As part of the Townsend Center's 1997-98 "Futures" program, Alan Liu conducts a full-scale inquiry into the prospects for literary knowledge in an information age driven by digital technology, management systems and corporate economics. His respondents, Miryam Sas, Albert Ascoli, and Sharon Marcus, Professors of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages, Italian Literature, and English, respectively, enrich the dialogue by posing questions to Liu and by pointing beyond him to other ways of envisioning questions of literary studies.