Pt. I: Riddle and obscurity in early romanticism -- From irritant to ideal: the transvaluation of riddle -- The closed circle of criticism -- Alethic aesthetics: Hegel's riddle of the symbol -- Wordplay and identity in Tieck's early prose -- Pt. II: Reading the psyche: the human riddle -- The inaugural gesture of psychoanalysis -- The joke and its other: toward a Freudian concept of riddle -- The riddle as Freud's textual model -- Trauma and the other Oedipus complex
