As an academic discipline built upon Enlightenment thought and a cosmopolitan worldviewnot grounded in the literary tradition of any single language or nationcomparative literature has benefited from regular re-examination of its basic principles and practices. The American Comparative Literature Association's 1993 report on the state of the discipline, prepared under the leadership of Charles Bernheimer, focused on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. That report and the vigorous responses it generated, published together as Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, offered a comprehensive survey of comparative criticism in the 1990s.In the first decade of the twenty-first century, globalization has emerged as a defining paradigm in nearly every area of human activity. This latest report from the ACLA demonstrates that comparative critical strategies today can provide unique insights into the world's changingand,increasingly, collidingcultures. Incorporating an even wider range of voices than had its predecessor, the report examines how the condition (or myth) of globalization, in all its modes and moods, affirms or undercuts the intuitions of comparative literature; how world literatures, whetherseen as utopian project or as classroom practice, intersect with the canons and interpretive styles of national literatures; and how language, media, history, gender, culture, and other material conditions of practice appear under the conditions of the present moment. 3 line drawings.
