The topic “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture” raises issues that epitomize current intellectual possibilities and problems. As Emerson said of his own time in “The American Scholar,” this is a moment when “the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of men are being searched by fear and hope.… This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” If anyone's “energies” are being “searched by fear and hope” today, it's because we face a similar situation. The two preceding essays brought to bear in rapid succession two historically different models of how the world works. These models, which I will follow Fredric Jameson in calling the “organic” model of the nineteenth century and the “linguistic” model of the twentieth, imply two different versions of the character and status of language, two different versions of what literature is, two different versions of what the self is, and two different versions of what we could mean by saying that we use these things to study American “culture.”