To mistake sound bites for deep thought, politics for action, reality shows for creative entertainment; to forget value of dreams; to lose ability to imagine a violent death in Darfur, in Afghanistan, in Iraq; to look at this as passing news: Are these not indications that now--more than ever we need courage and integrity, faith, vision and dreams that these books instilled in us? Is this not a good time to worry with Bellow's hero in Dean's December about what will happen if a country loses its poetry and soul?... In this day and age when politics are paramount, belligerence order of day, and questions of culture take second seat to power, I'd like to propose that there is such a thing as Republic of Imagination. It is a country worth building, a state with a future, a place where we can truly know freedom. --Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination (BW 10) With all due respect to President Bush, people of world do not have to choose between Taliban and US government. All beauty of human civilization--our art, our music, our literature lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. --Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (130) Traditionally, concept of nation has played a central role in regulating academic study of literature: most institutions organize literary study in terms of national languages and traditions; literary texts are frequently interpreted as expressions of national identity; and critics routinely invoke some concept of nation to explicate, categorize, and evaluate literary texts. For example, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities advocates a particularly strong connection between literature and nationalism, going so tar as to reconceptualize nation itself as an imagined political community forged less in some shared history of blood and soil than in crucible of national languages and literatures, which make it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to themselves and others, in profoundly foundly new ways (6, 36). Focusing specifically on World contexts, Fredric Jameson's Third World Literature in Era of Multinational Capitalism argues even more emphatically that [a]ll third-world texts are necessarily ... allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories because the story of private individual destiny is always an allegory 'of embattled situation of public third-world culture and society (69). In short, critics regularly identify a strong interrelationship between nations and narratives: not only does concept of nation influence how we interpret and teach texts, but texts also play a significant role in articulating, expressing, and even producing imagined political community of nation itself As Kwame Anthony Appiah explains, intellectuals everywhere are now caught up ... in a struggle for of their respective nations, and everywhere, it seems, language and literature are central to that articulation (53). While I appreciate these critics' diverse attempts to explain material, political significance of literary texts as forces that shape development of nationalist ideologies, I question usefulness of relying so exclusively--and, in Jameson's case, so absolutely--on nationalism as a privileged conceptual framework for interpreting narratives. In our rapidly globalizing world, contemporary critics now largely reject nation as a privileged locus for understanding and interpreting culture, and they have begun advocating instead a wide range of new transnational models, ranging from Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity (The Location of Culture 4) to concepts such as traveling cultures (Clifford 17), diasporic public spheres (Appadurai, Modernity at Large 4), postnational narratives (Pease 2), discrepant cosmopolitanisms (Robbins 181), and Global Souls or offshore beings (Iyer 21, 22). …