The essays in this volume explore the persistent struggle of language to overcome its own limitations. Given their scope--from Dantes confrontation with the divine All to Samuel Becketts obsessive need to speak in the face of Nothing--they expand our notion of the extent to which all speech is an assault on silence, an attempt to articulate what lies beyond the grasp of words. The collection offers the reader, in roughly chronological order, diverse conceptions of the ineffable as either superfluity or absence of reality. It also exposes language in the act of extending its own boundaries,...