Ethics and Dialogue: In the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan

by Michael Eskin

Overview

Ethics and Dialogue engages with four of the most complex authors of the twentieth century—Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan—in a hermeneutically and methodologically innovative manner. Construing Levinas's ethical philosophy in conjunction with Bakhtin's philosophy of the act and metalinguistics, as an interpretative framework for making sense of Celan's dialogue with Mandel'shtam, the author develops a highly sophisticated mode of reading poetry—poethics—which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy. While documenting the viability of Levinas's and Bakhtin's philosophies, Eskin's analyses of Celan's and Mandel'shtam's poetry in the light of its philosophical underpinnings open hitherto unseen vistas on to the workings of twentieth-century poetry in general and on to European modernist and post-World War II poetry in particular.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198159926
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	02/01/2001
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Columbia University.

Table of Contents

1. Emmanuel Levinas - The Ethics of Dialogue
2. Mikhail Bakhtin - The Metalinguistics of Dialogue
3. Osip Mandel'shtam and Paul Celan - The Poetics of Dialogue
Part II: Poethics
4. Encountering the Other
5. 'combien est-il donc difficile de traduire'
6. Continued Response - Die Niemandsrose
Conclusion: Towards a Metapoethics
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Michael Eskin's project is an interesting, ambitious, and in my view finally successful one... This book is successful because it brings together, in a manner rarely (if ever) done before, the ethical, the dialogic, the poetic, and the translational. It is not the least merit of this book for having shown the interdependency of this foursome to us in four of the most powerful and thoughtful writers of our time in such a way that opens the door to more work of the same." — Shofar

"A very welcome and illuminating book .... Magnificently in control of the material, and informative.... What it touches is always very provocative."—Modern Language Review

"A welcome rereading of Bakhtin in a Russian context.... For those who think of Bakhtin only as the theorist of the novel, and Levinas as a Rabbi and philosopher, this book everywhere upsets neat categorisation and offers a powerful apology for a creative ethics of the word."—Forum for Modern Language Studies

From the Publisher