Advanced studies in the several fields of Slavic literatures and linguistics. Content varies.

Among the many historical forms of displacement, exile has long occupied a privileged place in the literary imagination. From its earliest expressions in canonical texts, exile—understood as a state of banishment from which one cannot return—has functioned both as a theme and a trope. The separation from one’s place of origin even turned into an allegory of a realm that cannot be experienced. In this seminar, we will focus on the idea and representations of exile in the long twentieth-century, a period marked by mass displacements of people and a renewed interest in the explanatory and even emancipatory promise of exile. We will turn to some of the seminal literary and critical works on exile—by authors such as Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Brodsky, Julia Kristeva, Georg Lukács, Czesław Miłosz, Edward Said, Darko Suvin, and Dubravka Ugrešić—to examine how exile, now “irremediably secular and unbearably historical” (Said), remains a potent device for describing a range of cultural forms and theoretical insights, from the novel as a literary genre to a new ecstatic essence of humanity.

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