Authors: Paul H. Fry
ISBN-13: 9780804725316, ISBN-10: 0804725314
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Date Published: May 1995
Edition: (Non-applicable)
This book argues that literature can be defined—pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding—and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. The author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the “ostensive moment” that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | Non-construction: History, Structure, and the Ostensive Moment in Literature | 11 |
2 | One Last Theme: Literature as Insignificance | 31 |
3 | The Hum of Literature: Ostension in Language | 50 |
4 | The Torturer's Horse: What Poems See in Pictures | 70 |
5 | Clearings in the Way: Non-epiphany in Wordsworth | 91 |
6 | Nil Reconsidered: Criticism, Actuality, and "To Autumn" | 108 |
7 | Possession of the Sublime, Repression of Insignificance | 133 |
8 | The Absent Dead: Wordsworth, Byron, and the Epitaph | 159 |
9 | Disposing of the Body: The Common Sense of the Romantic Moment of Dying | 181 |
Conclusion: The Ethics of Suspending Knowledge | 201 | |
Notes | 215 | |
Index | 247 |