"We are of the same garden," H & eacute;l & egrave;ne Cixous writes about Jacques Derrida and herself in Rootprints. Born in Oran and Algiers respectively, both Franco-Maghrebin writers/thinkers indeed share the garden as a mythical figure of longing, loss and exile: the Jardin du Cercle militaire in Cixous's alg & eacute;riance and the Jardin d'Essai ("Garden of Essays"), as well as the family garden or "orchard," in Derrida's nostalg & eacute;rie, all symbolizing the expulsion from a promised land (Cixous when she was two and a half years old, Derrida at age eleven). For Derrida especially, the garden was a lost "intact PaRDeS" ("Circumfession"), a Talmudic Paradise from before the vowels, but also a "garden of reading" common to them both (Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint), while Cixous reminisces, in the "Expelled" section of "This Stranjew Body," how she felt admitted into the "second and last paradise, that after which there was nothing more to lose," symbolized by the "Garden of Essays" with its homophonic d & eacute;c & egrave;s (demise). The aim of this essay is to situate this shared problematic of an exilic, real as much as literary, political as much as poetic garden in relation to its manifold associations with WW2 and their families' displacement (which, especially in Derrida's case, triggered off a deep-seated abhorrence of rootedness and belonging, and, in Cixous's case, an incessant questioning about departing/fleeing vs. arriving/staying). Their mutual evocations of this partly fantasized 'primitive scene' of a forbidden/lost (and, for Cixous, found and lost again) garden, alongside the many other gardens conjured up especially in Cixous's writings (for e. g. "A True Garden"), will allow us to assess in what ways the irrecoverable sense of traumatic loss leading to exile, exodus and uprootedness, including from/within the self, is both evoked and redeemed by the imaginary, transformative work of literature.
My article examines a single, capacious piece of evidence - a dream recorded by the modernist Russian-Jewish poet Samuil Kissin (1885-1916) in a wartime notebook - and asks what that record reveals about Jewish experience and self-identification on the Eastern Front during WW1. I situate Kissin's dream in its local historical context of expulsions, (self-)censorship, and widespread anti-Jewish violence, and compare the dream's imagery and cultural patterns with contemporaneous poetic responses by Vladislav Khodasevich. Methodologically, the essay treats dream reports as a distinct kind of testimony: often fragmentary and private, such records register affective and cognitive dissonances that public genres may erase or suppress. Reading Kissin's dream record alongside Khodasevich's poems allows us to trace how private oneiric expression (along the lines of Dominick LaCapra's version of Freud's 'acting out') and later poetic elaboration ('working through') negotiate the trauma of Russian-Jewish identity under wartime conditions.
This article focuses on ways in which Romanian Jews remembered and represented their past while in exile. The recorded oral and written testimonies of Sorana Ursu, Rosa Meir, and artists Hedda Sterne, Marcel Iancu, and Daniel Spoerri reveal how through the act of testifying, identity and life-story are not only recalled but also created. All these witnesses survived the trauma of the Holocaust, and this historical moment shaped their socio-political and life perspective. Their narratives of trauma and reconstruction of the self are presented and analyzed through the prism of the exile experience and the concepts of active forgetting and narrative identity.
In Hamlet, observers are divided from themselves because they are tangible from where they touch, visible from where they see, and hearable from where they speak. Although these reversible dimensions of our experience necessarily envelop one another, they can never coincide with one another. In this regard, Hamlet has an unexpected affinity with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, whose entire later philosophy is dedicated to exploring "the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass." In my essay, Merleau-Ponty reads Hamlet, and reversibly, Hamlet reads Merleau-Ponty, in order to explore what it means 'to make seeing visible.'
The article discusses some of the reasons for - and literary shapes of - survivor guilt in the works of Ka-Tzetnik, Primo Levi, and Elie Wiesel. The comparative analysis takes into account their treatment of the crisis of theodicy in the face of the Holocaust - in particular, the representations of the notion of hester panim (God hiding his face) as accounting for the suffering of the innocent along with the guilty. The theme of exile in the works of these writers is variously associated with their having been deported from their native European towns; their different attitudes to the issue of return are a matter of their ideological self-inscription into the history of the Jewish people.
This article examines Geetanjali Shree's Our City That Year through Edward Soja's spatial trialectics to argue that urban space in contemporary Indian fiction functions not as a passive backdrop but as a constitutive force shaping memory, violence, and resistance. Against the background of South Asian communal violence and necropolitical urban transformations, the study demonstrates how Shree's narrative mobilizes Firstspace materialities, Secondspace ideologies, and Thirdspace insurgencies to reconfigure the city as both archive and battleground. Through architectural motifs, auditory saturations, symbolic inscriptions, and domestic interiors, the novel reveals how power inscribes itself into material and representational geographies. Yet, these closures are persistently unsettled by minor gestures - Shruti's traversal of interstitial spaces, Hanif's silent presence on the balcony, Daddu's recitations of Urdu poetry, or the feline indifference to partitioned geographies - which expose fissures of Thirdspace possibility. By framing the city as a protagonist in its own right, the novel enacts a poetics of urban space that destabilizes hegemonic cartographies of exclusion and foregrounds resistant forms of inhabitation. In so doing, the article contends that Our City That Year performs spatial praxis by producing insurgent geographies that resist erasure and sustain radical openness. The study concludes that theorizing literary space is indispensable for understanding how Indian fiction articulates urban belonging, dislocation, and justice in the aftermath of communal trauma.
This article focuses on the work of Emil Dorian, a Jewish-Romanian writer and physician, examining three forms of witnessing exile as a universal Jewish experience. The first part deals with the way in which Dorian's novels, the 1930 Profeti si paiate (Prophets and clowns), and the 1937 Otrava (The poison) recount obliquely the turmoil in which Jewish Romanians found themselves in the 1930 s, bearing witness to the condition of Jewish people in inter-war Romania where anti-Jewish policies were being progressively introduced. The second part uses Dori Laub's distinction between "levels of witnessing in relation to the Holocaust experience" and three types of witnessing as well as Hayden White's discussion on the representation of historical events and Dominick LaCapra's critique of White's 'middle-voice' approach to discuss the "quality" of Dorian's testimony in the first volume of his diary, translated into English as The Quality of Witness: A Diary 1937-1944. The last section connects this volume to a different medium, the film-essay Tara moart & abreve; (The dead nation, 2017), directed by Radu Jude, which deals with Romanian amnesia about the Holocaust.
This essay examines late 20th-century Soviet Jewish intellectuals' views on exile and identity. Using the theory of 'minor literature,' I study representative cases of authors who felt deterritorialized in the USSR and decided upon (1) internal exile; (2) immigration to Germany; or (3) immigration to Israel. Influenced by traditional Russian intelligentsia attitudes, Soviet Jews also alluded to theories of Jewish exile to defend their decisions. In all cases, encounters with a complex reality either subverted or modified the theoretical basis for choices.
In "La Busca de Averroes," Jorge Luis Borges reimagines the attempt of Muslim philosopher Ibn Ru & scaron;d (known in the West as Averroes) to interpret Aristotle's Poetics, and to draw a parallel between Greek tragedy and comedy and Arabic praise poetry and satire. Averroes' struggle to grasp the essence of theatre - rooted in his lack of direct experience - becomes, for Borges, a symbol of his own difficulty in reconstructing a distant event in intellectual history without unconsciously domesticating it. The Averroes of the story, distinct from the historical Ibn Ru & scaron;d, is set in an al-Andalus reinvented from Borges' imagery of Islam and shaped by Western sources, such as Renan, Lane, and As & iacute;n Palacios. Yet, in both his and Averroes' epistemological failure and creative recreation, Borges discerns a poetic quality. This article examines how Borges embeds reflections on poetry within fiction, unmasking the divide between poetic experience and its rational interpretation while offering a methodological alternative to abstract literary criticism.
Described as a modern and grotesque Iliad, with overtones of South American guerrilla warfare, Le Rêve d’Alvaro by Eudes Labrusse is a hypertextual variation of Homer’s famous poem, blending genres and tones to illustrate the rules governing the world and social relations today. The play skillfully wields the comic, the tragic, and the epic to serve politics, understood in its broadest sense of civility or Politikos : the exercise of power in a society and a state. The article first examines the fusion of categories and their contribution to the construction of the play, then the role of ideological structures, and finally, it aims to draw out a reflection on the place of Le Rêve d’Alvaro in contemporary political theatre.
Kazuo Ishiguro's exploration of memory in A Pale View of Hills opens a window for us to understand his literary creation. Although the academic community fully acknowledges Ishiguro's reliance on memory and recognizes the connection between the writer's own memories of his native Japan and this work, it has not yet analyzed the mechanism of memory's occurrence and development as a central topic. As a result, the role of memory elements in the theme of this novel remains obscure. Utilizing the philosophical theory of memory, this article conducts an in-depth examination of the writer's memory and the characters' memories and finds that the protagonist's memory of the atomic bombing is constructed through Ishiguro's transferential framing of his own memories of his native Japan. Ishiguro uses the mutual referencing of Etsuko's narration - Etsuko's narration to Sachiko, and Sachiko's narration to the unnamed woman - to allude to the widespread sense of collective loss among people in post-war Japan. He deliberately designs a spiral literary rhetorical structure of overlapping references to war memories, ultimately achieving a transformation of the re-encoding of war trauma.
This article analyzes the prolific African American writer Jacqueline Woodson's novel Red at the Bone (2019) from a position informed by transgenerational trauma and postmemory. While the novel outlines the story of two Black families united by a teenage pregnancy, it harbors a legacy of loss metastasized and transmuted among the protagonists. Employing the theoretical framework of Michael G. Levine's belated witnessing, the paper explicates childhood as a probable site of belated witnessing. He argues that belated witnessing occurs in the liminal space where stories are transmitted to the witness. Building on Levine's theory, the article further problematizes young adulthood as a liminal space negotiating the complex process of witnessing. By analyzing the protagonists' reluctance to witness and their belated acceptance of the traumatic past, the paper concludes by commenting on resilience and reconciliation as a positive outcome of adversity.
This paper examines how the perception of plants as ornaments or passive resources - central to the logic of the Anthropocene - has shaped interpretations of Ophelia's use of flowers in Hamlet as meaningless or mad. Focusing on Act 4, Scene 5, it explores how both criticism and film adaptations have erased the presence and agency of real plants on stage, thus reducing Ophelia to a powerless, incoherent figure. In contrast, this article proposes a phytocritical reading that takes seriously the material and symbolic presence of flowers in her hands. Drawing on early modern herbals and new materialist ecocriticism, it argues that Ophelia acts with deliberate botanical knowledge, offering plants as both remedy and accusation. Her gestures, often misread as nonsense, are reframed as a radical form of ecological and political agency. In doing so, this reading reimagines Ophelia not as a victim but as a prophetic figure - one who speaks from the margins of court and text, and who challenges the intertwined forces of patriarchal control and environmental neglect.
Described as a modern and grotesque Iliad, with overtones of South American guerrilla warfare, Le R & ecirc;ve d'Alvaro by Eudes Labrusse is a hypertextual variation of Homer's famous poem, blending genres and tones to illustrate the rules governing the world and social relations today. The play skillfully wields the comic, the tragic, and the epic to serve politics, understood in its broadest sense of civility or Politikos: the exercise of power in a society and a state. The article first examines the fusion of categories and their contribution to the construction of the play, then the role of ideological structures, and finally, it aims to draw out a reflection on the place of Le R & ecirc;ve d'Alvaro in contemporary political theatre.
Lorraine Hansberry, African American playwright, is hailed as a pioneer of Black theater with her seminal work A Raisin in the Sun. She artfully weaves elements of African-American popular arts such as spirituals, gospel, blues, and folk dance into the fabric of the play. Focusing on the play's rich musical landscape, this article argues that music in the play functions as both a cultural bond that sustains collective memory and pursues harmony, and an aesthetic space that exposes individual differences and accommodates conflicts. The aim is to elucidate how these artistic elements awaken African American's consciousness of cultural subjectivity and confront the problem of racial discrimination, thereby promoting, to a certain extent, the construction and development of ethnic community.
