In Roman Jakobson's classic account of aphasic disturbances in language, meaning arises from the intersection of metaphor and metonymy, relations of resemblance and association respectively. The Rhetoric of Exile, which makes frequent reference to Jakobson's scheme, observes that an analogous structure prevails in the rhetoric of exile. Because exile entails a transformative transfer from one realm to another, it is a dramatization of metaphor, but because the exile is forced from one space to another by a causal chain of political events, there is a metonymic aspect as well.
Vladimir Zorić's erudite and often deeply absorbing study examines texts by exiled authors, often in dialogue with the legal and political documents associated with their exile, in order to expose exile's essentially rhetorical character, in which the interaction of metonymy and metaphor, broadly understood as political and poetic power respectively, generate an inflationary logic that tends toward totalization. For example,...
