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After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics.

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Melaney, William D. After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics. Albany: SUNY P, 2001. x + 260 pp.

The primary purpose of After Ontology is to propose deconstruction as an effective critical approach to modernist poetics by showing that the interaction between seemingly dualistic thematic and ethical positions inherent in modernism corresponds to a similar interaction between such positions in deconstruction and hermeneutics. Of particular interest to Melaney is the nature of subjectivity and "otherness," the discovery of which is part of the "ethical task" (11) of the critic. Although he presupposes "a movement from hermeneutics to deconstructive poetics" (11) in his reading of modernist texts, Melaney considers that hermeneutics and deconstruction are "intertwined," and that together they "allow the issues of text and history to be posed" (11). Melaney's thesis is an important one; however, in support of that thesis and in order to position historically modernist poetics and postmodern theory, he must also discuss Platonism, Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian duality, psychoanalysis, Symbolism, canon formation, and more. It is the vastness of this undertaking that is the source of the book's greatest strengths and weaknesses.

After addressing the problems of defining modernism as a post-Romantic and...

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