Carol Jacobs is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Yale University. Her most recent work is In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999). Henry Sussman is Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY, Buffalo. He is the author, most recently, of The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (Stanford, 1997).

• Preface: The Place of Narrative CarolJacobs ix 1 J. Hillis Miller and the Task of the Critic Henry Sussman 2 Lying Against Death: Out of the Loop J. Hillis Miller 15 3 Waiting in the Wings Diane Elam 31 4 Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival Cathy Caruth 47 5 The Other Day: The Interpretation of Daydreams Rachel Bowlby 62 6 Difference Behind Similarity: Focalization in Third-Person Center-of-Consciousness and First-Person Retrospective Narration Dan Shen 81 7 The "Telepathy Effect": Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction Nicholas Royle 93 8 Trackings Tom Cohen 110 9 The Rape of the Lock: A Jacobite Aesthetics? Ronald Paulson 130 10 The Serpent in the Wilderness: Space, Place, and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century W J. T Mitchell 146 11 Narrative Discourse and a New Sense of Value: Meaning and Purpose in the Neoclassical Economics of Alfred Marshall Ronald Schleifer 157 12 Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History Alan Liu 174 13 "Le Parjure," Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying ("abrupt breaches of syntax") Jacques Derrida 195

"Acts of Narrative explores different facets of narrative with historical and thematic breadth, and each of the essays is a remarkable narrative act in its own right. Taken as a whole, the collection is a powerful demonstration of how the intersections between psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and performative theory change our understanding of narrative and its function in cultural life." -Ewa Plonowska Ziarek,University of Notre Dame