Description
Book SynopsisLanguages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically – at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other – in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration.
The essays collected here explore this dynamic from a comparative perspective, addressing the paragons of modernism as well as less frequently studied authors, from Joseph Conrad and Peter Weiss to Agota Kristof and Malika Mokeddem. The essays are international in their approach; they deal with the junctions and gaps between English, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and other languages. The literary works and practices addressed include modernist poetry and prose, philosophical criticism and autobiography, DADA performance, sound art and experimental music theatre. This volume reveals both the wide range of creative strategies developed in response to the interstitial situation of exile and the crucial role of exile for a renewed understanding of twentieth-century literature.
Table of ContentsContents: Axel Englund/Anders Olsson: Introduction: Twentieth-Century Ruptures of Location and Locution – Ulf Olsson: Evil Freedom: Linguistic Confusion and Convention in Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent – Maria Kager: To ‘Fondle in Humbertish’: Vladimir Nabokov’s Linguistic Exile – Ljubica Miočević: ‘What’s Difference?’: On Language and Identity in the Writings of Aleksandar Hemon – Tobias Dahlkvist: Exile as a School of Scepticism: Emil Cioran – Arthur Rose: Insomnia and Exile: Cioran’s Separate Man – Gabriela Seccardini: Exile in the French Language: Assia Djebar and Malika Mokeddem – Katharina Birngruber: Language Shift and the Experience of Exile: Agota Kristof ’s Prose in the Context of Migration – Adam Wickberg Månsson: Exile Writing and the Medium of the Book: Julio Cortázar’s
Rayuela – Jesper Olsson: Speech Rumblings: Exile, Transnationalism and the Multilingual Space of Sound Poetry – W.C. Bamberger: Language and Alternate History in Mauricio Kagel’s
Mare Nostrum – Anders Olsson: Aching Through: Nelly Sachs’s Poetics of Exile – Markus Huss: The Linguistic Outlaw: Peter Weiss’s Return to German as Literary Language – Axel Englund: Bleston Babel: Migration, Multilingualism and Intertextuality in W.G. Sebald’s Mancunian Cantical – Katarina Båth: The Meaning of a Piece of Silk: On Irony and Animals in W.G. Sebald’s
Die Ringe des Saturn.
