Criticism and crisis -- Form and intent in the American new criticism -- Ludwig Binswanger and the sublimation of the self -- Georg Lukác's Theory of the novel -- Impersonality in the criticism of Maurice Blanchot -- The literary self as origin: the work of Georges Poulet -- The rhetoric of blindness: Jacques Derrida's reading of Rousseau -- Literary history and literary modernity -- Lyric and modernity -- The rhetoric of temporality -- The dead-end of formalist criticism -- Heidegger's exegeses of Hölderlin -- Appendix A A review of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of influence -- Appendix B Literature and language: a commentary
