Irregular Metaphysics and the Criticism of Culture -- The Moral Imagination in Modern American Criticism -- The Challenge of the "New New Criticism" -- Pragmatism as Critical Antidote: The Allopathic Medicine of Kenneth Burke -- The Culture of Criticism and the Moral Imagination -- The Semiotics of Culture and the Diagnostics of Criticism: Clifford Geertz and the Moral Imagination -- The Humanities and Their Discontents: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Recovery of Alterity -- American Studies as Cultural Criticism -- Recent Criticism and the Sediments of the Sacred.