Redeeming Words and the Promise of Happiness (eBook)

A Critical Theory Approach to Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov

David Kleinberg-Levin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012
256 Seiten
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-0-7391-7752-5 (ISBN)

Infos

This book offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of language by reading some exemplary works of literature. Drawing on the thought of philosophers—especially Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the author argues that language is the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness, and that by redeeming the revelatory power of words, the two writers in this study are contributing to the redemption of the promise of happiness in a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions.

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This book boldly ventures to cross some traditional academic boundaries, offering an original, philosophically informed argument regarding the nature of language by reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. So it is a work both in literary criticism and in philosophy. The approach is strongly influenced by Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language and Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, but the philosophical thought of other philosophersnotably Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Heidegger, and Wittgensteinfigures significantly in the reading and interpretation. The essence of the argument is that, despite its damaged condition (standardization, commodification, staleness), language is, as such, by virtue of its very existence, the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness. Moreover, it is argued that, by reconciling the two senses of sense (sensuous sense and intelligible sense), showing the sheer power of words to create fictional worlds and destroy what they have just created, and redeeming the revelatory power of wordsabove all, the power to turn the familiar into something no longer familiar, something astonishing or perplexingthe two writers in this study sustain our hope for a world of reconciled antagonisms and contradictions, evoking in the way they freely play with the sounds and meanings of words, some intimations of a worldour world here, this very world, not some heavenly worldin which the promise of happiness would be fulfilled and redeemed. In the first part of the book, reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth to enable words to be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatorywhat Heidegger calls ';unconcealment', translating the Greek. He also argues that in the pleasure we get from the sensuous play of words, there is an anticipation of the promise of happiness that challenges the theological doctrine of an otherworldly happiness and makes the religious experience seem like a paltry substitute. In the second part of the book, Kleinberg-Levin shows how Nabokov inherits Mallarme's conception of literature, causing with his word-plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just so compellingly created to its necessary conditions of materiality: white paper, ink, print on the page. We thus see the novel as a work of fiction, as mere semblance; we see its conditions of possibility, created and destroyed before our very eyes. But the pleasure in seeing words doing this, and the pleasure in their sensuous materiality, are intimations of the promise of happiness that language bears. Using a Kantian definition of modernism, according to which a work is modernist if it reveals and questions the inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.

Autor

David Kleinberg-Levin is currently Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University.

Inhalt

Part I. Between Wild Sense and Plain Sense: The Language of Truth in the Poetry of Wallace StevensChapter One: TruthChapter Two: Reason’s FollyChapter Three: The Realism of the ImaginationChapter Four: Word-Play: Language on HolidayChapter Five: Redemption?Part II. Facing the Surface: Nabokov After MallarméChapter Six: ModernismChapter Seven: Mischievous PredecessorsChapter Eight: Transparencies and Metamorphoses: Nabokov’s Language GamesChapter Nine: When the Promise of Happiness Appears: Redeeming the Dust on the SurfaceChapter Ten: Paradise of Memory and Imagination

Produkt-Details

• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Sprachphilosophie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Aesthetics • American Literature • Literary criticism • Literary Studies • Literary Theory • Literature and the Arts • Philosophy of Language • World literature
• ISBN-10: 0-7391-7752-4 / 0739177524
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-7752-5 / 9780739177525