Introduction; Part One The transcendental and transcendence; 1 Rewriting grand narratives as a supratemporal mystical competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Pr; Preamble; New Europe in its medieval youth and Renaissance maturation; Refusal of senescence by modernist inheritors; Bibliography; 2 "Clearer awareness of the ... crisis": Erich Auerbach's radical relativism and the "wealth of conflicts" of the historical; References; 3 Secularism and post-secularism; Bibliography; Part Two Literature

4 Redemptive readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz RosenzweigReferences; 5 "So what if you are big?": The ethics of plurality in Indian literatures of devotion; Works cited; 6 Alterity and the ethics of the novel in J. M. Coetzee's quasi-realism; Deconstructing allegories: Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians in ethical criticism; Presenting representations of others: Literalness in Waiting for the Barbarians; Imaginary others and real ethics: Simultaneity in Coetzee's metafictional encounters; Conclusion; Bibliography; Part Three Religion

7 Asmodeus, the "eye of providence," and the ethics of seeing in nineteenth-century mystery fictionMystery and Asmodeus; Asmodeus and providence; Bibliography; 8 Modernism's religious rhetorics: Or, what bothered Baudelaire; Works cited; 9 Poetry and religion: Approaches to Christian transcendence in late-twentieth-century poets; Poetry, pain, and God's work of art; Poetry as deadly reassurance; A God caught in human nets; Poetry and the liberation of the unbeliever; Works cited; Part Four Ethics; 10 Instituting the other: Ethical fault lines in readings and pedagogies of alterity

A shared crisisTheoretical configurations of the Other; Bibliography; 11 Thinking God on the basis of ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism; Bibliography; 12 An ethics for missing persons; Works cited; Index.