Introduction: the legs of sense

Part I. Dialogue and Inscription: 1. Othello, Bakhtin and the death(s) of dialogue

2. P.s.: Plato's scene of reading in the Protagoras

Part II. Parables of Exteriority - Materality in 'Classic' American Texts: 3. Too legit to quit: the dubious genealogies of pragmatism

4. Poe's Foot d'Or: ruinous rhyme and Nietzschean recurrence (sound)

5. Only the dead know Brooklyn ferry (voice)

6. The letters of the law: 'Bartleby' as hypogrammatic romance (letters)

Part III. Pre-Posterous Modernisms: 7. Conrad's fault (signature)

8. Miss Emily, c'est moi: the defacement of modernism in Faulkner (inscription and social form)

9. Hitchcock and the death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible)

Coda: post-humanist reading.