An inquiry into the theories and practices of overhearing When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things that they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by a disparate company of interpreters: prophets, priests, and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, novelists and filmmakers. All have suggested that in the contingencies of discourse, there are precious indications to be gleaned, for which special techniques are required. In Far Calls, Daniel Heller-Roazen reconstructs such arts of detection, interweaving ancient, medieval, and modern examples. From the rituals of the ancient Greeks, Jews, and Romans to Freud and Lacan, from Augustine's catching of a salvific scrap of speech to the inspiration that Breton and Yeats, Proust and Joyce, drew from profane cries and transmissions, Far Calls explores the powers of sonorous coincidence and the varieties of reading that it incites.

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His is the author, most recently, of Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons; No One's Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming, Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers, and The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World.