Like many other subscribers to PMLA and most of the students enrolled in my literature classes, i first learned that reading could be a pleasure when I discovered Dr. Seuss's children's books. The Cat in the Hat implanted the desire to learn how to read in an entire generation of baby boomers. Dr. Seuss (the literary identity of Theodor Seuss Geisel) helped millions of children learn to read, and his books planted the seeds for a more caring, open, and creative culture.

The national book award for nonfiction was given in 2010 to Patti Smith for her book just kids. Since Patti Smith is a rock star as well as a poet and “punk icon,” her heartfelt remarks at the awards ceremony did more for the book business than any other tribute could have done. Smith told the assembled guests that as a young woman working at the Scribner Book Store, shelving books emblazoned with the National Book Award logo, she had dreamed of writing such a book herself. She concluded her acceptance speech with an impassioned defense of the printed book: “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book” (“National Book Awards—2010”).

Is the resurgence of religion in our millennial moment a case of zombies or of vampires? are we dealing, that is, with an atavistic army of stumbling, mumbling idiots, or are we encountering a phenomenon with teeth: vital, adaptive, crazy-beautiful, and ready to take some revamped general education courses at Harvard? I think we can conclude from these essays that we are dealing with vampires. In other words, like today's teenage vampires, the reanimated religions on the contemporary world stage are not anomalous, exceptional, or archaic. Instead, globalization, by draining functionality and glamour from the nation-state, has summoned organized religions and postreligions to take on ever-more-powerful political roles. Hence the brazen entry of an array of latter-day saints into the sempiternal sunlight cast by the restless streaming of information, capital, and populations across planetary time zones, from jihadist organizers and evangelical Alaskans to Harry Potter activists and irate Apple users.

Whoever goes down to Bà Ria and happens by the cemetery in the sand at the village of Phu'ó'c Lě, I beg you to go in that cemetery and look for the grave with a cross painted half black, half white, by the side of the Church of Martyrs–to visit that grave lest it become pitiful. Because it has been two years since anyone visited or cast as much as a glance.

—Nguyễn Trong Quan

SO opens nguyễn trọng quản's thẩy lazaro phiển (“lazaro phiển” 22). The narrative begins at an obscure gravesite evokes the life of a man as both victim of state violence and perpetrator of private deaths. Lazaro Phiển is a ictional work written in the romanized script and was published in Saigon in 1887 in a novelistic format almost forty years before Hoàng Ngọc Phách's Tố Tâm. Yet the latter, published in Hanoi in 1925, is oten touted in official literary history as the first modern Vietnamese novel. Although Nguyễn Trọng Qu.n's narrative revolves around the recovery of an elided story, the author could not have anticipated the elision of his work from a nationalist literary genealogy that locates the origin of modern Vietnamese literature in the North. he elision was part of a general omission of works from the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century and irst two decades of the twentieth. his genealogy was by no means limited to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North but was also perpetuated in the Republic of Vietnam in the South ater independence and the partitioning of the country into North and South in 1954

Some people say love is incomprehensible, that language cannot capture it. Some people never stop talking, thinking, writing, speculating, and theorizing about it. Maybe our unending discourse about love arises in the tension that stretches it between ineffability and expression.

“We were warned to expect ‘dirty tricks,‘” he tweeted. “now we have the first one.” He'd been set up, he told reporters. His lawyer attributed the allegations to “dark forces,” part of a “greater plan” to discredit him (Harnden). The “we” (and “he”) in question was Julian Assange, a thirty-nine-year-old Australian and founder of the guerrilla media organization WikiLeaks, which dedicates itself to embarrassing governments and corporations through strategic leaks of classified and secret documents to the media. Assange has yet to be formally charged with anything, although he's currently under house arrest at the English country estate of one of his supporters and facing extradition to Sweden after allegedly sexually assaulting two women there. The women, both WikiLeaks supporters, did consent to have sex with him, but apparently not the kind of sex he had in mind. As one of them put it, “Not only was it the worst screw of my life, it was also violent” (qtd. in Davies).

In 1909 Wu Zhihui, a proponent of esperanto and well-known anarchist of Twentieth-Century China, predicted the future of global languages. Though the nationalization of the Chinese language was still pending, Wu expressed concern not for its imminent standardization but for its eventual global viability. The outlook was not rosy:

In 2005 Emer O'Sullivan published the most comprehensive outline to date of a comparative approach to the study of literature and other cultural productions for the young. She presents nine constituent areas of comparative study in relation to children's literature (theory of children's literature, contact and transfer studies, comparative poetics, intertextuality studies, intermediality studies, image studies, comparative genre studies, comparative historiography of children's literature, comparative history of children's literature studies), which she illustrates with examples from around the world. But, although extensive, O'Sullivan's proposal is not without its blind spots, and she acknowledges that it “can only be enhanced by future discussion and modification” (12). With the aim of bolstering the field of children's literature, I here propose an area of comparative research overlooked by O'Sullivan. I also suggest extensions to her conception of comparative literature and to her handling of reception or reader response.

In the brief span of 1952–68, Puerto Rico sped through its industrialization process. Middle-class residential construction dotted the city of San Juan. Hotels replaced the mansions along its Condado waterfront. The spanking new Medical Center promised health for the sickly, undernourished population, a health that the developmentalist program of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico—Operation Bootstrap—desperately needed, as it endeavored to offer a cheap, obedient, and presumably bilingual labor force to American capital. The “Golden Mile,” the financial district established in the area of the sometime royal hacienda, Hato Rey, emerged as the centerpiece of a new downtown. The mythic mall of Plaza Las Américas (formerly a cattle ranch that bred cows for the milk industry) became the social hub of a polis that increasingly turned to consumerism for its exercise of citizenship. Newspapers and magazines were filled with consumer fantasies of every variety. Along with everything else that was dazzling and new, Puerto Rico consumed a new object for sale, the celebrity pop star.

Adding-Phone to the name of a National Language Entails an Expansion of Geographic and Historical Perspective. This expansion of perspective in the national-literature departments of the West was initially made possible by decolonization and the collapse of the European empires, when scholars in francophone studies and anglophone studies rethought the relation between language and culture in the postcolonial moment. While the move to -phone studies brings with it some potential to reinstate the national-literature paradigm in a different form, it can just as easily mean a departure into questions of transnationalism, transcoloniality, translation, and old and new creolizations. To study literature in terms of -phone is to assume no longer that language and literature follow the tidy dictates of national sovereignty, national identity, and realpolitik, as these were articulated during the age of high imperialism.

As Roger Sale has wryly observed, “everyone knows what children's literature is until asked to define it” (1). The Reasons WHY this unruly subject is so hard to delimit have been well canvassed. If we define it as literature read by young people, any text could potentially count as children's literature, including Dickens novels and pornography. That seems too broad, just as defining children's literature as anything that appears on a publisher-designated children's or “young adult” list seems too narrow, since it would exclude titles that appeared before eighteenth-century booksellers such as John Newbery set up shop, including the Aesopica, chapbooks, and conduct books. As numerous critics have noted, we cannot simply say that children's literature consists of literature written for children, since many famous examples—Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Little Prince—aimed to attract mixed audiences. And, in any case, “children's literature is always written for both children and adults; to be published it needs to please at least some adults” (Clark 96). We might say that children's literature comprises texts addressed to children (among others) by authors who conceptualize young people as a distinct audience, one that requires a form of literature different in kind from that aimed at adults. Yet basing a definition on authorial intention seems problematic. Many famous children's writers have explicitly rejected the idea that they were writing for a particular age group, and many books that were not written with young people in mind have nevertheless had their status as children's or young adult literature thrust upon them, either by publishers or by readers (or both).

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize–winning novel the road (2006) addresses the cliché that at the moment of death the endangered individual experiences a “life review” during which his life “flashes before his eyes.” McCarthy's protagonist intuits that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death” (18). Thus, in the view of McCarthy's unnamed hero, during a crisis one must focus on survival, escape, sustenance, or the successful execution of a plan. However, once all possibilities of survival are exhausted, the dying person will experience either an intense acceleration of cognition due to panic or a slackening of interest due to the acceptance of death. In either of these two scenarios, Henri Bergson posits, all the memories of the individual's lifetime will rush into consciousness. The following essay by Georges Poulet analyzes the development of Bergson's thought on this issue, supplementing Bergson's notions with examples from literature, history, and philosophy.

Refusing to fight the trojans because he will not countenance agamemnon's colonizing self-interest, achilles re-treated to his tent. All because Agamemnon did not want to give up a woman (Chryseis) and, when he is forced to do so, claims a woman who was part of Achilles's war bounty (Briseis). Suffering humiliation after injustice is not a fate that proud Achilles will endure, and he responds to this outrage with a signal act: retreat. In this moment, Homer's “brilliant Achilles,” famed military man and the “greatest hero of the Greeks,” becomes the first celebrity recluse in history (1.10). Achilles is the first figure to give the recluse a (heroic) place in the popular imaginary. We even have a phrase for Achilles's act, bequeathed to us as an accusation: sulking in one's tent. This popular expression is used to indict, often harshly, those who quit because they believe they have been unfairly treated. In leveling this charge, we implicitly side with Agamemnon, who accuses Achilles of the most dastardly military act: “Desert, by all means, if the spirit drives you home!” (1.204). As an expression, sulking in one's tent is ripe for mockery, redolent with puerile imagery, conjuring up scenarios in which spoiled children, obstreperous adolescents, or overindulged celebrities behave badly because they cannot get their way.

Don Quixote, having shared the goatherds' rustic meal on his second sally, takes up a handful of acorns and launches into his lecture on the Golden Age: “Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío” ‘Blessed the time, and blessed the centuries, called by the ancients the Golden Age—and not because, then, the gold which we in our age of iron so value came to men's hands without effort, but because those who walked the earth in that time knew nothing of those two words, thine and mine.’ Bewildering as his harangue was for the listening goatherds, Don Quixote's introduction invites consideration of the location, ownership, and definition of the Spanish “Golden Age.” These aspects illuminate the challenge the period presents to early modern studies and vice versa.

The spectacular rise of China as a superpower perhaps only now compels us to recalibrate existing discourses of empire and postcoloniality, but China has been an empire in the modern sense since the mid–eighteenth century, when it conquered vast lands north and west of “China proper.” This history has been largely hidden from view because of two unacknowledged obsessions: the fetishization of Western empires over other empires and the prevailing discourse of Chinese victimhood at the hands of Western empires. The rise of China would not have caught so many by surprise if our vision had not been persistently clouded by our privileging of the oceanic (i.e., Western) mode of colonial expansion, which paradoxically centered the West as the most deserving object of critical attention and intellectual labor. It also would not have been a surprise if we had looked back at the Manchu conquests of inner Asia, which present-day China largely inherited and consolidated in a continuous colonial project. Postcolonial theory as we know it, particularly its critiques of orientalism, may prove irrelevant or even complicit when we consider how the positions of Chinese intellectuals critical of Western imperialism and orientalism easily slip into an unreflective nationalism, whose flip side may be a new imperialism.