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Abstract
This dissertation examines the tensions between modernist and postmodern expressions of authorship by tracing the metaphors of exile and home through contemporary autobiographical writing. In Chapter One, "The Aesthetics of Distance in Contemporary Writing on Exile," I argue that the masculinized, solitary figure of the writer in exile reflects an anachronistic politics and history. I trace the metaphorical operation of the opposition of home and exile in two autobiographical texts by Edward Said which move between the conventions of exile and a more deconstructive approach to displacement. The second chapter, "Fictions of Exile: The Subject of Ethnic Autobiography," follows this opposition more closely through two memoirs by Michael Arlen. In the first text Arlen locates exile as the determining experience of his family history. In the second memoir Arlen builds an identity as a writer by relearning his ethnic heritage. Despite a textual resolution, Arlen's adoption of an ethnic identity masks a supression of gender's unsettling force in this family of writers in exile. The third chapter, "The Metaphysics of Presence in Two Travel Memoirs," poses Elias Canetti's record of a visit to Marrakesh in counterpoint to Marilyn Stablein's versions of her travels in India and Nepal. Canetti's text relies on a metaphysics of presence that privileges sound over sight. Stablein's text destablizes the metaphysics of presence to pose location and travel as questions of power. In Chapter Four, "The Poetics of Displacement in Alicia Dujovne Ortiz's Buenos Aires," I discuss a text that moves from the conventional concept of exilic identity to a multicultural notion of plural identities. In this text Buenos Aires functions as both place and method, a proper name and an autobiographical strategy. In Chapter Five, "The rewriting of Home and Exile in Contemporary Feminist Writing," I discuss autobiographical writing by Michelle Cliff, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith. Their writing refuses the solitude of exile to rewrite the connections between different parts of cultural and personal identity, making a world of possibilities out of the experience of displacement and marginality. A poetics of displacement eludes the opposition of origin and exile to express the multifarious location of postmodern autobiographical writing.
