How to Do Things with Fictions

Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fiction Formative Fictions The Temporality of the Reading Experience In Spite of Everything, a Role for Meaning A Polite Aside to Historians The Value of Formative Fictions PART ONE-CLEARING THE GROUND Chapter One-Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics Prudence or Oneiromancy? A Parody of Didacticism Preaching to the Converted The Asymmetry of 'Imaginative Resistance' Virtue Ethics and Gossip Qualifications Positive Views PART TWO- ENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENT Chapter Two-Mark: Metaphor and Faith Rhetorical Theories Five Variables, Six Readings Deliberate Opacity The Vision of Mark From Him Who Has Not To Him Who Has The Syrophenician Woman The Formative Circle Metaphor and Faith Theological Ramifications A Parable about Parables Getting It Wrong By Getting It Right Coda: The Secular Kingdom Appendix: "Le Cygne" Chapter Three-Mallarmé: Irony and Enchantment Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin Exorcisms and Experiments Science and Wonder Lucid Illusions Stéphane Mallarmé The Spell of Poetry Setting the Scene A Replacement Faith How to Do Things with Verses A Corner of Order The Magic of Rhyme A Training in Enchantment A Sequence of States The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of Re-Enchantment PART THREE-LOGIC AND ANTI-LOGIC Chapter Four-Plato: Fallacy and Logic A Platonic Coccyx Ascent and Dissent The Developmental Hypothesis Dubious Dialectic Pericles, Socrates and Plato The Gorgias Unravels The Uses of Oratory Was Gorgias Refuted? Spiritual Exercises: Seven Points in Conclusion Appendix: Just How Bad is the Pericles Argument? Chapter Five-Beckett: Antithesis and Tranquillity Bringing Philosophy to an End Ataraxia Antilogoi One Step Forward Finding the Self to Lose the Self An Irreducible Singleness Res Cogitans Solutions and Dissolutions Two Failures "I confess, I give in, there is I" Negative Anthropology The Beckettian Spiral An End to Everything? Fail Better Glimpses of the Ideal Two Caveats Coda Works Cited