ABSTRACT
The consolidation of American Studies in the United States (US) academy in the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as one of the legacies of the Cultural Front, bringing together many of its strengths and weaknesses. Comparative Literature in the post-war US, on the other hand, might best be perceived in analogy with post-war Italian politics. Italian governments used to be mocked, in the half-century between 1945 and 1989, for how frequently they collapsed. Considerable pressure has been placed on university presses to become profit generating, as though the subsidization of research was somehow incompatible with the idea of a research university. It is an axiom that every new means of communication technology allows for all the errors and prejudices of the past that were thought to have been safely superseded to return as if innocent and fresh all over again.
