Exile In Literature

In December 1987 a group of published novelists, poets, and journalists met in Vienna to participate in the Wheatland Conference on Literature. The writers presented papers addressing their common experience--that of being exiled. Each explored different facets of the condition of exile, providing answers to questions such as: What do exiled writers have in common? What is the exile's obligation to colleagues and readers in the country of origin? Is the effect of changing languages one of enrichment or impoverishment? How does the new society treat the emigre? Following each essay is a peer discussion of the topic addressed. The volume includes writers whose origins lie in Central Europe, South Africa, Israel, Cuba, Chile, Somalia, and Turkey. Through their testimony of the creative process in exile, we gain insight into the forces which affect the creative process as a whole. Contributors. William Gass, Yury Miloslavsky, Jan Vladislav, Jiri Grusa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Horst Bienek, Edward Limonov, Nedim Gursel, Nuruddin Farah, Jaroslav Vejvoda, Anton Shammas, Joseph Brodsky, Wojciech Karpinski, Thomas Venclova, Yuri Druzhnikov

This chronologically arranged collection of essays explores the concept of exile, from the literal to the metaphorical, in Western literary works, such as those of Hrothswitha of Gandersheim, Dante, Unamuno, Heinrich Boell, and Irish and Latin American contemporary writers.

The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied literary tradition, criticism of exile writing has tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures offers a theory of exile writing that accounts for the persistence of these dual impulses and for the ways that they often co-exist within the same literary works. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, Sophia A. McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile) and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), this book explores how these writers represent exile identity. Each chapter addresses dilemmas central to debates over cultural identity such as nationalism versus globalization, time as historical or cyclical, language as representationally accurate or disconnected from reality, and social space as utopic or dystopic. McClennen demonstrates how the complex writing of these three authors functions as an alternative discourse of cultural identity that not only challenges official versions imposed by authoritarian regimes, but also tests the limits of much cultural criticism.

The text includes excerpts and short stories from an international body of writers examining almost 100 years of literature on the experience of exile from a home country and displacement to the United States. Through the selections readers will investigate how the authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, and the role literature may play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in exile.

Furthering the scholarship on writers and artists as diverse as Lord Byron, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, and Jorge Luis Borges, Zeng probes the semiotics of exile. In artistic traditions the world over, exile exerts a potent and complex mythmaking power - whether it is manifest as a geographical dislocation or as a sense of cultural or psychological alienation.

A fascinatingly diverse anthology of the literature of exile, from the myths of Ancient Egypt to contemporary poetry Exile lies at the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages. Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Swahili Song of Liyongo, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Emma Goldman's travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani's ode to the lost world of Andalusia and the work of contemporary Eritrean fabulist Ribka Sibhatu. Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.

"Prompted by centuries of warfare, political oppression, natural disasters, and economic collapses, exile has had an enormous impact not only on individuals who have undergone transplantation from one culture to another, but also on the host societies they have joined and those worlds they have left behind. Written by prominent literary critics, creative authors, and artists, the essays gathered within Exile in Global Literature and Culture: Homes Found and Lost meditates upon the painful journeys-geographic, spiritual, emotional, psychological-brought about due to exilic rupture, loss and dislocation. Yet, exile also fosters potential pleasures and rewards: to extend scholar Martin Tucker's formulation, wherever the exile might land in flight, he bears with him the sweetness of survival, the triumph of transcendence, the luxury of liminality, the invitation to innovate and invent in new lands. Indeed, exile embodies both blessing and curse, homes found and lost. Furthermore, this book adheres to (and test) the premise that exile's deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms"--

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.