Ethics and Dialogue

'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 StudiesIn this methodologically innovative study, Eskin construes 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. In so doing, he develops a sophisticated mode of reading poetry--poethics--which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy, and opens new vistas on to the workings of European modernist and post-World War II poetry.