Introduction: Literature and the Ethics of the Other -- I. Narratives of History. 1. Counterfactual Artefacts: Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History. 2. The Rhetoric of Forgetting: Brecht and the Historical Avant-garde -- II. Sexual Difference, Power and Signification. 3. The Castration of Cassandra. 4. Female Reason and Symbolic Violence. 5. Adultery as Critique. 6. Abjection in the Texts of Walter Benjamin -- III. Sexual Politics and National Identity. 7. Prefigurative Racism in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris. 8. Sexuality in Robert Musil's Young Torless. 9. Space, Gender and National Identity -- IV. Between Enlightenment and Postmodernism: The Ethics of Art and Gender. 10. Popular Literature in the Third Reich. 11. Enlightenment, Sexual Difference and the Autonomy of Art. 12. Unreal Presences: Allegory in Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin. 13. Writing, Image, Reality. 14. From the Dialectic of Force to The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Re-reading the Odyssey
