Why literature today? Do we still need the literary humanities? Professor William Paulson (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) gives pertinent answers to both questions when he delineates goals for a literary culture in his most recent book, Literary Culture in a World Transformed. A Future for the Humanities (Cornell University Press, 2001). To create or interpret texts, to read and examine the literary written word, to hear the spoken word, to tell stories or watch a theatrical performance, cultivates new forms of speaking and thinking in contact with the works of the past and the present. Literature is thus a wonderful way of interacting with the diversity of the world over time and space and with the various ways of knowing and imagining the world through language. As scholars dealing with print literature in the current digital age, we seek to re-define the fundamental goals of literary and cultural study, reinventing our field to insure that it continues to contribute to our understanding of and interaction with the world around in its cultural as well as material, ecological, physical, or political dimensions. There is a real future for literary culture in crossing disciplinary boundaries so as to invent new forms and practices of intellectual work.  Writers of the digital age, like the print and wordsmiths who came before, will continue to use language not only as a communicative tool but as a way to imagine new modes of interaction with the social, historical, and ecological contexts in which they live. Literary study invites us to make our lives richer and more pleasurable by enhancing our capacities to read, speak and write in the many languages of the worlds, including …French and Italian.   Catherine Nesci (2004)