Modernism and Exile: Liminality and the Utopian Imagination [Hardcover]

Studying exile and utopia as correlated cultural phenomena, and offering a wealth of historical examples with emphasis on the modern period, Spariosu argues that modernism itself can be seen as a product of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate utopian social schemes to compensate for its exacerbated sense of existential loss.PART I: EXILE, UTOPIA AND MODERNITY: A CULTURAL-THEORETICAL APPROACH 1. Modernity and Modernism: Preliminary Theoretical Considerations 2. Play and Liminality in Modernist Cultural Theory 3. Exile and Utopia as Playful Liminality PART II: HISTORICAL EXCURSUS: MODERNITY AND THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 4. The Birth of Modernity: The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in Ancient Near-Eastern Narratives (The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch) 5. Modern Consciousness and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination in the Hellenic World: Sophocles and Plato PART III: EXILE, UTOPIA AND MODERNISM IN LITERARY DISCOURSE 6. The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in Modernism and Postmodernism 7. Exile, Utopia, and the Will to Empire: Conrad's Heart of Darkness 8. Utopia, Totalitarianism, and the Will to Reason: Koestler's Darkness at Noon 9. Exile, Dystopia and the Will to Order: Huxley's Brave New World 10. Exile, Theotopia and Atopia: Mann's Joseph and his Brothers and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita Afterword: The End of Exile: Toward A Global Eutopia

Mihai I. Spariosu is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, Athens, in the USA. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, USA, and has taught at several prominent universities around the world. He is the founder of a new field of study and practice, Intercultural Knowledge Management, which he proposed and developed in two books: Global Intelligence and Human Development (2005) and Remapping Knowledge (2006).