Carol Jacobs is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her previous books include: The Dissimulating Harmony (1978), Uncontainable Romanticism (1989), Telling Time (1993), and In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999).

• @fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgmentsiii Prologue: Skirting the Ethicaliii @toc2:1.Dusting Antigone: Sophocles' Antigone0 2Virtue Inside Out: Plato's Symposium00 3Subversions of the Political: Plato's Republic000 4Hamann is a nomadic writer: Aesthetica in nuce000 5What does it mean to count? W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants000 6Playing Jane Campion's Piano: Politically000 @toc4:Notes000 Index000

"It is a wise book, worth reading. . . The book has already prompted me to read two more works by Sebald and to teach the 'Republic' again." - Marianne Constable (Modern Philology) "This is a superb book, sometimes breathtaking in its readings of central and not-so-canonical texts in the Western tradition. 'Literary' ethics is a rather different matter than that of daily-life decisions about whether or not to so something because it's good (or not). Yet the stakes of these literary and para-literary ethics are high, and Carol Jacobs does an exemplary job in articulating just what is entailed." - Ian Balfour (York University)