Between the Freedom of the Imaginary and the Limitations of the Writer’s Self-Imposed Exile
Between the Freedom of the Imaginary and the Limitations of the Writer’s Self-Imposed Exile1
The present paper sets out to analyse the mental and emotional impact that exile has on writers – especially when this exile is self-imposed. In this case the destructive impact of exile is counterbalanced by the artistic freedom and the liberty of the imaginary which the author makes use of. Exile and the imaginary are therefore the major coordinates along which most postcolonial and postmodern literary texts are structured. Rootlessness, the feeling of not belonging, and even a certain type of ascetism of the postmodern individual are the ideological backbone of contemporary writing. We have thus attempted to show that the search for identity and the simultaneous existence in two binary opposite spaces are what give birth to exile literature.
Keywords: exile, imaginary, limitation, literature, freedom
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