THE EPIGRAPHS CHOSEN TO INTRODUCE THIS ESSAY on literary transference posit the existence of unspoken or wordless worlds, unformulated spaces that we cannot access directly, but that nonetheless shape us and form part of our utterances. Tracing the formation of such spaces back to early infancy, Christopher Bollas argues that the modes in which an infant is received and cared for, and the ways in which its earliest sensory experiences are stimulated and organized, establish a of being that precedes the acquisition of language. Even after the symbolic order of language is put into play, this early grammar retains its force, inhabiting language as an unspoken dimension, or, as Bollas calls it, an known. This spatial conception of language and suggests that what we commonly refer to as a person's inner is transposed into an inner of language and thus accessible to communication. The following essay explores the role of literature in fashioning such spaces and wordless worlds. Two guiding questions will orient the discussion: How does literature use words to evoke a wordless world, thus drawing it into the realm of intersubjective exchange and communication? And how does literature mediate an knowledge of this wordless world? Drawing on Bollas's theory of the unthought known, these questions expand my earlier theoretical reflections on the function of literature and reading. In Subjects without Selves, I develop a theory of the transitional space of literature, arguing that one of the main functions and effects of reading consists in continually redrawing the boundaries of subjectivity