Pontignano, 18 - 25 September 2006
Exile
Today, more than at any other time in history, exile has become a global condition. The ever-expanding lexicon for displaced persons—migrants, emigrés, refugees, evacuees, expatriates, nomads, outlaws, outcasts, sans-papiers, deracinés, aliens, the stateless and the globalized—is a reminder that half the world's an exile today. Living far from home—whether for political or for economic reasons—has become part of our everyday reality. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the West encouraged emigration as a way of easing social tensions and controlling the colonies; with the advent of dictatorships dissent and diversity were confined in Lagers or Gulags. The Shoah and ‘ethnic cleansing' soon followed. Today it is globalisation that is forcing millions of human beings into exile.
Ever since its beginnings in the loss of Eden and the Odyssey, the narrative of exile has haunted literature, music, the theatre, and, more recently, the cinema. Orestes, Ovid of the Tristia , Dante, Shakespeare's Lear are our contemporaries: Dante's eyes can still help Primo Levi to read the inferno of the Lager. The dramatic events of the last two centuries have provided a backcloth for innumerable critical discussions of the topos of exile in recent years. Yet the vastness of the theme and the variety of ways in which writers and artists have tackled it still leave plenty of room for a reconsideration of exile in its many facets.
Since exile involves being uprooted from one's homeland, writers and artists have naturally tended to concentrate on the sufferings, the inner drama, the tribulations of the exiled—on ‘the dangers they have passed'. But authors have also been interested in the kind of knowledge that can arise from exiles' encounters with the unknown and the different. Especially of late, they have focused on the social marginalization of exiles, on their difficulties in relating to their new environment and its inhabitants, as well as on the places and non-places of exile. The narrative of exile can, of course, include migration within one's own land. Moving from country to city or from one region to another can clearly create the same kind of temporal and anthropological displacement we usually associate with moving from one nation to another, from a stable human and social condition to an uncertain one—a condition that may turn out to be better but that still involves a difficult process of adaptation. Thus artists will tend to focus on their own or on their characters' relationship with their new selves, on the new identity that inevitably arises from a crisis which is both cultural and linguistic. That is why in this age of migrants the theme of identity has become so obsessive.
The material, existential, social and cultural conditions, the relationships and the solitude of exiles can be depicted on page or screen in countless ways. The same is true of the traditions that exiles bring with them: their ways of loving or interacting with others, their food, music, clothes, religion, and, above all, their language—all those things which represent crucial parts of their identity. Exiles may cling to their mother-tongue or allow it to be contaminated or replaced by that of their new country. Whichever the case, the problem of language is crucial for both authors and their characters, since it is what defines them. It is a predicament that can end in their integration or in defeat and flight.
Some exiles, of course, succeed in returning home. Needless to say, homecoming—a ‘movement' that begins with homesickness and ends when returned travellers tell their tales—has long been a major theme in literature. But ever since the time of Ulysses, the act of narration that consummates the return of the native has been depicted as problematic. Indeed, some exiles may find it impossible to tell their story because they fear that their sufferings will fail to earn a sympathetic hearing or even to be understood. Homecoming, like exile, involves a passage through both space and time. Hence the place to which exiles return—and even the persons—may not be the same as when they left. Conversely, the homecomer may have changed so much as to be taken for a stranger.
In the critical debates of the last few years, it has often been stressed that exile is a condition intrinsic to artistic creation. This has led to a shift of focus from exile as a theme to the exiled artists themselves. There is no doubt that twentieth-century dictatorships and colonialism have caused a diaspora of intellectuals who have profoundly changed the culture of the western world. However, Synapsis 2006 will not focus on the biography of exiled artists but on the various modes in which literature, theatre, cinema, and the other arts have represented exile in its many shapes and aspects.
Applications: from April 15 to May 30
Morning Lectures by:
Piero Boitani (Roma “La Sapienza”, in English); Helena Buescu (Lisbona, in English);
Gioachino Chiarini (Siena, in Italian); Theo D’Haen (Lovanio, in English);
Anna Iuso (Roma “La Sapienza”, in French); Patrizia Lombardo (Ginevra, in English);
Antonio Melis (Siena, in Spanish); Itala Vivan (Milano, in English);
Hayden White (Santa Cruz e Stanford, in English).
Seminars by:
Gillian Beer (Cambridge, in English); Roberto Bigazzi (Siena, in Italian);
Marc Cerisuelo (Paris VII, in French); Maria DiBattista (Princeton, in English);
José M. González - Stella Wittenberg (Madrid, in Spanish);
Melania Mazzucco (Rome, in Italian); Jürgen Wertheimer (Tübingen, in German).
Theatre Workshop
directed by Laura Caretti
Film Screenings
organized by Anna Masecchia
Executive Committee
Roberto Bigazzi, Laura Caretti, Remo Ceserani, William Dodd,
Stefano Bonchi, Orsetta Innocenti, Anna Masecchia, Simona Micali, Roberto Russi, Michela Scolari
- Location
- Abstracts
Last Update 07/10/2006