Redeeming Words
eBook - ePub

Redeeming Words

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

  1. 384 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Redeeming Words

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

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Redeeming Words by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & German Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Prologue
  5. Part I: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Language as the Causality of Fate
  6. Part II: Damals: The Melancholy Science of Memory in W. G. Sebald's Stories
  7. Epilogue
  8. Notes
  9. Bibliography