Description: Probing study of how literature can redeem the revelatory, redemptive powers of language.
Brief description: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University. His many books include Redeeming Words: Language and the Promise of Happiness in the Stories of Döblin and Sebald and Before the Voice of Reason: Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics, both published by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"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