New PDF release: Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical

By David Kleinberg-Levin

This e-book boldly ventures to go a few conventional educational obstacles, supplying an unique, philosophically proficient argument concerning the nature of language through studying and studying the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. So it's a paintings either in literary feedback and in philosophy. The technique is strongly stimulated via Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic thought, however the philosophical considered different philosophers—notably Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein—figures considerably within the examining and interpretation. The essence of the argument is that, regardless of its broken (standardization, commodification, staleness), language is, as such, via advantage of its very lifestyles, the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness. in addition, it truly is argued that, through reconciling the 2 senses of experience (sensuous experience and intelligible sense), displaying the sheer energy of phrases to create fictional worlds and wreck what they've got simply created, and redeeming the revelatory strength of words—above all, the ability to show the usual into anything not wide-spread, whatever excellent or perplexing—the writers during this research maintain our wish for an international of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, evoking within the method they openly play with the sounds and meanings of words, a few intimations of a world—our global the following, this very international, no longer a few heavenly world—in which the promise of happiness will be fulfilled and redeemed. within the first a part of the e-book, reflecting at the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that the poet defies the correspondence concept of fact to let phrases to be trustworthy to fact as transformative and revelatory—what Heidegger calls “unconcealment”, translating the Greek. He additionally argues that during the excitement we get from the sensuous play of phrases, there's an anticipation of the promise of happiness that demanding situations the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness and makes the non secular adventure look like a paltry replacement. within the moment a part of the booklet, Kleinberg-Levin indicates how Nabokov inherits Mallarmé’s notion of literature, inflicting together with his word-plays the surprising relief of the fictitious international he has in order that compellingly created to its invaluable stipulations of materiality: white paper, ink, print at the web page. We therefore see the unconventional as a piece of fiction, as mere semblance; we see its stipulations of threat, created and destroyed ahead of our very eyes. however the excitement in seeing phrases doing this, and the excitement of their sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness that language bears. utilizing a Kantian definition of modernism, in line with which a piece is modernist if it finds and questions the inherited assumptions approximately its worthwhile stipulations of chance, those stories exhibit how and why either Stevens and Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.

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Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness: A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov by David Kleinberg-Levin


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