THE READER AND THE REGION: THE ARAB INTELLECTUAL IN A WORLD LITERATURE FRAME World literature criticism from its beginnings a little over a decade ago has shown a particular attitude toward the reading process. David Damrosch claims, for example, that a reading method that thinks simultaneously about the original context of a literary work and its point of reception can help define the field, whereas, Franco Moretti makes what he calls "distant reading" central to his argument for criticism untethered by old nationalist categories. Even Pacale Casanova makes reading transcendent in her The World Republic of Letters by presenting an expansive system of authors from varied regions and epochs without ever mentioning critics or theorists, leaving their important role in the circulation and reception of literary works across borders transcendent in its invisibility. The connecting thread in these approaches is the emphasis on reading, but not readers. These methods can be contrasted with the focus--often quite critical--on embodied intellectuals who navigate their geohistorical situation and incorporate social implication at the same time that they carry out the task of reading. Abdallah Laroui's The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? occupies a central place in this bibliography and is distinguished by its Janus-faced critique of Orientalist reading, implicated as it is in colonial politics, and of regional thinkers, struggling against the binary choices of approaches that are either derivative or traditionalist. Other North African and Arab intellectuals (Hichem Djait, Mohamed Abed al-Jabari, Fatima Mernissi, Edward Said) work from versions of this critical approach, diverse in their goals and emphases, but sharing a keen concern with the question of where the reader is reading and what commitments she manifests. This Laroui influenced genealogy exposes the dimension of world literature criticism that has refused to globalize: the dimension of theory, reading, and method. It suggests, as well, the possibility of a more global method that would begin with asking who is reading and from where, incorporating an embodied reader back into the world of -systems and republics.