Outlandish

by Israel, Nico

• ISBN13: 9780804730730
• ISBN10: 0804730733
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Outlandishaddresses geographical displacement as a lived experience in the twentieth century, as a predicament of writing, and as a problem for theory. It focuses on the work of three transnational writers from diverse backgrounds working in different genres: Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born Polish novelist and storywriter living in Britain at the turn of the century; Theodor W. Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher and sociologist transplanted to Los Angeles during the Second World War; and Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British novelist and journalist, recently released from the peculiar conditions of his notorious houseless arrest. The author argues that Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie emblematize significant shifts over the course of the century, from a modernist expression of almost universal deracination, to a post-Auschwitz disarticulation of home and subjectivity, to an emergent conceptualization of displacement in terms of migrancy, hybridity, and flow. He theorizes a mode of readingbetweenexile and diasporatwo fundamentally different descriptions of displacementand allows the "outlandish" writing of these three figures to complicate this seemingly continuous trajectory. Drawing on texts from literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and geography, the author explores what he calls the "rhetoric of displacement"the struggle to assert identity out of place. He reads this writing predicament against the backdrop of the century's salient economic and technological changes, political upheavals, and mass migrations. In doing so, he draws attention to those aspects of exile and diaspora that have remained insufficiently considered: their relation to nationalism and colonialism, to authority and institutionality, and, above all, to broader questions of subjectivity, "race," location, and language, as these concepts themselves subtly change over the course of the century.

Author Biography

Nico Israel is Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Writing between Exile and Diaspora	1	(1)
Voyage Out	1	(3)
Tropics of Displacement	4	(1)
Place Matters	5	(3)
Unheimlich(e) Maneuvers	8	(3)
The Rhetoric of Displacement	11	(2)
Forcing the Issue of Choice	13	(5)
The Map	18	(5)
Conrad and the Cultural Geography of Exile	23	(52)
The Aura, The Aura	23	(5)
Fostering Difference	28	(3)
Vexed Encounters	31	(8)
Only (Dis)Connect	39	(12)
Mach es Kurz!	51	(7)
I had jumped...it seems	58	(13)
Usque ad Finem	71	(3)
``Et apres? There is an apres.''	74	(1)
Adorno, Los Angeles, and the Dislocation of Culture	75	(48)
Flying T.W.A.	75	(3)
Blue Note	78	(7)
Ac-cen-tu-ate the Negative	85	(12)
From Monad to Nomad, and Back	97	(4)
Subversive Elements	101	(15)
Split Personalities	116	(2)
Future Perfect	118	(2)
Coda	120	(3)
The Place of Salman Rushdie	123	(56)
Preamble	123	(7)
Finding Elbaroom	130	(7)
States of Emergency	137	(11)
Translating History	148	(9)
To the Devil	157	(17)
Homing Devices	174	(3)
Postscript	177	(2)
Notes	179	(46)
Works Cited	225	(14)
Index	239