“Must literary studies confine itself to the margins of the publishing field?” asks Andrew Goldstone in the first of what promises to be an important series of blog posts on John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.

In a fascinating parable, "A Story In Two Parts, With An Ending Yet To Be Written," posted on the National Humanities Center's On the Human Web site, Paula Moya tells the tale of a researcher named Kitayama who travels from the land of Interdependence to the land of Independence, conducts research into the way that culture shapes perception, and finds his results grossly misinterpreted by journalists (as reinforcing racist narratives of essential ethnic differences).

This post is a response to a comment made by Andrew Goldstone in a comments thread on Joshua Landy's fascinating Arcade blog post, "Human Minds, Literary Texts, and CD Players."