����� 1. Does literature have anything interesting to say about globalization? Is the work of literary critics germane to those analyzing today’s transnational flows of people, ideas, and goods? Many students of globalization, who work primarily in economics, political science, cultural studies, and journalism, would be skeptical of the claim that literary study could address their concerns. Indeed, they would be surprised to learn that Comparative Literature has been championing cosmopolitanism for more than a century, or that it had developed an international perspective on literary relations decades before they had. Comparative Literature, in fact, prefigured today’s transnational consciousness through its attempt to transcend the limits of individual national traditions and to investigate links among them. This makes the current malaise of Comparative Literature baffling. A discipline that promoted polyglossia and comparison for 100 years now finds itself in decline. Rather than emerging as a leading light in an academy so preoccupied with interdisciplinarity and difference, Comparative Literature has lost its glow. Most alarming of all, it has allowed English, Cultural Studies, and Globalization Studies to pursue a scorched-earth policy with respect to foreign languages. The discipline that spearheaded transnationalism in the humanities now finds itself in the rear guard. With some justification, Gayatri Spivak speaks of the death of the discipline. Her book, like so many studies of Comparative Literature today, is written in an elegiac tone. So persuaded are critics of Comparative Literature’s demise that they have resurrected the idea of world literature as a way of analyzing global literary production. To be sure, the proliferation of courses in and anthologies and studies of world literature all seems to indicate the rise of a fresh, more up-to-date approach to the study of the literatures of the globe. But is world literature really that novel? Or is it a case of old software in new computers? Has it learned from the lessons xxxxxxxxxxxx