The book consists of eleven chapters, all showcasing in one way or another linguistic approaches to literature and other arts. Several chapters (on Kafka, Jandl, Trakl, Mayröcker, and Jonke) are revised versions of the author's older articles, some going back to the early seventies. It is—this might be said at the outset—unfortunate to see that most of the references are also to older scholarship and that some of the issues and concerns seem to be formulated in reaction to a somewhat obsolete literary discourse. In these chapters, the entire poststructuralist movement, surely the most influential paradigm of literary scholarship in the past thirty years, as well as several other important currents in literary scholarship, are overlooked.