"I died at Auschwitz," French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, "and nobody knows it." Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future. Challenging customary "aesthetic" assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all literature works "autobiographically", which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo "I died; therefore, I am"; and for which the language of topology (for example, the "Möbius strip") offers a vocabulary for naming the "deep structure" of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics. In this extraordinarily rich and thought-provoking follow-up to his earlier Sacrificing Commentary, Sandor Goodhart offers us a new, 'Möbian' basis for a general theory of the literary, which encompasses an impressively wide range of texts and authors, from Homeric epic to Derridean deconstruction. The intellectual tour de force does not for a moment, however, lose sight of the real historical crisis of our time; for over it all hovers the shadow of Auschwitz. Möbian Nights will prove necessary reading for anyone seriously interested in literature and literary criticism, and their relation to each other, as well as to philosophy, Biblical religion, and ethics.