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Redeeming Words

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Redeeming Words

Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald

David Michael Kleinberg-LevinSeries: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

(0)

Pages

384

Year

2013

Language

English

State University of New York Press

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About

Probing study of how literature can redeem the revelatory, redemptive powers of language.

In this probing look at Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the stories of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words 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.

Related Subjects

Aesthetics
Philosophy
Adult Nonfiction
General (Philosophy)
General (Literary Criticism)
Literary Criticism
German
European
Phenomenology
Movements

Extended Details

SeriesSUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Artists

David Michael Kleinberg-LevinAuthor