Redeeming Words
Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald
David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
- 384 pages
- English
- ePUB (adapté aux mobiles)
- Disponible sur iOS et Android
Redeeming Words
Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald
David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
Ă propos de ce livre
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 Sebaldâwriters with radically different styles working in different historical momentsâhave 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.