In The Art of Memory in Exile, Hana Pí chová explores the themes of memory and exile in selected novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. Both writers, Pí chová argues, stress how personal and cultural memory serves as a creative means of overcoming the artist’ s and exile’ s loss of homeland. In their virtuoso displays of literary talent, Nabokov and Kundera showcase the strategies that allow their protagonists to succeed as é migré s: a creative fusing of past and present through the prism of the imagination.
 
Pí chová closely analyzes two novels by each author: the first written in exile (Nabokov's Mary and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) and a later, pivotal novel in each writer's career (Nabokov's The Gift and Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being). In all four texts, these authors explore how the kaleidoscope of personal and cultural memory confronts a fragmented and untenable present, contrasting the lives of fictional é migré s who fail to bridge the gap between past and present with those é migré s whose rich artistic vision allows them to transcend the trials of homelessness.
 
By juxtaposing these novels and their authors, Pí chová provides a unique perspective on each writer's vast appeal and success. She finds that in the work of Nabokov and Kundera, the most successful exiles express a vision that transcends both national and temporal boundaries.

A major historical phenomenon of our century, exile has been a focal point for reflections about individual and cultural identity and problems of nationalism, racism, and war. Whether emigrés, exiles, expatriates, refugees, or nomads, these people all experience a distance from their homes and often their native languages. Exile and Creativity brings together the widely varied perspectives of nineteen distinguished European and American scholars and cultural critics to ask: Is exile a falling away from a source of creativity associated with the wholeness of home and one’s own language, or is it a spur to creativity?
In essays that range chronologically from the Renaissance to the 1990s, geographically from the Danube to the Andes, and historically from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the complexities and tensions of exile and the diversity of its experiences are examined. Recognizing exile as an interior experience as much as a physical displacement, this collection discusses such varied topics as intellectual exile and seventeenth-century French literature; different versions of home and of the novel in the writings of Bakhtin and Lukács; the displacement of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector; a young journalist’s meeting with James Baldwin in the south of France; Jean Renoir’s Hollywood years; and reflections by the descendents of European emigrés. Strikingly, many of the essays are themselves the work of exiles, bearing out once more the power of the personal voice in scholarship.
With the exception of the contribution by Henry Louis Gates Jr., these essays were originally published in a special double issue of Poetics Today in 1996. Exile and Creativity will engage a range of readers from those whose specific interests include the problems of displacement and diaspora and the European Holocaust to those whose broad interests include art, literary and cultural studies, history, film, and the nature of human creativity.

Contributors. Zygmunt Bauman, Janet Bergstrom, Christine Brooke-Rose, Hélène Cixous, Tibor Dessewffy, Marianne Hirsch, Denis Hollier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Nochlin, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Thomas Pavel, Doris Sommer, Nancy Huston, John Neubauer, Ernst van Alphen, Alicia Borinsky, Svetlana Boym, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history.
It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.