"What is literature? What makes a text "literary" and how do we explain its extraordinary ability to unsettle, intoxicate and delight its readers? Throughout the centuries, influential thinkers have struggled with these questions, but no one has succeeded in pinning down the essence of literature. Derek Attridge invites us to take this resistance to definition as a starting point, in order to explore afresh not only literature, but the wider practices of Western art." Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions, Attridge here crystallizes many years of thinking about what happens when a writer produces an innovative work or a reader responds to it, at the time of writing or much later. He brings out the implications of regarding the work as an event performed anew each time by the reader, responding to its singularity, inventiveness and otherness. Calling for a "responsible" form of reading that does justice to these aspects of the work, Attridge retheorizes the place of literature in the realm of the ethical. His theory is anchored in scrupulous practice through new readings of well-known texts and, for those wishing to trace the theoretical underpinnings of key arguments or explore the major issues in greater detail, an appendix of "debts and directions" is provided.