This book examines and breaks the routine to propose alternative languages for criticism. It shows the commitments of some of the most distinctive voices in criticism, from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, amongst others, to comparative thinking.

1. What If? The Language of Affect 2. Nuisance Value 3. Borges's Blindness and Giacometti's Eyes 4. Wittgenstein's Chopin: Interdisciplinarity and 'the Music Itself' 5. Preserving the Performance: Scholarship as Art? 6. Echoing the 'Mortal Ear': Orfeo's Indiscipline 7. Is Music Criticism Criticism? 8. Modernist Futures 9. Conversation, Sport, or Hatchet Job? Criticism and the Power of Metaphor 10. Set Adrift in Style: The Scholar as Fiction and Film-Maker in Jacob's Room 11. Languages for Learning to Delight in Art 12. Loopholes in Performance 13. Etymology and its Others 14. Yves Bonnefoy's Récits en rêve: The Intersection of Creativity and Critique 15. On Touching: War, Art, and the Realm of the Senses 16. Snapshots from the Hereafter: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Critic as Photographer 17. Faith and Doubt: An Alternative Dialectic 18. Literature and the Theory of Games: Kleist's Verlobung in St Domingo as an Example 19. Towards Discursive Discipline: Dance beyond Metaphor in Critical Writing 20. Interdisciplinarity and Public Engagement