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

Columbia University.

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.

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