Rossum's Universal LitCrit

Author Patricia Hampl, writing in the NYTimes Book Review, suggests that Czech writer Karel Capek isn't as popular among Americans as he used to be, and that "This slippage may ? be proof of the disinclination of an imperial culture to sustain interest in 'smaller' literatures."

The U.S. is "an imperial culture"? Sounds bad. Yet Capek (1890-1938), best known here for the 1921 play, R.U.R. (which gave us the term robot although the play actually featured androids), and the 1937 satirical novel, War with the Newts, seems a strange example of imperial fiction reading. He may or may not be as popular as he was, but then most of his once-popular contemporaries ? including those from Big Lit cultures -- are by now more obscure than he is. Indeed, thanks largely to R.U.R., Capek long enjoyed good standing with an American SF readership that has otherwise shown little interest in translated works. In that sense, Capek's up there with Verne (who reads him anymore?), Stanislaw Lem, and a handful of others.

It might have been reasonable to argue that Capek's technological pessimism has worked against him here, or that his genre readership has long since moved on from "robots," or even that the U.S. tends toward insularity. But where's the hook for a charge of imperialist-induced oblivion? Nowhere, is where. The charge is intellectually mechanical, robotic.