Exilic space in the works of E. M. Cioran, Witold Gombrowicz, Saint-John Perse, Giorgio de Chirico, and Andrei Tarkovsky

This dissertation examines the experience of exile as projected by the twentieth-century artistic imagination in different genres and media: philosophical essay, short story, diary, novel, poetry, painting, film. Exilic space, a salvific transformation of the geographic, the social, and the metaphysical, is both a liberating construct embodied in a work of art and the experience of an inner spatial form through aesthetic contemplation. For the exiled author, exilic space functions as a counterbalance to the irreversibility of time and the attachment to place. For the beholder, it is an empirical extension of the self into and beyond exile.;The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, exiled in Argentina, also considers distantiation a necessary intellectual practice. But his exilic space arises from a staged and amplified tension between antinomic entities. In the end Gombrowicz attempts to eschew time in favor of a spatial plane which comes into existence only through artifice.;In Saint-John Perse's poetry the sea, and nature as such, offer the consolation and support which Cioran and Gombrowicz lack or reject. The French poet's exilic space is a realm of human integration with the elemental in which language is a medium intended not to distance us from the world, but to return us to it.;Giorgio de Chirico, an Italian painter born in Greece, amalgamates Western mythology with his private mythopoeic imagery. Through the use of multiple perspectives and of culturally charged figures, de Chirico creates a visible exilic space, an atmosphere in which the physical intimates the metaphysical.;A deeply pessimistic thinker, E. M. Cioran wishes to exacerbate the essential human incompatibility with the world by introducing distance between himself and anything binding--his Romanian homeland, religious faith, and native tongue. His is the exilic space of defamation, a zone of imperative detachment.;The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's film Nostalghia brings into focus the exilic space of mystical convergence of the native and the foreign.;Born of the experience of distance and separation, exilic space embraces a phantasmagoric coming together of otherwise incompatible elements: here and there, now and then, the I and the other.