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Julio Marquez Burtz Exile Research Paper

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Exile in Literature In an issue of Review Magazine, Julio Cortazar, an Argentine writer, states, “an exiled writer is in the first place a man or a woman who is exiled, someone who has been stripped of everything that he or she has - many times a family and at the very least a way of life, the smell of the air and the color of the sky.” The thought of someone being uprooted from their family tree, and forced to ignore their original heritage seems mind boggling. People get married, have children, and die in the city they were born and raised in. Where someone grows up and what they’re surrounded by is a contributing factor in their personal identity and a deciding component in how they communicate with others. The thought of this is harsh and unimaginable but unfortunately, this is the reality in past and current civilizations. From the Germans in 1933 during the precipice of Hitler’s reign to Chile in 1970 during the Pinochet dictatorship. The legal definition of exile is the state of being barred from one’s native country, typically for political or punitive reasons. Alejandro Sieveking, a Chilean playwright used a dark, overdramatized version of exile in his play The Praying Mantis to make a political statement. Bertolt …show more content…

This meant that the old high culture, with its idealism and élitism, would have to be replaced with a specifically modern culture. Brecht demanded ‘the radical transformation of the theater’ which would ‘correspond to the whole radical transformation of the mentality of our time’. In the 1920s, he, along with Erwin Piscator, created an ‘epic’ theatre different from ‘dramatic’ or ‘Aristotelian’ theatre. Whereas the premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed, ‘epic’ theatre assumed that it both could change and was already

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