In this text Bruns investigates the recent phenomenon of philosophers taking an interest in literature and literary theory.

Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that "really matter." It has eit

Why did Greek tragedy and "the tragic" come to be seen as essential to conceptions of modernity? And how has this belief affected modern understandings of Greek

-- Gerald Bruns's ground-breaking analysis compares two contrasting functions of language: the hermetic, where language is self-contained and self-referencing,

This important new reading of a central figure in American literary history, significant in its own right, powerfully demonstrates the potential of Davis's crit