Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface - An Autobiography of the Book -- 1 - Overture and Themes -- Definitions -- The Terror of Literature -- What Do We Tell Our Students? -- An Elegy for Art -- A Storied Existence -- The Beauty of Truth -- 2 - Art's Apology -- The Attack on Poetry -- Art and Justice -- The Allure of Aestheticism -- Breaking of Boundaries -- An Organic Art? -- 3 - Of Two Autonomies -- Kant's Aesthetics -- Art as Social Space -- Aesthetic Autonomy Is not Art for Art's Sake -- The Ambivalence of Autonomy -- Autonomous Art Is Public Art -- Only Autonomous Art Can be Political -- 4 - Art as Parabasis -- Literature as Difference Between Reality and Nonreality -- Literature as Boundary -- The Literary Difference -- The Leeway of Literature -- Parabasis -- 5 - The Line Between Living and Pretending -- All the Stage Is Parabasis -- Framed Narratives -- 6 - The Future of a Fiction Or, Is There a Parabatic in the Paratactic? -- The End of the Book? -- The Hype of Hypertext -- Transitions -- Notes -- References -- Index.