ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH VESELOVSKY (1838-1906) IS WIDELY REGARDED AS RUSSIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL Literary theorist before the formation of Opoyaz (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), whose members—Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, and others—developed the approach generally known as Russian formalism. Readers of Shklovsky may note the prominence accorded to Veselovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). Some will also recall the use of the term historical poetics—in reference to the method put forward by Veselovsky—in the 1963 edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky and in his “The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics” (1937-38, pub. in 1975). Another eloquent testimony to Veselovsky's spectral ubiquity in Russian literary theory is the concluding paragraph of Vladimir Propp's pathbreaking Morphology of the Folktale, where Propp humbly asserts that his “propositions, although they appear to be new, were intuitively foreseen by none other than Veselovsky” and ends his study with an extensive quotation from Veselovsky's Poetics of Plot (115-16). It is rarely recognized, however, that Veselovsky's method, in its rudimentary form, constitutes a common denominator of Shklovsky's, Bakhtin's, and Propp's widely divergent approaches.

Our professional practice of grouping cultural products into historical categories has recently been the subject of lively critical discussion, as well as some consternation. Here I want to consider how, and how well, periodization organizes knowledge in the field of comparative literature. Organizing knowledge is what scholars do in all disciplines, of course, but the organizational models differ according to our objects of study. Historians may be the most dependent on schemata of periodization, but literary scholars aren't far behind. Literature curricula in United States universities are largely organized according to diachronic historical categories, whether they are labeled by centuries or by rubrics tied to a historical period's style or ideology or political circumstances. This is not surprising since European periodic categories long precede the establishment of curricula in the United States. Periods are powerful because they carry with them their own historical accumulations and applications, and they become dialectical as we engage their diverse cultural and historical meanings. For this reason, they can be particularly useful to comparatists. Indeed, to speak of any period at all is to make a comparative statement. One period necessarily implies others, each period a part that exists in relation to other parts and to an implied whole—a provisional “classification of the universe,” to quote from the passage by Jorge Luis Borges that I take as my epigraph.

Africa, the world's second-largest continent, speaks over two thousand languages but rarely translates itself. it is no wonder, therefore, that Ferdinand Oyono's francophone African classic Une vie de boy (1956), translated into at least twelve European and Asian languages, exists in only one African translation—that is, if we consider as non-African Oyono's original French and the English, Arabic, and Portuguese into which it was translated. Since 1963, when Obi Wali stated in his essay “The Dead End of African Literature” that African literature in English and French was “a clear contradiction, and a false proposition,” like “Italian literature in Hausa” (14), the question of the language of African literature has animated debate. Two decades later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o restated Wali's contention, asserting that European languages led to African “spiritual subjugation” (9). Ngũgĩ argued strongly that African literature should be written in African languages. On the other hand, Chinua Achebe defended European languages, maintaining that they could “carry the weight of African experience” (62).

Carlos Fuentes, like many other writers of the Boom, discussed his peers' unprecedented renovation of Latin American narrative forms—specifically, the novel (e.g., Donoso; Vargas Llosa). In La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969; “The New Spanish American Novel”), Fuentes reviews the most influential novels of the 1960s after presenting some of the founders of the literary modernity that preceded the Boom: Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier. Fuentes focuses on the Boom's protagonists—Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar—to highlight his ideas about the groundbreaking contributions of these novels.

In 1979 the publishing house mladinska knjiga released the slovene translation of ferdinand oyono's une vie de boy (1956) as Življenje hišnega služabnika. The book appeared largely as a result of an order “from above” in what was then Yugoslavia, mandating publication of texts by writers from Nonaligned Movement (NAM) countries. Marjana Samide, the translator, had previously translated From a Crooked Rib (1970), by the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah (Upognjeno rebro [1978]), and she was given Une vie de boy by a Mladinska knjiga series editor because both authors, Farah and Oyono, were from Africa, seen evidently as a unitary place.

Correspondance was a belgian surrealist magazine, from the earliest years of the movement, that can be read as a Challenge to the notions of surrealism promoted in André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. It was a self-published periodical comprising twenty-two one-page tracts, written and distributed over seven months in 1924 and 1925 by three francophone Belgian writers, Paul Nougé, Camille Goemans, and Marcel Lecomte. The most important of these was undoubtedly the one who published least: Nougé, the intellectual leader of the Brussels surrealist group. In addition to scattered publications of startling originality throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he was at that time also a key promoter of René Magritte's art; at weekly meetings of the group (whose members had day jobs and could only gather on Sunday), Magritte's latest paintings were discussed, and Nougé, mostly, proposed their enigmatic titles.

IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, AMERICANS WHO BELIEVED IN THE BOOK'S TRANSFORMATIVE POWER ENJOYED SHARING THEIR literary wealth with readers in the developing world. Through the Darien Book Aid Project (founded in 1949), The Freedom House Bookshelf (founded in 1958), Books USA (BUSA; founded in 1962), and other programs, they sent bundles of American paperbacks to would-be readers in countries where books were scarce and expensive. Such experiments in what international-relations scholars call people-to-people diplomacy aimed to harness the energies of America's growing middlebrow reading public to the nation's Cold War aims.

Book-donation programs shared the realist aesthetic and humanist sensibility that hallmarked the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). Disdaining avant-garde “difficulty,” their selections foregrounded transparent language, traditional mimesis, and strong themes. Fiction, biography, and popular history were the backbone of such programs, and even selections from sociology and political thought centered on unambiguous, three-dimensional characters—individuals who embodied the Enlightenment virtues of rational thought, hard work, and tolerance.

Each new technology may be janus-faced, potentially improving and degrading the human condition. The steam engine made industrial products cheaper and more diverse but contributed to the exploitation of child labor and proliferation of squalid urban living conditions. The automobile makes transportation more convenient but pollutes and leads to countless highway deaths. Calculators let anyone perform feats of math but have weakened basic arithmetic skills.

A related conundrum holds true for technologies of the written word. The printing press helped spread literacy but shook the foundations of the Catholic Church. Word processing enabled the Japanese to generate text without producing each kanji stroke by stroke, but now many Japanese find themselves forgetting the stroke order. The spelling checkers in word-processing programs monitor typographical errors but dampen motivation to master spelling.

Information and communication technologies have generated new platforms on which to read. The list includes desktop and laptop computers, e-readers (such as the Kindle and Nook), tablet computers (e.g., the iPad), and handheld devices (e.g., the iPod Touch, mobile phones). But does reading on these devices differ from reading in hard copy? If so, does our growing dependence on reading onscreen contribute to a redefinition of what it means to read?

Gaston Bachelard, justifying his phenomenological method, emphasizes “the onset of the image in an individual consciousness,” provocatively states that “the poetic act has no past,” and asserts that “the image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship” (xv, xi, xv). Bachelard hedges his bets, qualifying the statement about the poetic act's having “no past” with “at least no recent past” (xi). And soon, admitting that while for him the image's primary effect “involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image,” a reverberation through which, “by going immediately beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising naively within us,” nevertheless, “after the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past.” But, he hastens to add, “the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface” (xix).

Like eyes that looked on Wastes—
Incredulous of Ought
But Blank—and steady Wilderness—
Diversified by Night—

Just Infinites of Nought—
As far as it could see—
So looked the face I looked upon—
So looked itself—on Me—

I offered it no Help— Because the Cause was Mine—
The Misery a Compact
As hopeless—as divine—

Neither—would be absolved—
Neither would be a Queen
Without the Other—Therefore—
We perish—tho' We reign—
—Emily Dickinson, poem 693

Herman Melville, Anne Carson, and Emily Dickinson. These authors' bits of language just claimed me as I stared at some books on my office shelf, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of these passages except that I like them. So I'm listing them for you. You might also like them. I like many things, and in no particular order. For instance, here's what I “liked” one day, not long ago, on Facebook: a picture of the word Puppies! scrawled on a sidewalk; a New York Times story about the disorganization of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 (that war has a huge, nearly comical significance in my adopted country of Canada—did you know that Canadians burned down the White House?); an audio clip of Justin Bieber, featuring Busta Rhymes, singing “Little Drummer Boy”; my friend and colleague Jordan Stein's “vegan homo Thanksgiving” photo album; a posting by my “friend” “Emily Dickinson”; numerous updates about and images of the November 2011 pepper spraying of protesting students on the University of California, Davis, campus. I could go on and on, which is probably one of the reasons I, and millions of others, go on and on Facebook. Disorderly is the right word, but the likes are not quite random. People have generated these items, these virtual objects of interest, for rapid public consumption and, with the ubiquity of the “Like” button, for rapid public response. They (we) put stuff out there in part because we're showing off our preferences, or if not our preferences (even though they will be acknowledged with our liking) then at least things that interest us and (we hope) others. It's hard to know exactly what liking something on Facebook means because a like is nearly the same thing as an acknowledgment, something that says, “Yes, I clicked on this item, and it did not displease me.” And often people complain in comments that they wish there were variations on the “Like” button (“I want to express my anger with this piece of information—I wish there were a ‘Hate’ button”). Whatever our motivations or the nature of our interest in what we curate for the world on Facebook, these objects for consumption often go under the heading of like; so, like it or not, we're reading for like—we're doing a little like reading.

The death of Carlos Fuentes means the end of an era that began with La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air Is Clear) and concludes with the posthumous Federico en su balcón (2012; Federico on His Balcony). Fuentes marks an entire era with the influence of his personality and his work, which have impacted Mexico's intellectual life, arts, and wider society, as well as its collective imagination. Fuentes has a place in the Mexican imaginary, like film or soccer stars, and for decades his face has been part of Mexican iconography. The history of contemporary Mexico would be very different without him.

Carlos Fuentes was a dapper man. His physical bearing, his way of dressing, and his manners were all exquisite. He favored tailored Italian suits, supple loafers, pocket squares. He liked tony international places: he once said he owed the idea for La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz), perhaps the most “Mexican” of his novels, “to the North Sea and a beach in Holland” (Interview). But his cosmopolitanism got him into trouble, such as when a well-intentioned but off-key televised public-service announcement resulted in late-night TV parodies. Addressing the pollution problem in Mexico City, Fuentes pleaded for the public to save his “beloved” city—all while standing in an idyllic spot in Cambridge, England.