Ethics, Aesthetics,and the Beyond of Language -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature,and the Beyond of Language -- In Lieu of a Historical Introduction -- 1. Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History -- Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm:Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale -- Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History -- Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny -- Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What It Goes to Prove -- 2. Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics -- The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifi er, the Representation of the Thing -- The Head of Beatrice:The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death -- Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifi er -- 3. Brown's Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death -- Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder -- The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifi er -- The Unforsaken Image -- Writing out of Death -- 4. Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being -- Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being -- Heidegger's van Gogh:The Shoes That Stared, the Painting That Spoke -- The Call of Language and theObligation to Bear Witness to One's Existence -- Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny -- 5. Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude -- Art and the Grammar of Being -- Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other -- Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem -- Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism -- 6. Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun -- Hawthorne's Final Romance -- Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of History for Life.

The End of the Romance,the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address -- 7. Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma -- The Event of Art:The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject -- A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess -- Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics -- Epilogue: Word After Word -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- b -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.