There is a passage in David Lodge's 1988 Novel nice work in which the heroine, a marxist-feminist critic who teaches English literature, looks out the window of an airplane and sees the division of labor.

Lindsay waters's “rescue tenure from the tyranny of the monograph“ in the 20 april 2001 chronicle of higher Education complements his “Modest Proposal […]” in PMLA. The longer Chronicle piece insistently deploys the concept of crisis that presided over a 1997 conference of humanities scholars, librarians, and editors, The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis (Case). According to Waters, the overproduction of monographs required of tenure candidates “conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past thirty years […]” (B7). “Above all,” he avers, “the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership” that implicates the university: “the problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university […],” an institution “increasingly committed to business values” (B8). In this university in which “the humanities have grown to be beside the point,” Waters submits, the increased stress on the tenure monograph during the eighties and nineties is the most evident symptom of an ill-conceived professionalization of the humanities.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that i have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I amhardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will-with luck-come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I amdoing-which is never an easy thing to do.

One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall recently to explain how happy she was to have reached a moment in her academic career when she no longer had to teach literature. Another colleague buttonholed me at about the same time to tell me he could no longer imagine teaching literature in any context other than cultural studies-that is, in a setting in which the literary text was at most an illustration of an ideological, historical, or theoretical theme, no different from any other cultural manifestation. No wonder undergraduates demonstrate dwindling interest in taking a major in literature. For a host of reasons, they come to the university less interested in studying literature than previous generations of students were, only to encounter on their arrival professors who are more than occasionally apathetic toward or suspicious of literary texts. Student disenchantment can only grow in such circumstances.

martin cohen's “developments in foreign approval buying,” in the march 2001 issue of pmla, lists some of “the foreign language bibliographer's […] tricks” (393) for stocking collections. Acquiring African literature, however, is largely a different matter. The approval plans Cohen mentions, whereby “the vendor allows you to see the book [or a description of it] before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection,” would be applicable to the presses in England and France specializing in Third World literature (e.g., Heinemann in England, L'Harmattan in France), which publish primarily the most established African writers (see Maja-Pearce; Ruppert). But when it comes to publishing on the continent of Africa, even books by well-known writers (like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o), when written in the national languages, can only be obtained locally. And certainly all other literature has to be bought in the country of origin.

Critical discourse today locates an antagonism between globalization and citizenship. The deepening of globalizing processes strips citizens of power, this position maintains. As economic processes become globalized, the nation-state loses its ability to protect its population. Citizens lose their ability to elect a leadership that effectively pursues their interests. When production facilities are dispersed beyond the nation, jobs are lost to foreigners, labor markets are affected by conditions in countries with diverse living standards, and capital flows, at the speed of light, to places of optimum returns. Consumption is also planetary in scope, bringing across borders alien cultural assumptions as embodied in commodities. The popular need no longer be the local. Although foreign goods are inflected with community values and easily adapted to local conditions, they remain indexes of otherness. What is more dramatic still than the changes in production and consumption, nation-states are losing their cultural coherence by dint of planetary communications systems. Much of contemporary music is global music or at least a fusion of diverse musical cultures. Satellite technology and the Internet bring all media across national boundaries as if those borders did not exist. Global processes run deep and wide, rendering problematic the figure of the citizen as a member of a national community.

What do we tell our students? the question implies a range of assumptions, most obviously the simple hope that such a conversation might even take place. Imagine a student dropping by during office hours or approaching us after class to ask for our thoughts on the choice of a major. Or consider a different scenario: the faculty member struggling to find the right tone in order to strike up a conversation with a student about his or her academic plans. Certainly such discussions take place, certainly teachers and students talk about educational goals, and certainly a teacher's advice can at times be important for a student. Yet all this reassurance cannot disguise the fragility of the situation. For it is equally certain that the question overstates the frequency, significance, and ramifications of these sorts of exchanges. Parental pressure plays a larger role in the real decision making than does a teacher's advice. (Perhaps there is a journal somewhere for parents of college students with a discussion on “Choosing the Right Major: What DoWe Tell Our Children?”) Many of us have spoken with students who plea their interest in selecting a literature major but find themselves compelled by their parents to choose something allegedly more practical. I for one have rarely met students passionate about a major in business but whose families heartlessly forced them to study literature.

With these epigraphs I aim to abbreviate a frequently cited “lesson of bosnia”——That a country was destroyed and a genocide happened, in the heart of Europe, on television, and what is known as the world or the West simply looked on and did nothing. Bosnians, said one to the American journalist David Rieff, “felt as you would feel if you were mugged in full view of a policeman and he did nothing to rescue you” (140). Or, as Rieff says with slightly more precision,