1st Edition

Exile in Global Literature and Culture Homes Found and Lost

Edited By Asher Z. Milbauer, James Sutton Copyright 2020
    278 Pages
    by Routledge

    278 Pages
    by Routledge

    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 meditate 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, and 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 tests) the premise that exile‘s deepest and innermost currents are manifested through writing and other artistic forms.

    Introduction: The Overreaching Arc of Exile

    Asher Z. Milbauer and James M. Sutton

    Chapter 1: Exile and Return in Jewish Teaching and Tradition

    David Patterson

    Chapter 2: Exile, Dislocation and Roman Identity in the Age of Augustus

    Sarah T. Cohen

    Chapter 3: "I Am not What I Am": Considerations of Shakespearean Exile

    James M. Sutton

    Chapter 4: The Problem of Exile for James Joyce

    Michael Patrick Gillespie

    Chapter 5: José Martí: Just Another Face in the Crowd

    Uva de Aragón

    Chapter 6: Exile as Metaphor and Memory: The Case of Salman Rushdie

    Martin Tucker

    Chapter 7: The Reluctant Exile: Remembering the Exilic Legacy of the Hungarian Jewish Poet,

    Miklós Radnóti

    Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

    Chapter 8: Elie Wiesel: Writer as Witness to and in Exile

    Alan L. Berger

    Chapter 9: Exiled from the Mother Tongue: Russian Writers Abroad

    David Markish

    Chapter 10: The Exiled Language

    Norman Manea

    Chapter 11: Dreamers and Lifers: Exile Terminable and Interminable

    Gustavo Pérez Firmat

    Chapter 12: Of Poetry, Place, and Personhood: or the Exacting Resonances of Language

    Abena P. A. Busia

    Chapter 13: Landscapes and Geographies of Chilean Exile

    Marjorie Agosín

    Chapter 14: On the State of Exile Studies: Past, Present and Future

    Guy Stern

    Chapter 15: Traveling with My Selves

    Ana Menéndez

    Chapter 16: Mirages of Imaginary Exile

    Richard Blanco

    Chapter 17: The Literature of Exile: Reading and Teaching

    Holli Levitsky

    Chapter 18: An Interview with Cuban-American Artist, Humberto Calzada: Exile, Nostalgia and

    the Art of Memory

    Asher Z. Milbauer and James M. Sutton

    Contributor’s Biographies

    Index

    Biography

    Asher Z. Milbauer is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Exile Studies Certificate Program at Florida International University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington. His publications pertaining to exile and its consequences include a book on literary transplantation, Transcending Exile: Conrad, Nabokov, I. B. Singer; a co-edited collection of original essays, Reading Philip Roth; an extended essay on exile and return, "Eastern Europe in American-Jewish Literature"; and another piece, "Life Encounters: Reflections on Elie Wiesel." He has also co-authored two other essays, "The Burdens of Inheritance" and "The Reluctant Witness," both of which treat significant aspects of exilic experience. His scholarly/experiential essay, "In Search of a Doorpost: Meditations on Exile and Literature," won the Sarah Russo Prize for an Essay on Exile. He was recognized as an "FIU Top Scholar" in 2015.

    James M. Sutton is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. He has taught in England, Italy, and Slovenia. He holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies from Yale University in 1995. He is the author of Materializing Space at an Early Modern Prodigy House: The Cecils at Theobalds, 1564–1607 (Ashgate 2005), in addition to related articles. In February 2016, he served as project lead when Florida International University exhibited a Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio (as part of the nationwide tour, "First Folio!: The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare," jointly arranged by the ALA and the Folger). His current research foregrounds "local Shakespeares" in Slovenia and South Florida. This work bridges Shakespeare to issues of exile, transplantation, immigration, and (in Miami) Latinx identities. 

    We are a nomadic species, constantly driven towards wanted and unwanted horizons by war, famine, and persecution of all kinds, but also by a need for change. This formidable collection chronicles our ongoing displacements and, by asking where we are going and why, makes us reflect on who we are and who we dream of being. In these times of global upheaval, this book is essential reading.

    -Alberto Manguel, Argentinian-Canadian-French polyglot, author, critic and intellectual. He is formerly the director of the Argentine National Library, and a modern-day Borges.

     

    Exile in Global Literature and Culture is a deeply thoughtful collection of pieces by scholars, writers, and artists, whose first-hand and more distanced accounts of exile eloquently speak to the geographical and psychological condition of the dispossessed, the uprooted, and the displaced and to the generational impact and inheritance of a legacy of exile. Together these chapters are a register of loss but also a testament to recovery, endurance, and return, a stunning tribute to the ability to negotiate disparate worlds.

    -Victoria Aarons, noted author and scholar in Jewish and Holocaust Studies. She is the O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio Texas.  

     

    In this intimate and moving exploration of the meaning of exile, a brilliant group of international authors ponder where to look for home in our age of displacement. An important and timely book that will resonate with readers around the globe.

    -Ruth Behar, Cuban-American thinker, poet and anthropologist, and a MacArthur Fellow. She currently holds the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.