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.

William Franke, Vanderbilt University

Melaney’s book is a welcome addition to ethical criticism because it eschews the danger of merely stating the alterity of the Other. The strength of Melaney is his philosophical rigor allied with an attention to textual detail, historical context, and theoretical conversations that illuminate the texts discussed, from Goethe to Joyce, from the Romantics to Eliot and Butor. Alterity appears here less as a recurrent theme than as a question posed to literature so as to prevent semiotic closure: texts are shown to be irreducibly open to the time of the Other.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania