Exile Literature Research Articles

Alcaeus Fragment 130b V and the Literature of Exile

Alcaeus Fragment 130b V and the Literature of Exile

Moon Brow

World Literature in Review FICTION Shahriar Mandanipour Moon Brow Trans. Sara Khalili. Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 452 pages. It would be an understatement to call Moon Brow, the latest novel by Shahriar Mandanipour (translated from Persian by Sara Khalili), anything but “world literature .” Moon Brow is both an Iranian novel and an example of the present global context that enables and, in Mandanipour’s case, forces literature to cross boundaries in language, theme, form, and style and offer a message beyond a singular national context or moment. Mandanipour, living in literary exile in the United States since 2006, seems to thrive on the idea of doubleness. Perhaps it is fueled by the predicament of a writer who has lived through one set of national contexts and stories and finds his oxygen for writing about those events outside his country in the strangeness of exile. Mandanipour’s previous novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 2009, is built on two interlinked stories. In Moon Brow, the double effect is conveyed through a literary device that echoes both an older folkloric and Quranic reference and a newer, more fractured sensibility that conveys the effects of the narrator ’s PTSD—two angels (one, the angel of virtue, and the other, the angel of sin) sit on the shoulders of the protagonist, Amir Yamini, a wounded veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, and narrate his story in the twinning of his past and present. The angels give the reader Amir’s evolving psychological development first as a reckless, philandering, violent, and confused young man who defies his privileged, religious family, and then in the aftermath of enlisting as a soldier to fight in the war as a traumatized veteran who has lost his arm on the battlefield. By the time he is found by his mother and sister in a mental hospital, Amir has lost most of his memory. But he is haunted by the memory of having fallen in love with a mysterious woman whom 66 WLT JULY–AUGUST 2018 he calls “Moon Brow” while he was away at war. All Amir can recall is that Moon Brow was his true love and that they had exchanged rings. Because he cannot remember his past, he must rely on his sister , Reyhaneh, to tell him what she remembers about his life before he ran away and joined the army. The two angels slowly reveal details about the mysterious young woman, but Amir is plagued by the need to find her since it is the most potent and immediate memory he has of his broken life. Once he has exhausted his sister’s memory, Amir pulls in every favor he can think of to find the ring that was lost with his left arm and hand on the battlefield so that he can learn the true identity of Moon Brow. Although it is easy to lack empathy for Amir when we discover what his life before the war was like, his quest to uncover the story of his love for Moon Brow imbues him with a human fallibility that evokes a need to see Amir made whole again. Like his previous novel, Mandanipour is concerned with the idea that readers glimpse both the specifics of Iran and Iranian history (his novel is replete with references to the events of Iran’s revolution and aftermath) but, more importantly, engage with the ideas of freedom and restriction and of the power of love to transport us beyond social, spiritual, and political confinement . He draws our attention to both the possibilities for freedom and redemption as well as the soul-crushing realities of war and power to imprison the human soul and psyche. Mandanipour’s ambitious and highly complex novel demands from his readers an attention to the much bigger questions of human life—both the idiosyncratic and the predictable as well as the comic and tragic. His highly inventive and playful writing as well as Moon Brow’s structure cast the reader into a psychological minefield that captivates and leaves us in awe of the writer’s ability to move from the historical and political reality of his own...

Erich Fried’s Prose in Changes of our Times (in Honour of his 30th Jubilee of Death 1988–2018)

The overall purpose of the researched study is to describe the confrontation between two basic translational principles in E. Fried’s prose and translational activities – naturalizing versus foreignizing (according to L. Venuti’s concept of the translation strategy named domestication in which a ST style is adopted in a TT, elaborated in contemporary Translation Studies). The further objective of the paper is to describe not only the issues for possible future translations of E. Fried’s prose (above all his crucial novel A Soldier and a Girl) into Slovak and Czech language, but also problems with the sense and the style of this author’s works in translations. The goal of this paper is to research not only the topics of antifascist and modernistic literature but also the topic of time and space (the historical setting in which the prose was produced – the addresses, circumstances, etc.) in E. Fried’s literary heritage and above all the history and the way of development of his crucial novel. Without that sense E. Fried’s famous novel and numerous tales cannot be translated into Slovak and Czech adequately and faithfully. The basic design of the study was built as follows: E. Fried’s prose in a broader context of the WWII exile literature; the modernistic novel of E. Fried as backlash on the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen trial 1945; background knowledge by the analysis of E. Fried’s prose and the role of authorial comments; naturalizing versus foreignizing as translational issues. Major findings in the field of literary research of E. Fried’s prose links to F. Kafka and his influence on the novel A Soldier and a Girl were shown in the part of the modernistic novel of E. Fried as backlash on the Belsen trial – i.e. the author’s turn from war-time antifascist literary production to a new modernistic stage during the writing of the novel (1945–46). Contemporary translational trends (the approach to translational principles of modernizing versus historicizing) are described in the two last parts of this paper. The conclusion stresses the impact of social and political circumstances on a controversial author as times change.

Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven

Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven Luma Balaa (bio) Nada Awar Jarrar is a Lebanese Australian author. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the Anglo-Lebanese exile literature. When she was a child, she had to leave Lebanon because of the civil war (1975–90). She lived in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States before settling in Lebanon in 1995. In 2006, the thirty-three-day war with Israel broke out, and she fled to the mountains of Lebanon. She wrote Unsafe Haven in 2016 while residing in Beirut at the time of the Syrian war. Nearly all the novel's characters are displaced by wars in their homelands, and through their stories, Jarrar explores the different effects of displacement. Her protagonist describes how the whole Middle East region has been in turmoil, and people "find themselves disconnected and dependent on whatever and whomever provides reprieve from this state of drifting" (80). Displaced during the civil war, she flees to Cyprus for part of her life. This novel tells the story of Hannah, a journalist, who refuses to leave Lebanon despite the instability in the region. She is married to Peter, an American doctor who is without a work permit in Lebanon since, by law, a wife cannot give her nationality to her husband. Instead, he toils at a low-level administrative position (Jarrar 25). Only his love for his wife keeps him there. Their friend Maysoun is an Iraqi social worker who helps refugees. Maysoun forces her mother, Nazha, to live with her for a while in Beirut, but her mother eventually decides to go back home. Anas, an artist, came to Lebanon on business and resides in Syria with his wife and two children. When the war breaks out, Anas's wife takes the children and flees to Germany. He later tries to catch up with her but dies on his way to Damascus. Fatima, a Syrian refugee, has two children, one of whom is illegitimate. She eventually reunites with her family in Turkey. Jarrar portrays ambivalence in various ways throughout the novel. Lebanon becomes a city of contradictions, a space journeying in between the imagined home-land and factual homeland, both unsafe and at the same time a haven, a refuge to hide in. The theme of ambivalence is a "common feature of many migrants and migrant cultures" that can be projected toward the past and the present or even the future, "as to whether things were better 'then' or 'now'" (White 3). Edward Soja's [End Page 30] concepts of "Thirdspace" and Homi Bhabha's "in-between space" are occupied by many of the characters, who are mainly immigrants and refugees. Diaspora theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Svetlana Boym, and Leo Spitzer allow one to study other related themes that might trigger this feeling of ambivalence, such as home-land, war, displacement, nostalgia, trauma, personal memory, collective memory, nationalism, and humanitarianism. The Ambivalence of Nostalgia Nostalgia and nostalgic memory can have both negative and positive impacts. It can make people feel depressed because they cannot go back to the past and visit their lost homeland, or it can have positive effects because it gives them hope to rebuild the lost homeland. So on the one hand, Jarrar is pessimistic and questions the viability of her nation. On the other hand, she has hope and is inspired through her nostalgic memory to go beyond the negativity of the civil war and attempt to reconstruct Lebanon and make people reconnect with their sense of belonging and their common national values and beliefs. Jarrar seems to suffer from nostalgia and homesickness, which is "the desire to return to one's native land" (Spitzer 375). Even though she has physically returned home, she is still nostalgic for the old Lebanon before the civil war. She longs for the lost homeland, for "a 'world of yesterday' from whose ideals and values one had become distanced and detached" (Spitzer 376). Raymond Williams sees nostalgia as an "opiate with dysfunctional consequences, enticing people to take refuge in an idealized past while avoiding a critical examination and engagement with their present" (20...

The Literature of Exile after 1939: A Bridge between Catalan Collective Memory and Identity

Abstract The present article reflects on and emphasises the importance of the still-unrecognised work by Catalan writers who bore witness to the exile of 1939 and the preceding historical period of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Civil War (1936–1939). The article explores how these exiled writers and their literary corpora played a fundamental role in recovering Catalan historical collective memory and identity. In particular, it focusses on two writers, Domènec Guansé and Vicenç Riera Llorca, in the light of recent studies of literary history, which have begun this process of re-evaluating the literature of exile, and thereafter relates their work to the theories of Lowenthal, Ricoeur and Traverso regarding the past and memory.

Rubins, Maria Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris (review)

REVIEWS 535 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. A more comprehensive assessment of Békássy the poet can be made by downloading the Bodleian Library’s copy of this now-rare volume from the Internet (free of charge). This little book has been scrupulously, indeed lovingly, edited and annotated by the Gömöris and beautifully produced by Karl Sabbagh’s Skyscraper Publications. It will be of great interest not only to those concerned with Anglo-Hungarian contacts but also anyone whose appetite for reading about the Bloomsbury set remains unsated, as well as everyone with an interest in the ‘lost’ poets of the First World War. It is a worthy tribute to Békássy, in whose memory Darwin’s granddaughter Frances Cornford wrote, in 1915, the Georgian lyric reproduced here (p. 233). Its final stanza runs: We, who must grow staid and old, Full of caution, worn and cold, In our hearts like flowers keep, Your image, till we also sleep. London Peter Sherwood Rubins,Maria.Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, NY, 2015. x + 302 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £55.00. Having been violently separated from their native land and tongue, those Russian writers who found themselves in exile after the Russian Revolution began to anxiously debate the very survival of a literary tradition abroad, fiercely arguing over whether what was being written in Paris, Berlin, Prague and Shanghai could be constituted as a continuation and preservation of this tradition, or whether all such ties had been inexorably severed. In his article on ‘Literature in Exile’ (Paris, 1933), Vladislav Khodasevich, a conservative frontbencher in this debate, adamantly rejected the idea that geographical location should be an integral part of national identity, arguing instead that ‘the nationality of a literature is created by its language and spirit, not by the territory in which its life passed, not the everyday reality reflected in it’. Maria Rubins’sstudychallengesthisnotionandquestionsthemyththatémigréwriters existed in cultural isolation by placing Russian Montparnasse at ‘the epicenter of modernist transnational culture’ (p. 7), suggesting that for the younger, less conservative generation of writers at least, a wider set of considerations need to be applied. By focusing on ‘cases of linguistic ambivalence decoupling the tongue from its original territory’, Rubins calls ‘into question the conventional SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 536 status of language as the chief marker of national identity’ (p. 6). As such, her study proposes to remap and recategorize literature as something more complex than specific national and linguistic parameters, and greater than geographic locus altogether. Rubins structures her study into four parts, each of which examines a distinct aspect of Russian émigré letters by placing them against a cross-cultural background. The study begins with a detailed survey of the evolution of the ‘human document’, a term which, despite its centrality to the debate around the direction which émigré literature should take, has hitherto not received the critical attention it deserves. This genre of writing constituted an attempt by the younger generation to produce a more documentary style of literature, encompassing truthful accounts of ‘real life’, human emotion and existential experience that were often also reflected in its fragmentary form. The second section turns to location, exploring the way in which the city of Paris, with its dark underbelly of metro stations, public toilets and river suicides, may have helped further shape these particular narratives. The argument then moves to explore the wider influences of interwar mass culture, particularly Art Deco and the Jazz Age, the essence of which, she argues, had an indisputable influence on the aesthetics and poetics of modernist writing in this period. Her comparative examination of these writers reveals that their responses to certain markers of urban modernity went far beyond their shared emergence and deracination from Russian literary tradition and instead represented a far broader aesthetic movement common to writers of other nationalities in interwar Europe. In the final section, Rubins turns to examine the complicated way in which Russian Montparnasse engaged with its own national literary tradition, in particular drawing attention to the significant influence of Lermontov and Rozanov...

La poesía como lección de historia, Matei Vişniec, «En la mesa con Marx» («La masă cu Marx»)La poesía como lección de historia, Matei Vişniec, «En la mesa con Marx» («La masă cu Marx»)

Tras una sucinta presentación de las principales coordenadas del exilio literario rumano, el artículo se propone revelar algunos aspectos de la originalidad poética de Matei Vişniec, escritor rumano de expresión francesa, que se define como un «exiliado afortunado». El poema propuesto, «En la mesa con Marx» («La masă cu Marx»), representa el eje del libro con el mismo título, publicado en Rumanía, en 2011. Su lectura explícitamente política lo conecta con otro texto que circuló como manifiesto anti-comunista en los años previos a la caída del régimen comunista, el poema titulado «El velero» («Corabia»). Parábola de la complicidad y de la culpa colectiva, «En la mesa con Marx» es una poética lección de historia sobre elecciones sociales erradas, con desenlaces fatales para la humanidad.

The development of exilic poetry in Anglophone West Africa

The nineteenth century was a period of migration that was perpetuated by the socio-political and economic instability in the continent; this caused the decline in the quality of life which had forced many people to go on exile. This study provides insights into the development of exilic poetry in Anglophone West Africa to show that exilic literature is not an accidental product; it grows out of the sordid social, political and economic realities in the sub-region. The contemporary development in exilic literary discourse in Anglophone West Africa indicates a radical shift in vision which is informed by the need to use this literature as a writing-back strategy. We have also discovered in this study that exilic literature in Anglophone West Africa has grown from the simple narration of personal feelings to become a radical ideology for re-ordering of human relations. Moreover, this study shows that there is a wide range of forms emerging from exilic literary experience in Anglophone West Africa in the explication of personal feelings, nostalgia, alienation, political and socio-cultural disruptions.

Transnationalism, Contingency and Loyalty in African Liberation Armies: The Case of ZANU’s 1974–1975 Nhari Mutiny

This article revisits the history of the 1974–75 mutiny in the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). The mutiny was primarily led by field commanders Thomas Nhari, Dakarai Badza and Caesar Molife. Dominant accounts on the mutiny maintain that the colonial Rhodesian Security Forces (RSF) influenced Nhari and Badza to stage the revolt. The article traces part of the life history of Rex Nhongo/Solomon Mujuru (a ZANLA commander who interacted with the mutineers) in order to challenge these long-standing accounts of the mutiny. The article highlights the import of conflicting understandings of loyalty in the mutiny, arguing that the revolt was not an RSF scheme. Instead, the mutineers took advantage of the absence of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and ZANLA leaderships, which were abroad on various transnational diplomatic engagements in countries sympathetic to Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, to stage a revolt. The mutiny could have been avoided had the ZANLA commander, Josiah Tongogara, heeded Nhongo’s advice that ZANU’s transnational appointments be postponed in order first to address growing dissent among guerrillas at the war front. The article underlines that the revolt’s primary grievances did not originate from ZANLA camps but in the war zone. Focusing on the war front provides an important corrective to the exile literature’s emphasis on the space of the camp, which mistakenly gives a lower profile to the influence of war-zone dynamics in upheavals experienced by liberation movements. It is potentially more insightful to consider meticulously the ways in which war-front dynamics interact with camp politics.

Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany. Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning by Johannes F. Evelein

Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany. Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning by Johannes F. Evelein

Brother Outsider: James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Exile Literature

Brother Outsider: James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Exile Literature

Xerox Men: Technological Tropes in U.S. Latino/a Displacement Literature

Xerox Men:Technological Tropes In U.S. Latino/A Displacement Literature Andres Amerikaner (bio) As technology becomes ever more central to the migration process in both its movement-enabling (planes, trains, automobiles) and gatekeeping aspects (biometric passports, X-ray scanners at the border), its ubiquity has complicated our notion of the geographic boundary. What we traditionally conceived of as a liminal site has been relocated within—as in airports, "internalizing the frontier between domestic and foreign spaces" (Hart 2015, 175)—and without, as in the multiplication of maquiladoras1 in northern Mexico. Along with the opportunities for virtual movement afforded by our increasingly networked existence, this new landscape has served as a deep well of inspiration for first—and second—generation Latin American transplant artists who are updating exilic literary tropes through their intersection with technology, hoping to conceptualize the feeling of being not-at-home—that is, of a traumatic external (geographic or physical) dislocation that ostensibly brings about an internal (mental process) disruption. It is at the cusp of this technological moment that Ilan Stavans' short story "Xerox Man" (2000) and Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer (2008) are situated, both emblematic examples of such a renewal. The former narrates the networking of an individual through copier machines; the latter through a dystopian form of telecommuting near the U.S.-Mexico border. Technology as means of both communication (connection) and isolation (destruction) stages an ageold dialectic that characterizes most exile writing, but this time with a twist: What is it about technology that, in the era of ever-constant mediation, can succesfully convey the alienation or distance of an exiled character? And what can the experience of dislocation tell us about our own relationship to technology? My treatment of exilic representation will be limited to exploring how transplants who have been severed from what they perceive to be their point of origin—including émigrés, expatriates, seasonal laborers, etc.—engage [End Page 113] with the technological, which in turn alleviates or intensifies their sense of fragmentation. More specifically, I am interested in how the literary depiction of this interaction serves as a trope, typically conveying a painful detachment from the new society and the now-imagined old one, but often carrying more complex symbolic significance upon closer examination. It is not my intention to disregard or downplay the very real political stakes of exile studies and its activist discourse, nor to claim that all migratory experiences can be understood to be equally disruptive. I am interested in what literary depictions of exile, broadly understood, can tell us about our contemporary understanding of dislocation: how it is experienced, how it is communicated, and how it is ultimately resolved, or not. Rather than watering down the exilic metaphor, I hope to uncover some of the ways in which it is reaching new audiences, in many cases more powerfully than ever before. Further, I do not wish to downplay the double-edged potential in representing an imagined, disempowered subject, as well as the contradictory tensions inherent in exilic literature: "separation as desire, perspective as witness, alienation as new being," as Michael Seidel puts it (1986, x). Understood as a system, dislocation commands both gain and loss, neither ever fully fixed, reversing course at every turn. In fact, many of the foundational figures of exile studies have exalted the intellectual possibilities of geographic disruption. Homi Bhabha situates his personal project in the margins of cultural displacement (1994, 21), where the Third Space can question hegemonic representation. Edward Said has declared that intellectual liberation depends upon the "unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies whose incarnation today is the migrant" (1994, 332). In Latin American theorizations, Fernando Ortíz's seminal concept of transculturación introduces the notion of blending, where cultural elements from the outside are adopted after running them through a local filter (in such a scenario, the exiled intellectual's contributions would be incorporated under the receiving culture's terms). Claudio Guillén (1995), on the other hand, chooses to approach exile literature by differentiating between texts that mourn, emphasizing loss, and those that propose an overcoming. Perhaps most useful for the purposes of this analysis is Sophia McClennen's understanding of...

Autobiographische Darstellungen von Identitätskrisen im Exil: Frederic Mortons und Ruth Klügers Suche nach Brücken in einer neuen Heimat by Dominik Hofmann-Wellenhof

Reviewed by: Autobiographische Darstellungen von Identitätskrisen im Exil: Frederic Mortons und Ruth Klügers Suche nach Brücken in einer neuen Heimat by Dominik Hofmann-Wellenhof Margarete Landwehr Dominik Hofmann-Wellenhof, Autobiographische Darstellungen von Identitätskrisen im Exil: Frederic Mortons und Ruth Klügers Suche nach Brücken in einer neuen Heimat. Transatlantica 9. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2016. 178 pp. In this slim volume, Hofmann-Wellenhof discusses key topics of exile literature such as the search for a new identity and the confrontation (or suppression) of trauma through autobiography in his analysis of Frederic Morton’s Runaway Waltz and Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben. After the Anschluss, Morton was able to escape Austria with his family via London to New York. Ruth Klüger did not escape Austria and was interred in concentration camps, along with her mother Alma. Ruth and Alma survived; Klüger’s father and brother did not. Both women managed to escape during a “death march” in 1945. After a year of study in Bavaria, Klüger settled with her mother in New York and later moved to California, where she lives today; like Morton, who died in 2015, she has retained her dual Austrian/American citizenship. In the initial chapter, the author discusses such aspects of autobiography as writing as a process of self-creation, the impossibility of attaining a truly “objective” perspective because of the unreliability of memory and bias, and the interrelationship between the authorial narrator and the former self, the protagonist. He also contrasts the “classical” form of autobiography that, like the Bildungsroman, implicitly assumes the protagonist’s progression from innocence to wisdom and its “modern” variation that presents the author’s life as simply a series of disconnected events that might not lead to profound insights or maturation. This study’s focus is on the inevitable question of identity, rooted in the shared values of a community, and the disruption of those ties. As Erik Erikson notes, the successful creation of a stable self or ego is developed through the confrontation and resolution of these crises. The abrupt or violent displacement from a Heimat to an unfamiliar country constitutes a trauma that can lead to the repression of memories or the creation of one’s identity through narrative. Frederic Morton, like Joseph Roth, viewed storytelling as therapy, as a home in the wilderness in which one finds one’s moral compass by surmounting crises: “At the end of a good story, the reader has a roof over his head” (33). In his essay “Exile: The Modern Heritage” Morton considers the immigrant’s crisis, “the mobility of fragmentation,” as a modern phenomenon. The exile’s struggle between past and present, old and new values, and loss of [End Page 181] Heimat embodies, for him, the destiny of his contemporaries. The role of language in the creation of a new identity is particularly interesting. Like his idol Fred Astaire (in early life Fritz Austerlitz), Morton’s Americanization of his name Fritz Mandelbaum and his mastery of English helped him to assimilate into his new country and establish a new identity. He despised America’s unbridled capitalism and consumerism, yet sought refuge in its language: “Me, the chronic gringo, perennially at odds with the new land, who’s rooted himself doubly deep in its language, perhaps because he cannot be comfortable with its culture” (55). Klüger’s autobiography portrays a feminist sensibility and religion as two sources of identity formation. Klüger blames her mother’s decision not to allow her to go on a Kindertransport to Palestine on her ignorance of political developments: “Politik galt als ‘unweibliches Interessengebiet’” (72). She discusses Nazism as a masculine ideology but also considers the patriarchal social order of the twentieth century in which she is not viewed as a “valid” witness of her time because of her gender (70). This criticism is extended to her evaluation of Judaism: she believes that the Torah justifies the oppression and degradation of women (76). Particularly heartbreaking for Klüger is that she is not allowed to say the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, for her father as she is female. Thus, she feels as if her...

Writing in a Cosmopolitan Age: Considerations of Ethnicity and Transculturalism in Sino-French Literature

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, French literature has turned from a national to a transnational model, making way for theories that emphasize correlations between a culture's literary productions and such political and social processes as immigration and globalization. This article explores how Chinese diasporic and exile literature fits into this new transnational paradigm, particularly Sino-French literature. First, the article discusses the surprising contradiction of Sino-French novels: that on one hand, these novels’ transcultural features infuse contemporary French literature with cosmopolitanism, while on the other hand, their preponderantly ethnic model reinforces the preeminence within the cultural diaspora of the Chinese nation. Second, I argue that the intrinsically metaphorical nature of the Chinese language is an essential factor in Sino-French novels’ creation of a new literary language. This new language is highly valued by the French literary establishment and has greatly contributed to the institutionalization of this literature.

Book Review: Johannes F. Evelein: Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany: Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning

Book Review: Johannes F. Evelein: <i>Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany: Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning</i>

Focused on Yongjae Ihaeng's Exile Literature as Viewpoint of Literary Therapy

Focused on Yongjae Ihaeng's Exile Literature as Viewpoint of Literary Therapy

« Robben Island » Un espace, Une Histoire, Une Littérature

A Space, A History, A Literature&#x0D; Talking about the struggle for freedom in South Africa during the Apartheid era, inevitably leads to a historically renowned place that has been classified as world heritage by the UNESCO. “Robben Island” can justly be considered as the cradle and symbol of the literature of exile as well as prison literature, both of which generated the autobiographical genre, a fundamental reassessment of detainees’ existence. This article shows how the context secretes the text, which justifies the recourse to autobiographical writings by most South African authors who sojourned in the prison of “Robben Island”.

Arab Literary Exiles and Their Writing in Light of the Arab Spring

Before the era of globalization, the nation state produced intellectuals, some in its support, and some in opposition. Among the latter were those who could be termed literary exiles. Different kinds of states produced different kinds of intellectuals, and thus arose the possibility of a sociology of literary exile. Today, in the wake of the Arab Spring, with its unexpected resurgence of old-fashioned nationalism, the question arises whether scholars should now take a second look at the question of national history and its theory in the wake of globalization. This essay argues that Arab literary exiles can be meaningfully looked at as part of a longer-term trend extending from the old national period until today, representing a historical approach well worth developing.

ПРОБЛЕМЫ СОХРАНЕНИЯ НАЦИОНАЛЬНЫХ ТРАДИЦИЙ И ЭТИЧЕСКИХ ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЙ В РАССКАЗЕ С. БАЛЫКОВА «СИЛЬНЕЕ ВЛАСТИ»

The article considers the works of one of the brightest representatives of the Kalmyk literary exile - Sanji Basangovich Balykov (1892-1943). His writing career began in exile. However, despite this circumstance, national pictures in his works are drawn with extreme care and thoroughness. The life of the Kalmyk people never ceased to interest him. In his works S. Balykov acts as a kind of psychologist and ethnographer. He describes life, traditions and customs of the Kalmyk people. Every his work, whether it is a story, a narrative or a novel, is associated with his thoughts on homeland, its history, culture and language of the great and long-suffering people. Reading the story “More than power” one can reveal a correlation between the writer-emigrant and the ethno-national traditions, and see the degree of his national identity realization (given the fact that the writer socialized within the emigre circles) that provides a basis to determine the origins of his works. The author of the article concludes that the national thinking of the writer is reflected in his works through ethical categories. The main communicative goal is that disrespect and disregard for all norms of national ethics of its people is a bad omen, which may be followed by great tragedy for all humanity. Every nation is great not by its size, says the Kalmyk writer, but by the power of the national spirit, preserving the language and culture.

Brer Rabbit and the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem: The Double Voice in Literatures of Exile

Abstract The connection between Brer Rabbit and the story of the Jewish community after 70 CE is that both are recorded in literatures of exile. As a result, they share a significant quality—the double voice—deployed as one of many literary strategies for survival under oppression. Using passages from Brer Rabbit and Lamentations Rabba, this article focuses on riddles and trickster tales because they present an especially striking witness of the double voice as expounded within African-American literary theory. These genres appear in the folklore of most cultures, but their encoding enables a unique inversion of cultural meaning for subaltern and dispersed peoples, which gives the tales remarkable power to fashion and sustain identities, and to articulate the complexity of their experience. They absorb the imagery and language of the dominant culture, yet re-signify their meaning in the process of assimilation. Both elements of this voice—the adoption and the inversion—are essential representations of the authors or redactors. Separated by time, space, language, culture, and context, the tales of Brer Rabbit and the Palestinian rabbinic midrash speak to each other through this strategic polyphony.