mong the complaints that writers sometimes make about critics is that the latter savor too much the role of the necrophile or the coroner. Speaking as a critic, it's admittedly more convenient to have a finite object of study. The vast majority of academic critics achieve this by working in historical fields. These critics never have to worry that their labors will suddenly be rendered moot by a new novel, poem, or play. For those critics who choose to study contemporary literature, film, or mass culture, however, the reader who takes pleasure in new developments remains on some level at odds with the historian anxious to fix and catalog things. The arrival of the new century marks a quiet but significant transformation in the self-definitions of those of us who study twentieth-century literature. Suddenly we have a choice: we can now construe ourselves as either historicists or contemporarists, depending on our taste. That is, we can either continue to study new literature, or else we can devote ourselves to the twentieth century as a completed historical period (ceding new work by Rushdie or Morrison, Ai or Stoppard, to our colleagues in twenty-first century lit, or else treating it as an embarrassing coda, somewhat like Faulkner's post-World War II novels). Here I am obviously being a touch facetious. This is by no means a necessary split; hopefully the arrival of the twenty-first century will, if anything, make us a little more self-conscious about periodizing by centuries to begin with. The place where this will have to be sorted out is in job advertisements, and it will be interesting to see how departments word these in coming years-whether, for instance, Contemporary Literature or Recent Literature become categories distinct from the newly historical field of Twentieth-Century Literature.