Abstract This thesis sets out to explore Shirley Geok-lin Lim's poetry collection Monsoon History in terms of three aspects: language, migrancy, and ethnicity. It also attempts to examine Shirley Lim's diasporic identity by embracing the border thinking. The notion of border-crossing, either physically or psychologically, passes through each chapter to represent the poet's identity and to re-create a space for herself to articulate. It is a study of Lim's exile experiences and how she establishes the poetics of diaspora for Asian American literature. In the introduction, the concept of diaspora and the theoretical framework will be explicated. The first chapter probes into the relationship between Shirley Lim and her choice of language in writing. I adopt Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's analysis of language and definition of ¡§minor literature¡¨ to discuss the deterritorialization of Lim's writing. The second chapter traces Lim's migrant status, in which I resort to Edward Said's ¡§Reflections on Exile¡¨ and his different categorizations of exile. The third chapter, appealing to several theorists or critics, such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Ling-chi Wang, deals with Lim's problem of ethnic identity displayed in her poetry. The last chapter concludes with an overall argumentation that the destination and dissolution of Lim's identity is an Asian American because of reterritorialization of language, migrancy, and ethnicity.

This thesis examines representations of nationhood, exile, belonging and nostalgia in three Palestinian memoirs: Ghada Karmi’s In Search of Fatima (2002), Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997) and Aziz Shihab’s Does the Land Remember Me? (2007). For diasporic Palestinians (such as these three) who are denied access to Palestine as a geographical entity, Palestine exists most strongly in and through narrative. As such, I examine the extent to which these memoirs are acts of nation-building. I explore the impact that living in exile has on the authors’ construction of personal and national identity, and the extent to which exile inhibits their ability to belong. Finally, I suggest that although these memoirs do not offer explicit solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they are important as measured, reasonable and imaginative acts of nation-building that dramatize and make accessible the plight of the Palestinian nation. / This thesis also examines literary considerations such as memoir as a genre, use of figurative language, and authorial presence.

Bakalauro baigiamajame darbe nagrinėjamas tremtinių kasdienis gyvenimas pasiremiant, o kartu ir analizuojant Šiaulių „Aušros“ muziejuje saugomus išlikusius tremtinių laiškus. Laiškai šiame darbe atstoja šaltinių bazę. Visų pirma, tai yra pirminis šaltinis ir galiausiai šių laiškų turinys nėra giliau analizuotas. Laiškai analizuojami pasiremiant įžvalga, kad tremtiniai buvo vieno kolektyvo nariais bei priklausė vienai socialinei grupei. Pagrindinė darbo problema yra tremtinių prisitaikymas prie tenykščių gyvenimo sąlygų, jų elgesio tendencijos bei tremties patirtis. / The Final Bachelor’s Thesis deals with the daily life in exile with reference to and at the same time by analysing extant letters of exiles stored at Šiauliai “Aušra” Museum. The letters serve as the base of sources in the present Paper. First of all they are a primary source and finally the content of these letters lack deeper analysis. The letters had been analysed based on the providence that all the exiles had been members of a single collective and had belonged to the same social group. The basic problem of the Paper is adaptation of the exiles to indigenous living conditions, trends in their behaviour, and experience in exile.

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This mini-dissertation aims to examine the way in which Breyten Breytenbach explores the concepts of home and exile in his novel Memory of Snow and of Dust. The author captures and conveys the experience of exile, and envisages through the exile’s double vision a more complicated conception of home. Through the novel one is able to observe the exilic condition and gain access to new insights. The narrative structure comprises of various discourses and illustrates the restless nature of an unsettling and unstable existence. In the Introduction the theoretical framework for this study is outlined: recent developments in postcolonial and postmodern theories, Breytenbach’s oeuvre and literary criticism devoted to his work are discussed. Chapter One examines the distressing journey into a new awareness of what constitutes home. Chapter Two inspects the restless, yet regenerative condition of exile. Chapter Three considers a more fluid response to spatiality and the concept of home through an exploration of fresh perspectives that may emerge from extreme mental suffering. This study concludes with an affirmation of the relevance of Memory of Snow and of Dust, in times in which the overlapping boundaries of home and exile are becoming a global condition. / Thesis (M.A.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

Exile is, as Edward Said so eloquently put it, “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” Exiled peoples operate on the margins of their native culture: part of it, but excluded from it permanently or temporarily. Broadly speaking, my project explores the impact of exile on English literature of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. English exiles appear frequently in literary studies of the period, but little attention has thus far been focused on the effect of exile itself on late medieval and early modern authors. Historical studies on exile have been more prevalent and engaging. My project builds on this work and contributes new and groundbreaking investigations into the literary reflections of these important topics, mapping the influence of exile on trans-Reformation English literature. My dissertation identifies and defines a new, critical lens focusing on later medieval and early modern literature. I call this lens the “mind of exile,” a cognitive phenomenon that influences textual structure, and metaphorical usage, as well as shapes individual and national identities. It contributes new theories regarding the development of polemic as a genre and their contribution to the development of the “nation-state” idea that occurred in the sixteenth century. It identifies a new genre I call polemic chronicle, which adopts and deploys the conventions of chronicle in order to declare a personal and/or national identity. Lastly, it contributes new scholarship to Spenser studies by building on established scholarship exploring the hybrid identity of Edmund Spenser. To these studies, I add fresh critical readings of A View of the State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Comes Home Againe. Both texts represent, I argue, proto-colonial literature influenced by Spenser’s mind of exile that explore England’s new position at the end of the sixteenth century as a burgeoning imperial power.

This thesis consists of two parts: an autobiographical documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, My Lovers Both, is a record of two journeys back to my native South Africa wherein I confront aspects of my past. These two trips offer a means to explore a personal history around the experiences of immigration, displacement and exile. In the exegesis, I argue that autobiography is changing and rather than offering catalogues of public achievement, contemporary personal histories deal with sites of trauma and challenge dominant narratives of official memory. Likewise, the New Documentary is embracing fictional strategies and moving towards increased subjectivity and introspection. As a consequence, new forms are created that generate novel insights into causality and time. The exegesis goes on to examine the major influences on my work as a filmmaker and then articulates a reflective analysis of the creative process which produced My Lovers Both.

A definitive identification of the Servant figure of Second Isaiah is notoriously difficult, as attested by centuries of conjecture and debate. The interpretive obstacles are profuse: the Servant is addressed as Israel-Jacob, but then spoken of in terms that are not consistent with the nation’s experience; in some texts he seems to represent a community, while in others he speaks as an individual; he seems to suffer extreme hardship and persecution, but then is said to experience new life; some of his experiences appear to be historical, while others are best described as idealistic. Further hampering objective interpretations are the pervasive traditional approaches among Christian and Jewish readers, which associate the Servant, equally emphatically, with Jesus or Israel. But a primary reason the Servant is so difficult to pin down is rarely considered, and that is that there exists no objective image of the Servant anywhere in Second Isaiah. As a literary character he is constituted entirely by dialogue; that is, by discourse addressed to him, spoken by him, and spoken about him by others in the form of a confession. His actions are never described, and his person is never defined. Scholars have referred to this as his “fluid” nature, but have lacked the methodological tools for a fuller study of this literary curiosity. The ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin speak to this type of characterisation. His “polyphonic hero” is a fictional character who is constituted by what is spoken to him or her, by what they overhear said concerning them, and by how they make that discourse, and the discourse of the wider world, an aspect of their own self-knowledge. They become known only by the discourse that converges on them, much as the Servant of Second Isaiah is constituted. This thesis develops a reading strategy based on Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic hero, as well as his broader theories of dialogism. It reimagines the inner discourse of the Servant in order to comprehend him according to the dialogue by which he knows himself, and not according to conventional reading strategies that seek for a fixed, opaque image. In the process it discovers that there are not multiple Servants, which is often posited as a solution to the problem of his fluid nature, but one Servant, Israel-Jacob, whose self-knowledge as the faithful Servant of Yahweh calls empirical Israel to faith in a time of national distress. It concludes that the Servant is present in the collection of Second Isaiah as a “voice-idea”, the embodiment of a theologically critical position that calls many of Israel’s theological and ideological presuppositions into question, in order to liberate her for a renewed history as a faithful “witness” to Yahweh her redeemer.

This evaluation strives to determine what is the best police tactic in reducing gun violence. There are four approaches that are discussed are the pulling levers approach, the use of increased sentencing, hotspot identification, and the focus on reducing gun trafficking and illegal gun use. In addition to examining other evaluations, data from the FBI UCR database of specific case-study cities are included to determine to what extent each approach had. The study includes the analysis of programs such as Operation Ceasefire and Project Exile, but also includes analyses of smaller lesser known programs. Though many of the cities used a combination of these four approaches, overall, hotspot identification had great success in reducing gun violence. However with the preliminary research, it is difficult to come to any greater conclusions; more research is necessary.

After the introductory chapters dealing with problematics of living abroad including memories of writers and non-writers, the thesis presents literary (especially lyrical) work of women writers who have decided to live beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia between years 1968-1989. This requires reflection of the whole context of post-war period. The attention is primarily focused on topics, motifs and instruments of poetic language that are present or absent in the chosen collections of poetry and on their potential changeability as well. There are also discussed the causes of exile or emigration of poetesses as well as other hypothetical effects on their work that are based on socio-cultural events. The final chapter outlines the situation after the year 1989 when some of poetesses have chosen the comeback to their motherland, some of them have stayed abroad or they have decided for life that does not have to consist of decision for a single country.