How Do We Read the Literature of Exile Today? For a Post-colonialist and Post-totalitarian Poetics (original) (raw)

In Exile: A literary critic of the notion of being exiled

Exile. Is it a verb, a noun, an adjective? Does anyone truly know what it is to be an exile, to be exiled, to be in exile, to be an exile leader/poet/whatever? A quick "Google search" of the word exile comes up with 2,800,000 hits. There are videos, software, music groups, computer games and magazines all professing some connection to the term exile. And then there is a multitude of every conceivable group speaking from exile. No country is without exiles. The Dalai Lama is living in exile in India. African Americans have sought exile in Cuba. Some American soldiers have found exile in Canada to avoid participating, in their words, in "an illegal war in Iraq". Many countries have some form of government in exile, waiting for the time to rightfully return to the homeland. Indeed, history is often written from in exile, as is witnessed by a plethora of groups that have sought to justify the "true" nature of events. Everything has been figured out, except how to live (Jean-Paul Sartre. 1905-1980). Perhaps the word "exile" is too political of a term for the average citizen. It connotes civil war, disruption, potentially a cruel immorality. Do we know where to draw the line between immigration, migration, refugee status and exile? Surely there are cases of some who claim exile but who are ultimately fleeing their own criminal prosecution. Similarly, there must be cases of some who never escape persecution, the intricate web of surveillance and betrayal, or the depth of torment and torture. Sometimes those in exile are labeled "terrorists", or conversely "freedom fighters", and occasionally "despots". Often, they are those on the margins, seeking peace. Assuredly, the vast majority prefers to not be in exile There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. (Victor Hugo, 1802-1885).

Limits of Exile: an Introduction

An introduction to a collection of comparative studies of exile, published in a defunct journal but available "on demand" from Galda publishers. Here is the Table of Contents: Contested Legacies a program and conference the project the 2002 conference publications project sequel 2008: first letters project home Project Sequel JOURNAL OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CROSSROADS Vol. 3, No. 1 April 2006 THEMATIC ISSUE: The Limits of Exile Editors David Kettler Zvi Ben-Dor Table of Contents 'Introduction: The Limits of Exile' DAVID KETTLER and ZVI BEN-DOR 'The Privilege of Pain: The Exile as Ethical Model in Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, and Edward Said' SEBASTIAAN FABER 'On the Specificity of the Spanish Exile of 1939' CARLOS BLANCO AGUINAGA 'Dennis Brutus and the Stations of Exile' SIMON LEWIS '"Exilforschung" as Mirror of the Changing Political Culture in Post-War-Germany' ALFONS SÖLLNER 'European Exile for Russian Westernizers: The Logos' ALEXANDER DMITRIEV 'Toward Understanding the Art of Modern Diasporic Ideology Making: The Eurasianist Mind-Mapping of the Imperial Homeland (1921–1934)' IGOR MARTYNYUK 'Béla Balázs: From the Aesthetization of Community to the Communization of the Aesthetic' TIBOR FRANK 'Invisible Exile: Iraqi Jews in Israel' ZVI BEN-DOR 'Reflections on a Diremptive Experience and Four Theses on Origins and Exile' PEYMAN VAHABZADEH 'Exile and Return: Forever Winter' DAVID KETTLER 'W.G. Sebald and Exilic Memory – His Photographic Images of the Cosmogony of Exile and Restitution' JERRY ZASLOVE 'Exile without Borders' EDUARDO SUBIRATS

Diaspora, Exile, and Displacement: Literary and Theoretical Perspectives

Violent upheavals of the twentieth century -imperialism, the two world wars, struggles for national independence, decolonization, and the Cold War --have made exile and dislocation the great preoccupations of literary works, autobiography, and theoretical writings. Globalization, driven by unprecedented trade and new technologies of communication, information, and travel, has accelerated the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and cultures across the world. Diaspora is thus treated here not as a singular but rather historically varied and heterogeneous phenomenon. The transnational mobility of people may be the result of forced or voluntary migration, self-exile or expulsion. Refugees, people in transit, are the product of war, ideological heterodoxy and persecution, ethnic conflict, and natural calamity.

On the dark and bright sides of exile

XXI век. Человек и окружающий мир , 2018

This article aims to contribute to the conceptualization of the exilic condition by recollecting how it is perceived by studies in the field of humanities. The realities surrounding exile can drastically vary, being caused by collective suffering such as famine, epidemics, war, economic distress and authoritarian political regimes. Nevertheless, each human displacement has a common background tinted by separation and loss. Very often it can be poignant and humiliating, resulting in suffering that might be insurmountable in a lifespan. Less spoken of but equally valid is the other side of such condition, full of potential to denude reality and to reveal the other side of local habits. All together, these movements reconfigure the demographic distribution of the globe, promote awareness and rise issues of national and individual identities. We approached the subject from a multidisciplinary perspective, departing from a etymological and diachronic understanding. We have studied foundational works that have created a base for the understanding of the subject in humanities, as well as contemporary texts that contemplate exilic condition in the fields of literature, philosophy, philology, arts and psychoanalysis.

EXILE LITERATURE: some variants

Abstract: Exile literature has always attracted a lot of critical attention because of the poignant issues it raised. Particularly significant is the wide range of variants that the exile of the mind has and the creativity and innovations it sets into motion. Some authors were exiled or ostracized for holding atheistic or radical beliefs. A few others felt that the literary and artistic ambience provided by their native countries was too narrow , conventional and uninspiring. and went in search of a more fertile intellectual terrain. A further variant is of authors who remained in their native land but alienated by contemporary socio-political conditions and fought against the angst created by uninspiring and obsolete literary conventions . Another form of exile is a direct outcome of the segregation that was an after-effect of the machination that took hold of the society in the post-industrial revolution Europe . This article attempts to present a detailed analytical view of the major works and the paradoxical state of mind of the respective authors ( 168) Key words : exile variant alienated machination angst after-effect

Thinking about Exile: Community, Violence, and Law

APA NEWSLETTER | HISPANIC/LATINO ISSUES IN PHILOSOPHY, 2020

Initially, we approach exile from a socio-political perspective whereby a person or group are forced to leave or remain outside of their country of origin due to well-established fears of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or public opinion. This exposes a relationship between violence and contemporary exile. It is enough to contemplate the world’s horrors first seen in the Great War of 1914, an event that marks the beginning of the most violent period (hostile, criminogenic, and mortal) in the history of human kind (approximately 160 million killed in the twentieth century as a result of war conflicts). We see here the rise of instrumental rationality, applied over individuals and collectives, through very efficacious ways in order to manage fear, destruction, and the victims themselves

Exile and Liminality: Experience between Cultures and Identities

Interlitteraria, 2015

To describe the exilic condition, many scholars have made use of the concept of liminality. Being neither here (Great Britain as a place of exile) nor there (Latvian exile society as a substitute of a nation) characterizes the life of one of the best Latvian existentialist prose writers-Guntis Zariņš (1926-1965). In Zariņš' life and work he negotiated several liminal areas-from his war and professional experience, literary presentation to his standing in the Latvian exile community. Whether it is voluntary/involuntary or internal/external, the process of exile is one where an individual is removed from a place of origin (a homeland) therefore one of the crucial questions to solve is a relationship between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of cultural identity. The time when Guntis Zariņš became prominent in Latvian exile literature, coincided with the time when the change of generations had started. Guntis Zariņš was one of the first exile writers who visited Soviet Latvia in order to personally meet colleagues-writers from the other side of Iron Curtain and cooperate with them in the field of literature but he was trapped between two powers-Britain and Soviet secret services that eventually led to his mental instability and suicide. Zariņš' case is an example of an individual and undesired exile where prolonged liminal phase and inability to integrate neither into the host society nor to establish apolitical and cultural contacts with homeland resulted in an excellent existentialist prose on the one hand and ruined individuality on the other.