From Moby-Dick to The Unnamable, from A Tale of a Tub to The Book of Questions, Bruce Kawin explores the nature of self-conscious fiction and compares its structure to that of human consciousness. Focusing on texts that confront their own limits by trying to name the unnamable, the ineffable self, Kawin draws on methods from literary criticism to systems theory to explain a variety of first-person works that "dance around the ungraspable subject."

Bruce F. Kawin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Tino Balio, Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of "United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars," "United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry," and the editor of "The American Film Industry" as well as the 22 volume Wisconsin/Warner Bros. Screenplay series, all published by the University of Wisconsin Press. He directed the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research from 1966 to 1882.