Studying exile and utopia as correlated cultural phenomena, and offering a wealth of historical examples with emphasis on the modern period, Spariosu argues that modernism itself can be seen as a product of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate utopian social schemes to compensate for its exacerbated sense of existential loss.

Autorentext

Mihai I. Spariosu is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia, Athens, in the USA. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, USA, and has taught at several prominent universities around the world. He is the founder of a new field of study and practice, Intercultural Knowledge Management, which he proposed and developed in two books: Global Intelligence and Human Development (2005) and Remapping Knowledge (2006).

Inhalt
PART I: EXILE, UTOPIA AND MODERNITY: A CULTURAL-THEORETICAL APPROACH 1. Modernity and Modernism: Preliminary Theoretical Considerations 2. Play and Liminality in Modernist Cultural Theory 3. Exile and Utopia as Playful Liminality PART II: HISTORICAL EXCURSUS: MODERNITY AND THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD 4. The Birth of Modernity: The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in Ancient Near-Eastern Narratives (The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch) 5. Modern Consciousness and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination in the Hellenic World: Sophocles and Plato PART III: EXILE, UTOPIA AND MODERNISM IN LITERARY DISCOURSE 6. The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in Modernism and Postmodernism 7. Exile, Utopia, and the Will to Empire: Conrad's Heart of Darkness 8. Utopia, Totalitarianism, and the Will to Reason: Koestler's Darkness at Noon 9. Exile, Dystopia and the Will to Order: Huxley's Brave New World 10. Exile, Theotopia and Atopia: Mann's Joseph and his Brothers and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita Afterword: The End of Exile: Toward A Global Eutopia