Strategies, performances, virtues
A performance paradigm
Reading, empathy, alienation
Virtue criticism as cultural criticism
Necessary troublemakers
"Heaven's graces" : gnostic strategies
"Sweetest things" : aesthetic strategies
"Nature's riches" : parabolic strategies
Reluctant performers
"Others but stewards" : T.S. Eliot's gnostic impulse
"Lords and owners" : Vladimir Nabokov's sequestered imagination
"The basest weed" : Donald Barthelme's parabolic fairy tale.