Robert Hughes is Assistant Professor of English at the Ohio State University and coeditor (with Kareen Ror Malone) of After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, also published by SUNY Press.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction

1. Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History
Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What It Goes to Prove

2. Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics
The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier

3. Brown's Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death
Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death

4. Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being
Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger's Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting that Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One's Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny

5. Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude
Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism

6. Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun
Hawthorne's Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of the History of Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address

7. Riven: Badiou's Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma
The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
Epilogue: Word after Word

Notes
Works Cited
Index