Introductory Essay: Poeticanova -- Introductory Essay: Poeticanova -- I Pessimism and Optimism in the Human Condition: The Limit Situations of Existence -- The Present Tide of Pessimism in Philosophy and Letters: Agonistic literature and Cervantes' Message -- Is the Battle with Alienation the Raison d'Être of Twentieth-Century Protagonists? -- Nihilism, Reason, and Death: Reflections on John Barth's Floating Opera -- Beckett, Philosophy, and the Self -- Protagonist, Reader, and the Author's Commitment -- II The Human Spirit On The Rebound -- Nature and Personal Destiny: A Turning Point in the Enterprise of Human Self-Responsibility -- Amor Fati and the Will to Power in Nietzsche -- Jorge Luis Borges-Lover of Labyrinths: A Heideggerian Critique -- Laughter in the Cathedral: Religious Affirmation and Ridicule in the Writings of D. H. Lawrence -- The Enigmatic Child in Literature -- III The Gift of Nature: Man and the Literary Work of Art -- Homecoming in Heidegger and Hebel -- Pastoral Paradoxes -- Reality and Truth in La Comédie Humaine -- Man and Nature: Does the Husserlian Analysis of Pre-Predicative Experience Shed light on the Emergence of Nature in the Work of Art? -- The Language of The Gay Science -- Santayana on Beauty -- IV Genesis of the Aesthetic Reality: Ways and Means -- Heroism and Creativity in Literature: Some Ethical and Aesthetic Aspects -- Permutation and Meaning: A Heideggerian Troisième Voie -- Criticism of Robert Magliola's Paper -- Mythos and Logos in Plato's Phaedo -- Sartre's Conception of the Reader-Writer Relationship -- "Souvenir" and "Imagination" in the Works of Rousseau and Nerval -- Intuitions -- Eidetic Conception and the Analysis of Meaning in Literature -- Annex: Programs of the Conferences from Which the Papers Were Selected -- Index of Names.