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In this probing examine Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and the tales of W. G. Sebald, Redeeming Words deals a philosophical meditation at the strength of language in literature. David Kleinberg-Levin attracts at the severe conception of Benjamin and Adorno; the idealism and romanticism of Kant, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling; and the 19th- and twentieth-century considered Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. He exhibits how Döblin and Sebald—writers with notably diversified types operating in numerous old moments—have in universal a fight opposed to forces of negativity and an goal to result in in reaction a undeniable redemption of language. Kleinberg-Levin considers the fast paced, staccato, and hard-cut sentences of Döblin and the ghostly, languorous, and depression prose fiction of Sebald to articulate how either writers use language in an try and get better and produce this utopian promise of happiness for all times in a time of mourning.

“Redeeming Words is a sublime, hugely discovered, and incisive exploration of the way language—and hence the best literature of our time—both registers the adventure of the lack of utopia and affirms wish through making the loss extra transparent. It takes as its subject the main profound reflections at the function of phrases in a time of abandonment and disenchantment. Kleinberg-Levin argues not just that phrases speak this feeling of loss yet represent it via failing to accomplish overall mastery and transparency and self-consciously thematizing the corruption and in addition affirmative strength of phrases. on the private point, this learn analyzes phrases and what the very life of phrases can confer to participants and communities.” — Peter Fritzsche, writer of The Turbulent international of Franz Göll: a typical Berliner Writes the 20 th Century

David Kleinberg-Levin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern collage. His many books contain Gestures of moral existence: analyzing Hölderlin’s query of degree After Heidegger; Before the Voice of cause: Echoes of accountability in Merleau-Ponty’s Ecology and Levinas’s Ethics, additionally released by way of SUNY Press; and Redeeming phrases and the Promise of Happiness: A serious thought method of Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov.