Death of a discipline does not tell us that Comparative Literature is at end. On the contraty, it charts a demanding and urgent future for the field, laying out the importance of the encounter with area studies and offering a radically ethical framework, for the approach to subarltern writing.

In the era of globalization, when mammoth projects of world literature in translation are being undertaken in the United States, how can we project the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university. Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad´s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf´s A Room of One´s Own.