Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-252) and index.

Introduction: Modernism and the Crisis in Aesthetics -- Ch. 1. Hermeneutics and the Modern Work of Art. Sect. 1. Gadamer's Interpretation of Kant: The Perils of Subjectivity. Sect. 2. Heidegger's Poetic Ontology: Art as the Truth of World. Sect. 3. Hermeneutics after Structure: Rethinking Modernist Time. Sect. 4. Vattimo's Understanding: History in Postmodern Hermeneutics -- Ch. 2. Deconstruction and the Modernist Text. Sect. 1. Derrida's Passage beyond Kant: The Silent Space of Language. Sect. 2. Deconstruction after Heidegger: "Double Reading" in "Restitutions" Sect. 3. Nietzsche and Psychoanalysis: Toward the Other in Language. Sect. 4. Lyotard's Postmodern Turn: Legitimacy and the Missing Trace -- Ch. 3. Archeology and Modernist Poetics. Sect. 1. Eliot's Postsymbolist Inter-Text: Hamlet and the Voices of Irony. Sect. 2. Eliot/Pound as Epic Poets: Dante and the Site of Translation. Sect. 3. In Search of Joyce's Ulysses: From Discourse to Semiotics. Sect. 4. Yeats and the Poetic Occasion: History in the Signs of Writing -- Ch. 4. Criticism and the Modernist Inter-Text. Sect. 1. Modernism as the "Completion" of Aesthetics. Sect. 2. Deconstruction as an Ethical Hermeneutic.