“Reading Both: Literary History and the Monolingual Model”

In the future, we will need to read both. We will need to read comparatively in a number of ways, which will involve reading literary works locally and globally, reading across editions and formats, and reading within and across languages.  Since the turn of the last century, we have been asked to exchange national models of literary history for linguistic models -- British literature for anglophone literature, French literature for literature in French.  But what comes after the monolingual model, and how can works of contemporary literature, concerned visually and verbally with their embeddedness in languages, help us read more and read differently?