Redeeming Words by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Redeeming Words by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

offers a philosophical meditation on the power of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin draws on the critical theory of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows how Döblin and Sebald-writers with radically different styles working in different historical moments-have in common a struggle against forces of negativity and an aim to bring about in response a certain redemption of language. Kleinberg-Levin considers the fast-paced, staccato, and hard-cut sentences of Döblin and the ghostly, languorous, and melancholy prose fiction of Sebald to articulate how both writers use language in an attempt to recover and convey this utopian promise of happiness for life in a time of mourning.

"Redeeming Words is an elegant, highly learned, and incisive exploration of how language—and thus the greatest literature of our time—both registers the experience of the loss of utopia and affirms hope by making the loss more clearIt takes as its theme the most profound reflections on the role of words in a time of abandonment and disenchantment. Kleinberg-Levin argues not only that words communicate this sense of loss but constitute it by failing to achieve total mastery and transparency and self-consciously thematizing the corruption and also affirmative power of words. At the deepest level, this study analyzes words and what the very existence of words can confer to individuals and communities." — Peter Fritzsche, author of The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century

David Kleinberg-Levin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His many books include Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger; Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics, also published by SUNY Press; and Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781438447803
ISBN 10	1438447809
Title	Redeeming Words
Author	David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
Series	Suny Series Intersections: Philosophy And Critical Theory
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	State University of New York Press
Year published	2014-07-02
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.