Poetry and the Sense of Reversal

William D. Melaney is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. His current teaching fields include Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century European Literature, the history of literary criticism, hermeneutics, and recent work in criticism. William has published three books on modernism as a literary and philosophical concept: After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (2001); Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse (2012); and Alterity and Criticism: Tracing Time in Modern Literature (2017), as well as the book Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary (2021), which explores a new approach to literature in adopting Julia Kristeva’s semiotics as the starting point for reinterpreting Freud and Hegel.