Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Prophet without a God? Secular Humanist, Par Excellence (by Daniel T. O’Hara)
Part One: Existentialism and the Postmodern Turn
Chapter 1. Modern Literary Criticism and the Spatialization of Time: An Existential Critique (1970)
Chapter 2. The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination (1971)
Chapter 3. Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle: Toward a Postmodern Theory of Interpretation as Dis-closure (1976)
Chapter 4. Hermeneutics and Memory: Destroying T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1978)
Chapter 5. Charles Olson and Negative Capability: A Phenomenological Interpretation (1979)
Chapter 6. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Temporal Interpretation (1980)
Part Two: Humanism and the Poststructuralist Turn
Chapter 7. boundary 2 and the Polity of Interest: Humanism, the “Center Elsewhere,” and Power (1984)
Chapter 8. The Apollonian Investment of Modern Humanist Education: The Examples of Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I. A. Richards (1993)
Chapter 9. Culture and Colonization: The Imperial Imperatives of the Centered Circle (1996)
Chapter 10. Heidegger, Foucault, and the “Empire of the Gaze”: Thinking the Territorialization of Knowledge (2000)
Chapter 11. “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener”: Reflections on the American Calling (2008)
Part Three: American Exceptionalism and the Secular Turn
Chapter 12. The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Post-Historical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics (2000)
Chapter 13. Edward Said’s Humanism and American Exceptionalism: An Interrogation after 9/11 (2008)
Chapter 14. Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: The Imperial Violence of the Novel of Manners (2011)
Chapter 15. The Calling and the Question of the Secular (2012)
Chapter 16. Arab Spring, 2011: A Symptomatic Reading of the Revolution (2012)
In Lieu of a Conclusion: A Discussion between William V. Spanos and Donald E. Pease
Index