Like the automobile industry, the science fiction industry overproduces. Increasingly, the science fiction label is intended to fit every model. “Any color as long as it's colorful.”

The extent to which we in east-central europe ACquire proficiency in new languages and develop the capacity to communicate in the new international environment without translators or interpreters has significant consequences for our economic efficiency, living standards, and general welfare.

Arthur Danto's meditation, in his “Works of Art and Mere Real Things,” on a square of red paint and its various possible readings serves as a warning about multiple interpretations. This painting might be a story of the Egyptians and the Red Sea, after the Israelites crossed over. Or, then, a work by a Danish portraitist, labeled “Kierkegaard's Mood.” Or, then, one by a politically active painter, “Red Square.” Or by a disciple of Henri Matisse, “Red Table Cloth”—in this one, the paint would be more thickly applied. In my view, the most appropriate state we can muster is what the surrealists called “availability” (disponibilité)—openness to whatever might, of a sudden, happen in our understanding to achieve a presentness of perception, even as we note the clear risk of boundary crossings between the arts.

It is often said that a century ago the author and the reader occupied the same space. I am told that much of modern literature is the result of a separation in that sense of space. It could also easily be said that a century ago archives and history occupied the same conceptual and methodological space. This sense of partnership in the study of the past has undergone a variety of stresses and strains over recent decades, to the point that what constitutes the archive has become a question fundamental to how our knowledge of the past is acquired and shaped. History and archives now occupy very different spaces, a condition that has conceptual, technical, and practical causes. Among the many consequences of this intellectual divide is the need for a new understanding of the archive apart from its historical roots.

The students of the present generation are the first in a long time who will not take their cultural identities from books. Statistics reveal that film, museum, concert, and sports attendances are up but that fewer and fewer people are reading books. Those strange moments in nineteenth-century novels when young heroes strike poses, dress, coif, and woo by the book are gone, perhaps forever. Our students are more likely to take their models from television, films, glossy magazines, video games, or the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. My colleagues in the profession report that, thanks to the expansion of visual culture, students now possess an enviable talent for decoding images, often to the detriment of reading ability. To be frank, I am not so convinced: in my experience, the most literate students continue to be the best readers of images. But I agree that we are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of visuality. A new era has dawned, and we are not prepared for it. We need to change our teaching and scholarship to keep up with our students.

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.

It was a foreign critic, ironically, who grasped the insurmountable national challenge that alessandro Manzoni posed to himself and to Italy's future authors with his monumental novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed [1827, rev. ed. 1840]). Manzoni's basic theme, Georg Lukács writes, is “much less a given, concrete, historical crisis of national history” than it is “the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole” (70). This eternal plight—distilled into the story of the courtship and separation of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy during plague, riots, and Spanish occupation—encompassed Italy's perpetual struggle against foreign rule, its lack of a unifying language and polity, and its reticent modernity, especially its tensions between religious tradition and secular progress. According to Lukács, the universality of the text combined with the abiding, unchanging nature of the problems it fictionalized essentially exhausted the genre of the historical novel that it introduced to Italy. Posterity has vindicated this assessment. Manzoni abandoned the genre soon after I promessi sposi to dedicate himself to historical writing proper, and his novel remains ensconced in the Italian public imaginary, just behind Dante's Commedia, as the towering, mythic work that helped occasion Italy's belated unification in 1861.

I'm not a science fiction expert. Nor am i an academic, although i used to be one, sort of. Although I'm a writer, I'm not primarily a writer of science fiction. In this genre I'm a dilettante and a dabbler, an amateur—which last word, rightly translated, means “lover.” I got into hot water recently on a radio talk show in Britain: the radio person said she'd just been to a sci-fi conference there, and some people were really, really mad at me. Why? said I, mystified. For being mean to science fiction, said she. In what way had I been mean? I asked. For saying you didn't write it, she replied. And I having had the nerve to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction.

It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).

Mary robinson's essay “present state of the manners, society, etc. etc. of the metropolis of England,” published in the reformist Monthly Magazine shortly before the author's death in 1800, makes a significant statement on the volatility of British print culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Once again recognized as a major writer of the Romantic period, Robinson influenced and was influenced by contemporaries such as Southey, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, who called Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius” (Letter). “Metropolis” is an important document not only because of its engagement with the contemporary debate over the direction of print culture and the public sphere but also because of the alternative it offers to Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Moreover, it provides an important link between earlier eighteenth-century concepts of urban culture and cosmopolitan refinement and later nineteenth-century ideas of urban identity such as Poe's Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire's flâneur. Resolutely urban, democratic, and cosmopolitan, Robinson's essay amounts to a manifesto of metropolitan culture.

As has been said many times before, South Africa is a land of contrasts: Between races, landscapes, economic strata, political viewpoints, and lifestyles. A complex contrast, but one that is relevant to science fiction, is the disparity between levels of technological literacy. Some of the country's population have access to advanced technology, such as Internet connections and cell phones, but most citizens have a monthly income well below the comfort level. Illiteracy is extremely high, despite the efforts of a large number of educational organizations. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has reached crisis proportions; by 2010, approximately sixty-five percent of the country's adult population will have died of the disease if the current rate of infection continues unchecked. In this context, one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments; neither can one assume even a basic acquaintance with published literature.