Exile and creativity : signposts, travelers, outsiders, backward glances / edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 1939- Editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Exiles in literature.

Exile (Punishment) in literature.

Creativity in literature.

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Literature, Modern--History and criticism.

Literature, Modern.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (457 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 1998.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A major historical phenomenon of our century, exile has been a focal point for reflections about individual and cultural identity and problems of nationalism, racism, and war. Whether emigrés, exiles, expatriates, refugees, or nomads, these people all experience a distance from their homes and often their native languages. Exile and Creativity brings together the widely varied perspectives of nineteen distinguished European and American scholars and cultural critics to ask: Is exile a falling away from a source of creativity associated with the wholeness of home and one’s own language, or is it a spur to creativity?In essays that range chronologically from the Renaissance to the 1990s, geographically from the Danube to the Andes, and historically from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the complexities and tensions of exile and the diversity of its experiences are examined. Recognizing exile as an interior experience as much as a physical displacement, this collection discusses such varied topics as intellectual exile and seventeenth-century French literature; different versions of home and of the novel in the writings of Bakhtin and Lukács; the displacement of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector; a young journalist’s meeting with James Baldwin in the south of France; Jean Renoir’s Hollywood years; and reflections by the descendents of European emigrés. Strikingly, many of the essays are themselves the work of exiles, bearing out once more the power of the personal voice in scholarship.With the exception of the contribution by Henry Louis Gates Jr., these essays were originally published in a special double issue of Poetics Today in 1996. Exile and Creativity will engage a range of readers from those whose specific interests include the problems of displacement and diaspora and the European Holocaust to those whose broad interests include art, literary and cultural studies, history, film, and the nature of human creativity.Contributors. Zygmunt Bauman, Janet Bergstrom, Christine Brooke-Rose, Hélène Cixous, Tibor Dessewffy, Marianne Hirsch, Denis Hollier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Nochlin, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Thomas Pavel, Doris Sommer, Nancy Huston, John Neubauer, Ernst van Alphen, Alicia Borinsky, Svetlana Boym, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron

Contents:

Exsul / Christine Brooke-Rose

Exile as romance and as tragedy / Thomas Pavel

Art and the conditions of exile : men/women, emigration/expatriation / Linda Nochlin

"Mamãe, disse ele," or, Joyce's second hand / Hélène Cixous

Letter from Paris (foreign mail) / Denis Hollier

At home abroad : El Inca shuttles with Hebreo / Doris Sommer

Gombrowicz's tango : an Argentine snapshot / Alicia Borinsky

Surrealists in exile : another kind of resistance / Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron

Jean Renoir's return to France / Janet Bergstrom

A master of amazement : Armando's self-chosen exile / Ernst van Alphen

Estrangement as a lifestyle : Shklovsky and Brodsky / Svetlana Boym

Bakhtin versus Lukács : inscriptions of homelessness in theories of the novel / John Neubauer

Romain Gary : a foreign body in French literature / Nancy Huston

The welcome table : James Baldwin in exile / Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Assimilation into exile : the Jew as a Polish writer / Zygmunt Bauman

Strangerhood without boundaries : an essay in the sociology of knowledge / Tibor Dessewffy

Persistent memory : central European refugees in an Andean land / Leo Spitzer

Monuments in a foreign tongue : on reading Holocaust memoirs by emigrants / Susan Rubin Suleiman

Past lives : postmemories in exile / Marianne Hirsch.

Notes:

"All of the essays in this book, with one exception, first appeared in the special double issue of Poetics today ... vol. 17, nos. 3-4, 1996"--Introd.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822322153

0822322153

9780822379829

0822379821

OCLC:

893682715