Introduction: Place of poetry in the world -- ch. 1. Actual and imaginary library: literature as a social institution -- ch. 2. Mighty poets in their misery dead: the death of the poet in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's gift -- ch. 3. "Battering the object": the attack on the literary text in Malamud's The tenants -- ch. 4. Reading Zemblan: the audience disappears in Nabokov's Pale fire -- ch. 5. Taking of the moon: the struggle of the poetic and scientific myths in Norman Mailer's Of a fire on the moon -- ch. 6. Finding the new thing.
