This book boldly crosses traditional academic boundaries, offering
an original, philosophically informed argument about the nature of
language, reading and interpreting the poetry of Wallace Stevens
and the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Redeeming Words and the Promise
of Happiness 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 other philosophers-notably Plato, Kant, Hegel,
Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein-figure
significantly in the reading and interpretation. Kleinberg-Levin
argues that despite its damaged, corrupted condition, language is
in its very existence the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise
of happiness. Moreover, he argues, by reconciling sensuous sense
and intelligible sense; showing the sheer power of words to create
fictional worlds and deconstruct what they have just created; and
redeeming the revelatory power of words-the power to turn the
familiar into something astonishing, strange or perplexing-the 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 new
world-but our world here, this very world, not some heavenly
world-in which the promise of happiness might be redeemed.
Reflecting on the poetry of Stevens, Kleinberg-Levin argues that
the poet defies the correspondence theory of truth so that words
may be faithful to truth as transformative and revelatory. 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 in reading Nabokov, Kleinberg-Levin shows how that writer
inherits Mallarme's conception of literature, causing with his word
plays the sudden reduction of the fictional world he has just
created to its necessary conditions of materiality. The novel is
revealed as a work of fiction; 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
inherited assumptions about its necessary conditions of
possibility, these studies show how and why both Stevens and
Nabokov are exemplars of literary modernism.
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