Synopses & Reviews
Review
“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
Synopsis
In a collection that furthers the scholarship on individual writers and artists as diverse as Lord Byron, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, and Jorge Luis Borges, Zeng probes the semiotics of exile: exile as geographical dislocation, but also as certain forms of cultural and psychological uprootedness, is seen to exert a potent and complex mythmaking power in many distinct but interrelated artistic traditions.
Synopsis
This book provides a study of the socio-political and cultural climate in Turkey in the aftermath of the Cold War, which resulted in a major voter re-alignment in the Turkish political system in the mid - 1990s. Except for a brief period of coalition governments, the country came under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a conservative political party, which has been a coalition of pious Sunnis, liberals, Kurdish nationalists, former socialists, led by leaders from immaculate political Islamist backgrounds. Concomitantly, Turkish society has begun to experience increasing religiosity, authoritarianism, spreading lack of interpersonal trust and tolerance, increasing xenophobia, and anomie. The book delves into the sources of such a surge of conservatism, traditionalism, and parochialism in Turkey of the 1990s and 2000s. Data collected through nationally representative survey conducted in 2006 are analyzed to decipher the core driving forces of current Turkish society and politics in this book.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
These essays offer a unique comparison of literature of exile, exile not only in the sense of geographical dislocation, but also cultural and psychological uprootedness. Examining the semiotics of exile, this book draws new conclusions on the semantics of photography, the constituent value of tragedy, prototypes of artists, and the construction of female mythos. Here, Hong Zeng makes a fresh contribution to the scholarship of individual writers and to the field of comparative literature at large.
About the Author
Hong Zeng is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Carleton College. She is the author of A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy in Literature and The Arts; An English Translation of Poems of the Contemporary Chinese Poet Hai Zi; and Apollonian and Dionysiac: Patterns of Imagery in Edith Whartons Tragic Novels.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Semiotics of Exile in Photography * Poetics of Exile Semiotics of Exile in Tragedy *
Ecriture feminine and the Semiotics of Exile * Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension in Escher, Borges, and Proust * Artist-in-Exile