The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

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.

"This rich and wide-ranging book grows from a single idea of extraordinary analytic power - that literary work has its origin in a perception of separation from the feelings, places, and experiences that make up the identity of the author - a state to which, either figuratively or literally, the term 'exile' may be applied. Zeng shows how pervasive this perception is in literature, and how an awareness of this motif may serve to show the underlying connectedness of works across a huge spectrum of times and cultures." - Eric Henry, Senior Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Asian Studies Department

Autorentext
Hong Zeng is an assistant professor of Chinese language, literature, and film at Carleton College.

Inhalt
Introduction Semiotics of Exile in Photography Poetics of Exile Semiotics of Exile in Tragedy E'criture feminine and the Semiotics of Exile Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension in Escher, Borges, and Proust Artist-in-Exile