The teaching of an ‘imperialist’ language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective renders inadequate, on the one hand, the peda-linguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages.

To say that globalization is on all our minds would be both trite and excessive. Yet for many years we have known that we live in the ‘global village’ and, as humanists, we have even rejoiced in the fact that the various technologies facilitating communications and travel have woven our world into one, concretely and visibly. We know that the Other is not out or down there but right here; that the suffering of the Other, for example that of the Third World, is with us constantly in images and statistics. In many ways this has been the fulfilment of many dreams: Christian, humanist, cosmopolitan dreams in which humanity is indeed one.

In a world post-September 11 2001, with seemingly endless escalations of war and violence in so many places, engaging one's time in literary research may appear futile and perhaps even self-indulgent. Scientific research has obvious and immediate outcomes that directly benefit the human condition (although it can of course have the reverse effect in certain fields - developments in weapon technology for example). Medical research helps to cure diseases. Social research facilitates planning for the future in all sorts of ways. Comparatively, it may certainly seem that literature and research in literature - exploring texts for what they say and how they say it, tangling with ideas of different takes or ‘comprehensive grasps’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 408) on the world - have no such directly observable beneficial outcomes. On the surface at least, they indeed may appear removed from everyday needs. In reality, however, literature, literary research and literary researchers need to play an increasingly significant and creative role in a troubled world.

This passage by Jorge Amado appeared in an article entitled ‘Livros para crianças’ 13 years before he wrote O Gato Malhado e a Andorinha Sinhá.

The flutter of a swooping butterfly. The feverish rush of readers as they move from poem to poem, text to text, as if from flower to flower, pursuing a personal pleasure guided by the law of desire and by reasons that reason has no knowledge of. In the Dictionnaire universel of 1690 Antoine Furetière illustrated the word with the following remark: ‘On dit proverbialement qu'un homme court après les papillons quand il s'amuse à des bagatelles’ (The proverb has it that a man is chasing butterflies when he takes pleasure in trivial things). We are also familiar with the words of Jean de La Fontaine, who did not mince epigrams when, four years earlier, he addressed his old friend thus:

Toi qui crois tout savoir, merveilleux Furetière. (p. 646)

(You who think you know it all, marvellous Furetière.)

To be a teacher of literature at a university today is to occupy a problematic position in the production and codification of knowledge - a fact that has generated a great deal of critical comment in recent years. But it should be noted that this position in its problematic dimensions is not necessarily new. In fact there is reason to believe that the teacher of literature has always been a propagator of an aberrant science - yet a science that in its aberrations has more to do with the methodological problems of the natural sciences than is usually credited.

People say the same thing is happening everywhere, even though there are local variations; all over the world the study of the ‘humanities’, and even of languages (other than the new lingua franca, American English), is going through an unprecedented crisis that may rightly make us fear for their very survival into the future. In Europe, probably never since the Renaissance has the threat of a return to barbarism or vacuity (the difference is not very great) in education been so clear.

I shall start with a joke and go on with a riddle. The joke first: in Woody Allen's film Take the Money and Run young Virgil, a future criminal, who is clumsy and unlucky, suddenly comes into view, in the middle of the school band, going along the streets of the town playing the cello; in this brief episode the mismatch between the instrument and the situation is complete, absolute, since the cellist could obviously not follow the rhythm of the procession. The riddle next: why do policemen always go around in pairs? Because one can read and the other can write. So the two skills complement each other unreliably, whereas they ought to exist together in the same person.

Talking about teaching modern literature is also a way of talking about the relationship between literature and society, such an old topic that there is now scarcely any desire to deal with it. But when the teacher in a school or university classroom opens a novel, a poetry collection, or most often an anthology or classic with its attendant notes, and starts reading, trying as hard as possible to grab the attention of twenty or a hundred students, at that moment something crucial happens that has to do with the relationship between literature and society.

This issue of Diogenes includes short papers by prominent officers of 18 of the member-associations of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes - FILLM) with a view to introducing and explaining the history, purpose, and function of these international learned societies representing different branches of the modern languages field at a time when the role of such bodies is often questioned even by professional academics working within the discipline, and their very existence largely unknown outside it, even to educated persons. The FILLM is one of the earliest member organizations of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH) which had indeed had a prior existence since its foundation in Oslo in 1928 as the Commission Internationale d'Histoire Littéraire Moderne and was subsequently reorganized in its present structure in 1951 following the formation of UNESCO.