Exile

Course Description

This course explores Exile in the past and present, globally and locally. Through lectures and readings, you will examine exilic experience from antiquity and Abrahamic religions through to the Modern Period and later Postmodernity and the contemporary moment in Europe and beyond.

Emphasis will be put on authors, artists, and activists, whose existence was or has been exilic. We will read and interpret together Homer, Ovid, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan, Hannah Arendt, Marlene Dietrich, Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Said, and Wole Soyinka, amongst others.

Learner Outcomes

• Sensitizing students to the past and present experience of Exile, both globally and in the student’s own home region
• Developing a critical awareness of the problems of the othered and abjected perception of exilic experience
• Celebrating the cultural achievements of Exile
• Debating and arriving at some understanding of the appropriate ethical attitude toward exilic existence