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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 post-Symbolist aesthetic movement, in chapter 1 Melaney discusses the relationship between hermeneutics and modernist art. In section 1, he focuses on Hans-Georg Gadamer's response to Kantian aesthetics. Although Gadamer's position is essentially grounded in phenomenology, approaching Kant from a purely hermeneutic standpoint is, according to Gadamer, problematic. Gadamer also views the so-called separation between art and truth as impermanent and based on a "false conception of truth" (24), which necessitates a return to tradition-as opposed to the "Romantic-modern art of experience" (25). section 2 then turns to Gadamer's philosophical source, which is Heidegger, and Gadamer's effort "to reclaim art as an ontological concern that surpasses the limited standpoint of modern aesthetics" (26). Gadamer ultimately challenges modernity by centering his approach on the presence of the work itself "rather than [on] the consciousness of the aesthetic subject" (37). Addressing the issue of time and tradition in Gadamer's hermeneutics, in section...