What exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?

This year marks the centennial of Samuel Beckett's birth, and the celebrations around the world have been a wonder to behold. From Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Rio de Janeiro to Sofia, from South Africa (where Beckett did not permit his plays to be performed until apartheid was ended) to New Zealand, from Florida State University, in Tallahassee, to the University of Reading, from the Barbican Theatre, in London, to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, from Hamburg and Kassel and Zurich to Aix-en-Provence and Lille, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid to Tel Aviv, and of course most notably in Dublin, 2006 has been Beckett's year. Most of the festivals have included not only performances of the plays but also lectures, symposia, readings, art exhibitions, and manuscript displays. Paris Beckett 2006, for example, cosponsored by the French government and New York University's Center for French Civilization and Culture, has featured productions of Beckett's entire dramatic oeuvre, mounted in theaters large and small all over Paris, and lectures by such major figures as the novelist-theorists Philippe Sollers and Hélène Cixous, the playwrights Fernando Arrabal and Israel Horovitz, and the philosopher Alain Badiou. To round things out, in 2007 the Pompidou Center will host a major exhibition of and on Beckett's work.

Baghdad, Banda Aceh, Beirut, Detroit, Dhaka, Harare, New Orleans. In these times chronicling the devastation and annihilation of cities—through capital flight, natural disaster, slum eviction, and war—I gravitate to stories about restoring ruined cities. Halfway through Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's novel about the firebombing of Dresden, we find an eccentric scene. After surviving Dresden's conflagration, Billy Pilgrim, optician and ex-GI, escapes traumatic memories by becoming “unstuck in time” (93). He journeys with the Tralfamadorians, creatures from outer space who teach him to time-switch so that he can move fluidly through his own private and public histories. Finding a war movie intolerable, Pilgrim imagines it in reverse: “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.” Pilgrim changes space by changing time. German guns suck bomb fragments from wounded American airmen as “the formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (93–94). How can we shelter or care for, how can we nurture, the ruined city in the belly of the text?

This essay examines the professionalization of United States literary studies and sociology between the 1930s and 1950s under the aegis of John Crowe Ransom's New Criticism and Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism. These paradigms pulled the disciplines to opposite poles of the professional class: Ransom argued for a less sociological literary criticism, while Parsons distanced sociology from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school. However, both implemented similar professional ideologies that synthesized their disciplines' technical and moral claims, and both paradigms involved fantasies that specialized, disciplinary work within the academy can have a broader, moral significance. These ideas remained fantasies, which contradicted the actual effects of the New Criticism and structural functionalism; professionalism became reflexively oriented toward disciplinary self-perpetuation, isolating literature and sociology from the public they were supposed to reform. Ransom and Parsons thus exemplify the disintegration of publicly responsible professionalism—an event with broad implications for the “new class” of postwar knowledge workers.

This essay focuses on a little–studied narrative form I call the modernist miniature. Its practitioners after Baudelaire include novelists like Kafka and Musil, poets like Rilke and Benn, social thinkers and critics like Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno. Central concerns of these modernist miniatures, written primarily for the newspaper feuilleton and published only later in book form, were the perceptions and image spheres of urban space, which were undergoing radical change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernist miniatures can be alternately narrative or philosophical, lyrical or sociological, temporal or spatial. I draw on photographic and architectural discourse to analyze this hybrid literary form, which flourished in the interwar years in Austria and Germany.

When we interrogate a concept like genre, there are advantages to beginning with the way we use the word in the common language. In reading a text, we “identify” or “recognize” a genre. If we attempt to define or describe a genre as such, we are engaging in an entirely different order of activity, one remarkably close to legislation or border control. To identify something assumes a paradigm with a limited set of choices. We may identify a given text differently as a “novel,” a “realist novel,” a “pastoral”; we may debate whether a work is a “novel” or a “prose romance”; but in each case we presume sets of categories on various levels of specificity, whether we deploy particular categories to confirm or surprise common expectations in our identification.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) is discussed here as an unacknowledged treatise on methodology: a hermeneutics of the modern city that aims to interpret how a city is evidence of an era's Wollen, its drive to manifest its self–understanding in distinctive material forms. My coinage Stadtwollen alludes to an undervalued source for Benjamin: Alois Riegl's Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (1897–98), which discusses a Kunstwollen, a collective will to art, or a drive leading a culture to create works of art revealing and predicating its self–understanding. This essay sets Riegl's treatise next to Convolute N of the Passagen-Werk and the project's two Exposés (1931 and 1933) in order to illuminate Benjamin's critical–materialist phenomenology and hermeneutics of the city as encompassing new classes of technical–industrial artifacts–a discourse on method sensitive to the political critiques initiated by Marxism but far outdistancing the claims to epistemological critique made by his era's Marxisms.

Scholars have rightly asserted that the cannibal motif of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is the mechanism by which the author covertly addresses colonialist pillaging in Ireland. Less attention has been paid to an unresolved problem, that of the satire's audience. This article claims that its publication in Dublin at the height of the Irish parliamentary session of 1729 suggests that Anglo-Irish legislators were its target readers. If so, the figure of the cannibal may signify how national debt and the mortgaging of future public revenues needed to amortize that debt metaphorically devoured the posterity of the colonized Irish natives. Given that the famine conditions of 1729 had reduced revenues and produced a crisis in paying Ireland's “debt of the nation,” the satire's calendar for the harvesting and slaughtering of Ireland's babies could be taken as mimicry of the debates over how to raise new taxes and schedule their collection and expenditure.

In the last few years, a growing number of writers and artists have begun to develop a new form of verbal art. They no longer devote themselves to individually writing fixed texts destined to be read in solitude and silence. Instead, they are designing mechanisms that enable large and heterogeneous groups to collaborate on projects that combine the production of discourses, the exploration of knowledge about local circumstances, and the invention of potential socialities. These projects intend to foster forms of cosmopolitan citizenship in a globalized world at a time of expanding digital technologies. The article describes some crucial aspects of this process through a reading of two projects: a platform for collaborative translation on the Internet designed by the American artists Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks and an “open-source narrative” by the Italian collective Wu Ming.

This is a brief essay about a long or perhaps interminable subject, about what I am (for the moment) calling the genre of the unfinishable work, as distinct from works that are unfinished or open-ended—the work whose themes and style involve what comes last and then what comes after that, if there is anything after that. I thought at first there might be too few of these works to form a genre. Now I am inclined to think there may be too many, but the shift or increase does give us a contrasting term and may help us consider more closely the possibility that lies between insufficiency and excess.

This article discusses the history of Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade (1867), one of the earliest volumes of translations of Chinese poetry published in any European language. It explores the connection between her interest in this project, which Gautier undertook as an amateur student of Chinese, and both the sinological context and the influence of her father, Théophile. Although her command of Chinese was imperfect, Gautier knew more than many have insinuated; her renditions convey important themes of the Chinese poetic tradition and maintain at times an impressive fidelity to the original form. Though she frequently chose to adapt the Chinese verse to an innovative rhythmic prose, her adaptations retain the originals' emotional reticence and imagistic evocativeness–stylistic qualities that resonated with contemporary and succeeding poetic tastes. The collection's remarkable literary and musical afterlife provides an illuminating case in the cultural history of translation, mistranslation, and adaptation.

Wai Chee Dimock's chapter on genre as world system, in her recently published book Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, performs a thoroughgoing interrogation of paradigms of periodization and planetary comparatism: “What would literary history look like,” Dimock asks, Her book answers these questions by applying fractal modeling to the scaling of literary chronotypes and geopolitical territories. Dimock uses Benoit Mandelbrot's concept of indeterminate lengths to imagine a literary field of serried shapes, lacy ground, pocked sponges, coiled twine, clumped shapes, cystlike protuberances, and warped intervals (84). “Such irregularities are not limited to just one scale,” Dimock specifies; “they are much more transitive, and much more robustly self-propagating. They carry over tenaciously from one metric to another, spewing out countless copies of themselves on countless dimensions” (77). Dimock's concept of fractals as a self-duplication of literary forms produced in manifold sizes and temporal dimensions and endowed with entropic powers of extension allows her to plot feedback loops between the “gnarled contours of the globe [and] the gnarled contours of every single node” (78). Despite her concern that theorizing genre as a world system delivers “the large literary canvas” at the expense of the text, Dimock insists that such “scalar recursiveness” can in fact “thicken comparative morphology,” diversifying the conceptual grounds of comparison (79).

This article attempts to reconstruct a mental cartography of early modern London, the ensemble of material, social, and symbolic codes that made up the social architecture of the city. The article extends Steven Mullaney's work by giving scholars a more accurate understanding of the geography of London and its liberties, especially those that housed private theaters, such as Shakespeare's Blackfriars. I look in particular at the liberty of the Whitefriars, arguing that between 1600 and 1615, two theaters used the liberty's reputation to draw visitors to both the theater and the neighborhood in an early modern version of cultural tourism. The theater thrived on a symbolic economy, a commodification of local color that drew people to the district, from in and outside London. I bring theories of space and tourism into play when considering the complexities of how a theater commodifies its neighborhood in this manner.