This volume is a Festschrift in honor of the scholar who has been a leader in the renewal of Comparative Literature as a major discipline. However, the papers in this collection are also a celebration of the discipline that has been the passion of Anna Balakian's life: the rigorous, scrupulous, uncompromisingly logical study of literary history across cultural barriers. This volume is also literary history as discourse because the contributors examine and question the enterprise itself. As a collection these essays comprise a searching assessment of the present state of the discipline.