A defense of the detail and a plea for textual complication, The Critical Moment examines various expressions of suddenness. While each chapter — devoted to works by Longinus, Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Paul Klee — can be viewed as a treatment of a particular oeuvre, it may also be read as an analysis of the relationship between a certain trope or figure and textual instantaneity. Among the rhetorical events studied are anacoluthon and apostrophe, transport and cesura, quotation and disjunction, chiasmus and inversion.
      Consisting of readings of primarily modernist texts, the book particularly discusses moments of textual self-reflection. Such “spots of time,” in Wordsworth’s phrase, need not contain a direct comment by the text upon itself; they need not take on a metapoetic character. Yet the fact that a text reflects on linguistic phenomena has consequences for its reading; in an important sense, the text has already anticipated that which the reader brings to bear on it. The Critical Moment proposes to term such moments “critical” insofar as they can be demonstrated to address questions of reception.
      The Critical Moment goes straight to the core of today’s concerns within the field of literary criticism. The study treats important problems at the intersection of literary history and aesthetic ideology, and its treatment of some of the most important writers of the modernist canon offers new insights of great value to both the specialist and the general reader.