TY - BOOK ID - 77923308 TI - Redeeming words PY - 2013 SN - 1438447825 9781438447827 1438447817 9781438447810 9781438447810 PB - Albany DB - UniCat KW - Language and languages in literature. KW - Sebald, Winfried Georg, KW - Döblin, Alfred, KW - Sebald, W. G. KW - זבאלד, וו. KW - Sebald, Max, KW - Criticism and interpretation. KW - Deblin, A., KW - Poot, Linke, KW - Doeblin, Alfred, KW - דבלין, אלפרד, KW - דעבלין, אלפרעד KW - Döblin, Alfred UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77923308 AB - 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. ER -