Alterity and Criticism

William D. Melaney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics and Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse.

• 1. Introduction: Alterity in Literary Texts / Part I: Romanticism as Beginning Alterity / 2. Time in Goethe’s Faust I: A Poetics of Disruption / 3. Reassessing the Byronic Sublime: A Critique of Pure Autonomy / 4. Coleridge as Poet-Critic: Imagination and Other Life / 5. Shelley and the Myth of Poetry: The ‘Return’ of Metaphor / Part II: Alterity and the Prose Tradition / 6. Flaubert’s Dislocations: Rethinking a Crisis in Reading / 7. Eliot and the Uses of Dante: Thresholds of the Unsayable / 8. Joyce and Metaphor in Excess: Art, Encounter, Semiosis / 9. Butor’s Rite of Passage: Reference and Repetition / Part III: Critical Discourses of Alterity / 10. Lévinas and Psychoanalysis: Engaging Alterity in Language / 11. Iser’s Aesthetic Phenomenology: Reading, Time and World / 12. Alterity and Future Criticism: Modern Literature in Context / Bibliography / Index

Melaney intricately connects the dissolution of subject-centered consciousness, interrupted by "alterity" as audaciously expressed in modern literature, to reflections of phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. He highlights broken circuits of reflexivity as key to reading in the mode that in the modern period gives us "literature" – provocatively presented as a creation of criticism.