Introduction / Ira Konigsberg
Issues in contemporary American critical debate / Jonathan Culler
The ethics of reading / J. Hillis Miller
Finding feminist readings / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Comedies of errors / René Girard
An apology for poetics / Murray Krieger
How to recognize a poem when you see one / Stanley Fish
The irrepressible real / Wesley Morris
Literature as assertions / Gerald Graff
Narrative versions, narrative themes / Barbara Herrnstein Smith.