It was not long ago that one prefecture of french culture was reinventing the idea of authorship while another one was trying to kill it off. The New Wave movement and post-structuralism, fundamental opposites in almost every respect, emerged at the same cultural moment. Roland Barthcs's Writing Degree Zero (1953) and François Truffaut's seminal essay in Cahiers du cinéma that instated auteur criticism (the first phase of the New Wave) appeared less than a year apart; the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) coincided with the triumph of New Wave filmmaking; and in the interval between 1966 and 1970, which saw the publication of The Order of Things, Of Grammatology, and S/Z, Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of the New Wave critic-directors, released fourteen feature films, including four masterworks. In its classic phase poststructuralism was fixated on the written word, involved disciplined thought inflected by mainstream Continental philosophy, took on itself the burden of refashioning modern European history along Marxist lines, and could be uncompromisingly rectitudinous. The New Wave spoke the language of images, involved a loose and—except for its radical stylistics—rather tame avant-gardism, valued an aleatory, free-form aesthetic over political commitment, assailed mainstream French culture, and championed alternative forms of cultural production such as American popular movies. Yet the teleologies were similar: to inscribe a unique place in the history of authorship. To supplant the biographical author from the textual site, one of the primary motives of poststructuralism, was to make the collective space available for a higher entity, the philosopher-critic who is the author not of individual texts but of textuality, the social meaning of texts. In the same way, in claiming the textual site for a film author—a radical conception for the time—the auteur critics scripted a role for themselves that they would subsequently occupy as film directors.

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

This study calls for globalizing recognitions and for writing less exclusionary histories. In introductory remarks, it relates two undermined cultures to current globalization and to “Western civilization” as a complex constructed from selected ancient Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian elements. Seven sections illustrate various contradictions in scholarship, in literary history, and in practice and attempt to reinsert Canaanite, Etruscan, and other suppressed civilizations into the Western and monotheistic self-valuation. The sections are titled “Etruscology,” “Recognition Politics and Paradigmatic Omissions,” “A Few Scholars,” “Recognition Textbooks,” “Canaan, Ugarit, and Biblical Scholarship,” “Demonologies,” and “Writing Writing.” The last section suggests that the original development and transmission of the alphabet could be used as another model for human commonality and for altering frameworks of interaction, knowledge, and recognition.

About halfway through the 1998 film shakespeare in love, a group of players and hired extras, under the critical eye of the theater owner Philip Henslowe, begins rehearsing a new play at the Rose. While Henslowe observes the process with a simultaneously proprietary and befuddled air, his financial backer, the apothecary Fennyman, comes to ask him about the play's progress. Suddenly Fennyman notices a tall, handsome figure bustling about, shouting both instructions and thanks. “Who is that?” the skeptical Fennyman asks. The movie audience knows that it is Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's version of Will Shakespeare, assembling the cast for his play. “Nobody,” replies Henslowe. “The author” (Norman and Stoppard 49-50).

The enormous twenty-seven-nation post-Soviet sphere—including the former Soviet republics and the former “East Bloc” states—is virtually never discussed in the burgeoning discourse of postcolonial studies. Yet Russia and the successor Soviet Union exercised colonial control over the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics, and Central and Eastern Europe for anywhere from fifty to two hundred years. The present essay interrogates the possible postcoloniality of the post-Soviet sphere, including Russia. The investigation is complicated by Russia's seeming Eurasian status and its history of perceived cultural inferiority to the West. A broad range of theoretical, historical, cultural, and geographic positions are examined, and figures such as Curzon, Conrad, Lermontov, and Shohat are addressed. In conclusion the essay argues against the current occidentocentric privileging of Western European colonization as the standard and proposes a fully global postcolonial critique. Overall, it critiques both too narrow post-Soviet studies and too parochial, too Anglo-Franco-focused postcolonial studies.

Despite efforts among recent critical theorists to remove, banish, or even kill the author, the author remains at the center of general critical attention. It is commonplace now to understand that all texts produced by authors are not the products of individual creators. Rather, they are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print. Even if not intended for an audience or the publishing marketplace, a piece of writing cannot escape the numerous influences that produce it. All discourse is socially constructed.

Intercourse means commerce, they told us in school. And we giggled at the explosive word that went off in more than one direction. But the confusion is more than simply a joke of mistaken referents or of metaphoric allusions to intimate contact and interested exchange. It is a tangle of productive sex and enterprising business revealing an adjacency of practices that add up to modernity. In a metaleptic circle of cause and effect, modern desire for family and for wealth seemed to drive those practices, and they helped form the kind of modern subject who desired them. The circularity illustrates what Nietzsche said about the fiction of empirical moorings (279-80). The moorings invented themselves to produce an illusion of stability. This is what happened at the beginnings of European modernity, as Mary Poovey shows in A History of the Modern Fact: truth grounded in empirical facts turns out to be a metaleptic effect of the seventeenth-century fiction of precise accounting, a rhetorical compensation for numbers that could not add up in the precarious conditions of mercantilism. But a century later, precise and transparent accounts were no longer performances that interpreted irregular data; they required proofs of economic and civic credibility. In a broad stroke, we can say that the foundational fiction that followed from honorable entrepreneurship is the dynamic law of desire for development as the natural drive of our particular and collective lives. Laissez-faire was the slogan.

Imagine that you are a young sociologist working around 1907. On your daily ride to the university, you witness an explosion of nickelodeons along the trolley route. They seem to operate continuously, day and night, and it is rare not to see a queue outside their doors. Because your children spend an extravagant amount of time and money unsupervised within their walls and exhibit an extraordinary and sometimes incomprehensible fascination with the characters presented there and the people who play them, perhaps you have gone inside to see a photoplay or two. How can you comprehend, despite the breadth and depth of your knowledge, that an entirely new medium and an important industry are being created that, in many respects, will come to define the visual culture of the twentieth century?

“You claim to be entirely able to do your book selection with only a few suggestions from us here and there—how can that be'?” Thus Professor X to Librarian Y, all over North America. Well, granted, we librarians are proud of the subject know-how that we've acquired, some by earning higher degrees in the subject, others by just having learned our way around the literature of the subject after years in the trenches. We have to admit, though, that approval-plan buying has made a big difference: the vendor allows you to see the book before you decide whether or not to add it to the collection. (People do this when they buy a car or a cabbage; why not a book?) Approval-plan buying is a great deal more reliable than the reading of blurbs, which are all too often deliberately uninformative, or than waiting for reviews before ordering, which takes too long. However, since debate springs up from time to time about whether libraries with straitened budgets can afford approval plans (a red herring, in my view), I thought I'd speak up in defense of them, especially in my area, foreign language book selection.

Along with many other aspects of north american culture, literary studies is being swept into the digital age. In considering what this might mean, I examine in particular how the Internet, with its many and protean conveniences for literature, is beginning to supplant the library, that traditional bastion of the text. The prospects for literature are not necessarily favorable. While libraries have been attempting to adapt to the Internet, the nature of the digital medium and some of the rhetoric that has attended it invoke troubling questions, raising the possibility that central features of literary studies may be in danger of being disregarded or marginalized. The digitizing of literature affects how we read and what we read, methods of study, the preservation of the archive, and the forms taken by new writing, some of which is specifically designed to exploit the electronic medium. In this paper I offer a sketch of the problems, possibilities, and paradoxes that we face as literary scholars.

We felt the first stirrings of collaborative desire fifteen years ago. since then, we have published one book (and some miscellaneous pieces) together and have finished another. They are very different, though related, books, and while producing them we have had different, though related, thoughts about our collaborative authorship. One thing that collaboration teaches you is that there is no last word on anything. Someone looking over your shoulder or over your draft is going to find a better word or cross out your word entirely.

A story of origins: We began to talk about writing a book together while trying to finish our dissertations. It was helpful to fantasize such a project—it presumed that the dissertations would get finished and that when they did, we would be alive and well and still writing. But the fantasy of collaboration addressed other anxieties, especially over the word original in the demand that the dissertation be a “significant and original contribution to scholarship.” Each of us knew how much her work depended on the scholarship she had read and how much the shape of her work had been affected by conversations, in reading groups or over coffee, with other graduate students, professors, friends, bartenders. Worse, in our theory classes we were being rewarded for pontificating about the demise of the very author we were working so hard to become. The notion of solitary authorship on which intellectual authority depends seemed a lie. At least in our cases. We certainly felt like frauds, but then as women in programs in which the students and professors were no longer exclusively but still predominantly male, we were perhaps predisposed to feeling like frauds. To write a book that had two signatures, we mused, would formally acknowledge that authors depend on other authors and would as well trouble the notions of original and originary. Intellectual honesty seemed to require the candid dismantling of the solitary author, of the original and originary genius.

Global production of literature and criticism about the environment has increased dramatically in the past decade, but black African writers and critics have not participated fully in this new approach. Literary green globalism, broadcast from metropolitan centers East and West, has inspired suspicion among some black African anglophone writers, while gaining acceptance among others, who with their Euro-American counterparts have begun to examine the relations of humanity and nature in sub-Saharan environments.

To say that globalization is ubiquitous is stating the obvious. for globalization has become a household word in boardrooms, local and international institutions, the academy, and the media. It also shapes the everyday life of all but the most disadvantaged communities. Besides having the world at my fingertips twenty-four hours a day, courtesy of CNN and other news channels, I am connected by a mere click of the mouse, even in South Africa, to colleagues across vast geographic distances locally and abroad. The supermarket down the road in my Johannesburg suburb offers me the choice of Oprah's Book Club, the “taste of Provence,” and African, Indian, Chinese, English, and a host of other flavors, not to mention Coca-Cola, because I live in a society made up of different cultures and ethnicities. Without having to move even a mile, I feel like M. de Vogüé, of whom Harper's Magazine said in 1892, “[He] loves travel; he goes to the East and to the West for colors and ideas; his interests are as wide as the universe; his ambition, to use a word of his own, is to be ‘global’” (“Global”).