Alienation in Selected Continental Texts

Abstract

Like death or abandonment, alienation is a deeply rooted feeling experienced by human. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture or a religion. The experience of alienation is one of isolation of person's need for acceptance. When a person is not accepted by a society, he became an outsider to everyone around him (Hughes, 2004). Alienation is a recurring theme in continental literature. The idea of self-alienation has played a crucial role in modem thought from German classical idealism to Marxism and Existentialism. It was first encountered in the thoughts of Wilhem von Humboldt, Hagel, and subsequently viewed in Feuerbach's and Marx. "This idea always implies the individual's estrangement from his humanity or human species being, from the individual's membership in the human species. The individual is estranged from himself insofar as he is alienated from his essential nature as a human being" (Bloom, 2007). Many masterpieces of continental literature are concerned with the theme of alienation. The term 'alienation' was introduced in the modem literary era and modem writers have explored the theme of alienation through their writings. Modernism is the period of technology and machine and it simply separated human being from others. In his Manuscript Economic and Philosophic Manuscript, Karl Marx (1964) defined "alienation as emotional isolation or dissociation from others" (45). It is found that most of the principal characters of continental texts are consistently alienated. We see them undergoing experience of isolation from society.