Table of Contents

Preface / Paul A. Bove 1
The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination / William V. Spanos 17
Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry / David Antin 40
The New Gnosticism: Speculation on an Aspect of the Postmodern Novel / Ihab Hassan 77
From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics / Charles Altieri 100
Charles Olson: Preliminary Images / Catharine R. Stimpson 140
The Dialectics of Literary Tradition / Harold Bloom 163
At Circe's, or, The Self-Opener / Helene Cixous 175
Postmodern Oral Poetry: Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, and David Antin / Barry Alpert 188
From Heidegger to Derrida to Chance: Doubling and (Poetic) Language / Joseph N. Riddel 207
Scientific Discourse and Postmodernity: Francis Bacon and the Empirical Birth of "Revision" / Gerald Gillespie 232
Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy / Cornel West 265
Index 291

About the Author

Paul A. BovÉ is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture.