Redeeming Words

David Kleinberg-Levin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His many books include Gestures of Ethical Life: Reading Hölderlin's Question of Measure After Heidegger; Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics, also published by SUNY Press; and Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov.

• AcknowledgmentsProloguePart I. Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Language as the Causality of Fate 1. Fatality: Character as Fate2. Natural History3. Döblin’s Conception of the Modern Novel4. The Language of Fate5. Language as the Causality of Freedom6. Paradise in Words: The Promise of HappinessPart II. Damals: The Melancholy Science of Memory in W. G. Sebald’s Stories 1. Telling Stories: A Question of Transmissibility2. Natural History: Becoming in Dissolution3. Of Humans and Other Animals4. As Time Goes By: Words from the Embers of Remembering5. Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness: Sebald’s Phenomenology of Spirit6. Beauty: Symbol of Morality in a Phenomenology of Spirit7. On a Journey through DisenchantmentEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex

"Redeeming Words is an elegant, highly learned, and incisive exploration of how language—and thus the greatest literature of our time—both registers the experience of the loss of utopia and affirms hope by making the loss more clear. It takes as its theme the most profound reflections on the role of words in a time of abandonment and disenchantment. Kleinberg-Levin argues not only that words communicate this sense of loss but constitute it by failing to achieve total mastery and transparency and self-consciously thematizing the corruption and also affirmative power of words. At the deepest level, this study analyzes words and what the very existence of words can confer to individuals and communities." — Peter Fritzsche, author of The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century