Redeeming words
Subtitle: language and the promise of happiness in the stories of Döblin and Sebald
By: David Kleinberg-Levin
Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9781438447810
Subjects: Language and languages in literature; Criticism and interpretation
Description: In this probing look at Alfred Döblin{u2019}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{u2014}writers with radically different styles working in different historical moments{u2014}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. -- From publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-318) and index.
Table of contents: title: Part I: Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: Language as the casusality of fate; title: Part II: The melancholy science of memory in W. G. Sebald's stories.