It was inevitable that the events of September 2001 and the rapidly shifting world picture they have generated should force us to reexamine our programs, methods, orientations, and presuppositions. Having set out to address the role played by theory in comparative literature programs, I find myself caught between a wish to anticipate this fast-changing history we half live, half dream, in front of television screens and a need to take more distance, to survey a longer history. Besides, since I completed a book entitled The Future of Theory just weeks before these events, I feel the urge to check the relevance of some of my analyses and predictions.

Michel de Certeau thinks about reading as an archaic practice: “Readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else … despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves” (174). Embedded in Certeau's romanticization of reading is a history of how Egypt has been read: as wealth to be plundered, as endlessly available texts, as the ruin of time. Pose against this lostness Friedrich Nietzsche's contention that all philosophy is just Egyptianism, the nostalgia for and reification of a past tense without a dynamic sense of history, so many “conceptual mummies” (35). Nietzsche reminds us to consider not lost origins but the possibility of endings, not the loss of history but its death—not death in the sense of apocalypse as Percy Bysshe Shelley's “now” and the release of new time in Prometheus Unbound but death as the archaic, the ruin, the mute, as Egypt's lost “now” and the end stop of archaic time. I will pursue the problems of the archaic, poetic ground, and translative readings Romantically through Hegel's Egyptianized account of aesthetic practices, for Nietzsche's post-Romantic Egyptianism mummifies thought. Although Hegel's Egyptianizing also concerns the dead matter of the past, his account renders that matter as dynamic. His revivification of the archaic Romantically accounts for its contaminative potential as a mysterious text whose translation can unearth a curse, and/or a promise, for the new.

What is comparative literature? Not a theory or a methodology, certainly (which raises the question of why this article should appear in a series so entitled), though theories and methodologies aplenty occur as part of its typical business. Is there, or can there be, an object of knowledge identifiable as “comparative literature”?

When I began hearing about comparative literature in the middle 1970s, there was a fairly straightforward means of distinguishing comparative literature on the university campuses where it was done. The English department pursued knowledge of language and literature in one language; the foreign language departments pursued similar studies in two languages (typically English, assumed to be most students' native language, plus the foreign tongue); and comparative literature committees, programs, or departments carried out literary analysis in at least three languages at once.

About thirty-five years ago, my professor in a course on seventeenth-century english social history began with the following. “You may have heard,” he said, “that the reading list for this course has not changed since I took it here in 1924.” Here he paused. “But I can assure you that it has changed”—he paused again, and added, sotto voce—“however imperceptibly.” These words have long seemed emblematic for me of the pride felt by much of the historical profession in the continuity of its essential practices. I do not mean, of course, that historians have not embraced new groups of people, adopted a much wider array of ideological stances, and above all invented a researchable historicity for many things that had never before seemed to have a history. All this innovation is splendid, and the finest products of academic history constitute a rich and admirable body of work. But in the essential practices, especially the practice of reading—the basic relation of reader with language and imagination—change is, shall we say, hardly perceptible. It seems that the charge that historians are professionally taught not to read is almost as true now as it was two decades ago when Dominick LaCapra made it (339). But if we are to learn about the historical imagination, histories need to be read and academic historians need to be reminded from time to time that what they do is as subject to the formative pressures of discourse as any other precinct of the world of words.

Various ghosts have haunted this special topic. Caroline Weber's essay conjures the ghosts of slaves in Denis Diderot's Le fils naturel. Kari Lokke explores the way Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand deploy tales of contact with the spirits of the dead to probe a nation's political unconscious, enlisting the dead to galvanize the present into revolutionary action. For Todd Samuel Presner, Hegel's grand sweep of world history is haunted by the ghosts of Jews written out of that history. That PMLA in its special topics has not always wanted to listen to the Spirit of Literature Past is unsurprising, for the desire to listen to history's ghosts is by no means universal.