appeal was directed primarily to the Protestant freeholders of Dublin, who were struggling to supplant the clique dominating political life in the interests of the Viceroy and his “undertakers” with officials and a parliament representative of their views. Lucas wished to inspire these freemen to achievements as great as those of the citizens of Rome or Athens.