Introduction: Making Meaning and Doing Justice with Early Modern Texts

Abstract

[Poetry’s end is] well-doing and not … well-knowing only.1 Formal innovation (of the sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experimentation. To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me, translate my un-translatability, learn me by heart and thus learn the otherness that inhabits the heart....