Renegotiating the Role of the Intellectual in the Age of Globalization‪.‬

The need felt by the readership of Annali d'Italianistica that occasioned this issue--to collectively renegotiate "place" in order to rethink and define national, regional, global identity--is catalyzed, at least in part, by the evolution of the academy, most notably, the increasing prevalence of bottom-line concerns in North American universities, which are now typically run as for-profit business entities. It is also occasioned by the effects of the emerging field of cultural studies within the field of italianistica. Further complicating matters are the for-profit restructuring of university press catalogues, whose form is now shaped by market forces, at the expense of freedom of intellectual inquiry; cost-cutting reconfiguration pressures on departments and disciplines; and, in Italian literary studies, the relative tardiness with which colleagues in Italy--when compared to North American counterparts--have dealt with the transformation of our field. (1) Nonetheless, these combined factors have had the salubrious side effect of forcing us to rethink what we do as literary scholars, and how and why we do what we do. This state of affairs necessitates the critical awareness of one's own situatedness, which in turn means keeping in mind, as West writes, "the fact that the shifts and changes in literary studies are part of a much greater picture of social change involving ideologies, forms of communication and of the transmission of culture, the university system, conditions of academic work, and so on" (21). (2) And since, as Kilborne maintains, seeing and being seen are the basis of the social bond, in this case introspection permits us to take a step outside ourselves that in turn may allow us to manage our appearance anxiety over how we believe we appear to others and how we appear to ourselves.