Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope

Be the first to write a review

Overview

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date. Consistently challenging assumptions and refusing preconceived categories, Dorfman has published in every major literary genre (novel, short story, poetry, drama); adopted literary forms including the picaresque, epic, ...

See more details below
Paperback
$24.28
BN.com price
(Save 9%)$26.95 List Price
Pick Up In Store

Pick Up In Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Other sellers (Paperback)
  • All (12) from $10.94   
  • New (7) from $14.67   
  • Used (5) from $10.94   
Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope

Available on NOOK devices and apps  
  • Nook Devices
  • NOOK HD/HD+ Tablet
  • NOOK
  • NOOK Color
  • NOOK Tablet
  • Tablet/Phone
  • NOOK for Windows 8 Tablet
  • NOOK for iOS
  • NOOK for Android
  • NOOK Kids for iPad
  • PC/Mac
  • NOOK for Windows 8
  • NOOK for PC
  • NOOK for Mac
  • NOOK Study
  • NOOK for Web

Want a NOOK? Explore Now

NOOK Book (eBook)
$14.82
BN.com price
(Save 45%)$26.95 List Price

More About This Book

Overview

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date. Consistently challenging assumptions and refusing preconceived categories, Dorfman has published in every major literary genre (novel, short story, poetry, drama); adopted literary forms including the picaresque, epic, noir, and theater of the absurd; and produced a vast amount of cultural criticism. His works are read as part of the Latin American literary canon, as examples of human rights literature, as meditations on exile and displacement, and within the tradition of bilingual, cross-cultural, and ethnic writing. Yet, as Sophia A. McClennen shows, when Dorfman’s extensive writings are considered as an integrated whole, a cohesive aesthetic emerges, an “aesthetics of hope” that foregrounds the arts as vital to our understanding of the world and our struggles to change it.

To illuminate Dorfman’s thematic concerns, McClennen chronicles the writer’s life, including his experiences working with Salvador Allende and his exile from Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she provides a careful account of his literary and cultural influences. Tracing his literary career chronologically, McClennen interprets Dorfman’s less-known texts alongside his most well-known works, which include How to Read Donald Duck, the pioneering critique of Western ideology and media culture co-authored with Armand Mattelart, and the award-winning play Death and the Maiden. In addition, McClennen provides two valuable appendices: a chronology documenting important dates and events in Dorfman’s life, and a full bibliography of his work in English and in Spanish.

Read More Show Less

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher
“Controversial, relentless, provocative, and astoundingly creative, Dorfman has been the most single-minded culture critic of the latter part of the 20th century. McClennen’s critique is, in turn, an exemplary analysis of Dorfman’s remarkable practice of thinking through crisis. An invaluable addition to the literature on literary and cultural studies. Essential.” - K. M. Sibbald, Choice

“[T]his remarkable study makes a valuable contribution for those interested in Dorfman's life and works and for anyone considering the difficult questions of how literature can effectively engage with the world in which we live, of what role more experimental art can play in the age of mass media, and of how language can engage with trauma and memory.” - Victoria Garrett, Hispania

“Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a complete life-and-works study of Dorfman, one of the premier Latin American writers. Surprisingly, it is the first full-length English-language study of the author. I learned a great deal from this rich and compassionate text. Sophia A. McClennen approaches Dorfman with measured affection and a sharp critical eye. She has written a model study: the biographical information provides context for the creative work, and her analysis of the creative work avoids excessive plot summary, while still giving the reader unfamiliar with a given text enough information to understand the argument.”—Debra A. Castillo, author of Redreaming America: Toward a Bilingual American Culture

“Sophia A. McClennen is a writer of extraordinary gifts and one of our most promising intellectuals. In Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope, she not only gives human form to a poetics and politics of hope, but also offers us a brilliant and compelling narrative of Ariel Dorfman’s work and life, revealing the courage and costs involved in taking risks, embracing civic courage, addressing the suffering of others, and living in a world in which democracy must never be taken for granted. Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, this is a book for everyone who believes that hope is the poetry of politics.”—Henry A. Giroux, author of Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror

Read More Show Less

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780822346043
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Publication date: 1/18/2010
  • Pages: 408
  • Product dimensions: 6.10 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Sophia A. McClennen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures.

Read More Show Less

Read an Excerpt

Ariel Dorfman

AN AESTHETICS OF HOPE
By Sophia A. McClennen

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4604-3

Chapter One

THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL

Ariel Dorfman's personal biography is inseparable from inter-American history, and his life has been connected in uncanny repetition to many of the region's most significant historical events. Beyond being tangentially influenced by events taking place in his environs, however, Dorfman's life continually confronts and is confronted by history. His life is the story of multiple exiles, historical ruptures, and profound despair. It is equally the story of passionate social commitment and relentless hope. The story of Dorfman's life is remarkable not only for its profound connection with the hemispheric history of the Americas, but also because it is the story of a man who not only witnessed history but also felt compelled to write about it.

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman was born on May 6, 1942, in Argentina. Throughout his life, the man known today as Ariel Dorfman has used three distinct first names: Vladimiro (Vlady), Edward (Eddie), and Ariel. Dorfman's name changes run (almost) parallel to the three nations (Argentina, the United States, and Chile) in which he lived as a young man, and they indicate some of the reasons why Dorfman's literature often deals with problems of identity. These name changes further evoke the linguistic shifts of his multiple exiles and their cultural contexts. He moved from Spanish to English as a young boy exiled from Argentina to New York (1945-54), from English to Spanish when his family was expelled from the United States to Chile due to McCarthyism (1954-73), and then finally to bilingualism as an exile from Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-90); a condition he only came to fully embrace after 1990, when Pinochet no longer ruled Chile. The name changes also reveal that Dorfman was extremely invested from a young age in his ability to shape identity through naming. Well before he had read theories about language and power and well before he became intellectually versed in the connections between naming and social control, Dorfman was acutely sensitive to the ways that names project meaning.

His initial, given name, Vladimiro, was assigned to him by his parents, who named him after Vladimir Lenin. This unwieldy name signals his parents' commitment to politics and their close ties to Eastern Europe, especially to the Russian Revolution. (His father remained faithful to the Bolshevik Revolution after he left Russia in 1920.) Later, as we learn from Dorfman's 1998 memoir, Heading South, Looking North, when the family lived in the United States, the "flaming moniker" Vladimiro became a tremendous liability (23). It was a name easily butchered during children's renaming games, and Dorfman was verbally attacked with perversions of his name such as Bloody, Flatty, and even Laddie and Lady (79). Vladimiro was also a name that prevented his complete immersion into U.S. culture. So in 1951, while on a cruise to Europe at the age of nine, Dorfman launched a plan that he had been concocting for some time. He introduced himself to everyone he met as "Edward" or "Eddie," and before his parents knew what was happening, Dorfman had been "baptized" with an Anglo name that eschewed his Jewish, Latino, and leftist heritage. "Edward" came to Dorfman by way of a comic book edition of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, a fitting sign of his "conversion" to U.S. culture (79). The comic book may also have been Dorfman's first introduction to the literary theme of the doppelganger, which would later influence much of his work (79). Remade as "Edward the Prince," Dorfman announced to his startled parents that he "would not answer if called Vlady ever again" (80).

The eventful cruise in which "Vlady" was abandoned and "Eddie" emerged was a watershed moment in Dorfman's quest for acceptance in U.S. culture. Prior to this trip Dorfman had grown up in a leftist household in Manhattan, where his father worked with the United Nations and the family had strong connections to many political activists and intellectuals who often visited the Dorfman home. In contrast to his parents' world of foreign languages, young Vlady favored English and U.S. cultural assimilation, immersing himself in the life of an all-American kid: "I wanted to melt and dissolve ... into the gigantic melting pot of America" (Heading, 78). How did a nine-year-old Argentine boy come to desire such radical self-transformation?

Dorfman's parents, Fanny Zelicovich Vaisman and Adolfo Dorfman, were both the children of Jewish émigrés who came to Argentina to avoid European anti-Semitism and to seek financial success. His mother's grandfather was murdered in the pogrom of 1903 in Kishinev (now Moldavia). Subsequently her family decided to leave the country, choosing Argentina as a consequence of Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association, which helped many East European Jews emigrate to Argentina and Brazil. Dorfman's maternal great-grandmother, Clara, and his great-aunt, who had stayed behind because the latter was sick with meningitis, were killed by the Nazis (Heading, 15). On his father's side of the family, emigration was largely due to financial pressures. In 1914 Adolfo went back to Russia with his mother and witnessed the beginnings of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, returning to Argentina in 1920. In relation to Dorfman's personal history it is crucial to understand that his parents' families had endured massive dislocation as a consequence of historical conflicts. Dorfman was born into a legacy that was already deeply marked by exile, loss, and intolerance. His Jewish heritage, which is more cultural than spiritual, signals patterns and tropes that continue to influence his life: exile, wandering, loss, struggle, and the search for a community. Referring to his time in Chile, where he felt at home, he writes, "There is a place, one place, where you truly belong" (Heading, 275). Yet he also suggests that to "start anything worthwhile, one must leave the place of one's birth" (276). Connecting his exile to the Jewish tradition, he writes that "salvation can only be attained by wandering" (276). These themes that link geography and identity, wandering and exile, struggle and joy, persecution and oral history, indicate the ways that his life and work highlight common Jewish motifs.

After a pro-Axis coup led to a change in government in Argentina in 1943 and stripped marxist Adolfo Dorfman of his position as a professor of industrial engineering at the Universidad de la Plata, Dorfman's family moved to the United States, where his father was a Guggenheim fellow. The ironies of life were emphasized for the young Dorfman by the fact that the anti-imperialist Adolfo came to the United States, "the most powerful capitalist country in the world, protected by a foundation built with money that had come out of one of the world's largest consortiums" (Heading, 24). When Fanny, Vlady, and his older sister, Eleonora, joined Adolfo over a year later, Adolfo was distant and preoccupied. He had been called to military service and was expected to report for duty four days after his family arrived in Manhattan. In a key example of the ways that historical events would shape their lives, Adolfo was reclassified because Nelson Rockefeller, founder of the State Department's Office of Inter-American Affairs, determined that Adolfo Dorfman's work for their office was "essential." This reclassification gave the family a reprieve from another dislocation and separation.

Shortly after his family had moved into their first Manhattan apartment, Vlady Dorfman, then a young exile nearing three years of age, caught a terrible case of pneumonia and was hospitalized and quarantined. He was isolated from his family for three weeks, and when he returned home from the hospital, he spoke only English, refusing to communicate in Spanish altogether. Dorfman describes this complete immersion into English as a desire for coherence and unity, as part of a will to wholeness: "I instinctively chose to refuse the multiple, complex, in-between person I would someday become" (Heading, 42). In contrast to other immigrants and exiles who tend to live bilingually, young Vlady sought monolingualism as a way to exercise control over his identity. Or at least that is the way the adult Ariel describes his immersion into English, since much of our knowledge of his early life comes from the reconstitution of that experience in Heading South, Looking North.

This event, the pneumonia and hospital quarantine that led to his adoption of English, becomes a defining moment in Dorfman's life. It not only signals a linguistic tension between Spanish and English, but also reveals another pressing tension that haunts his identity: that between understanding the self as a subject of free will or as a socially and historically determined entity. When one's life and the lives of one's family have been scattered by the winds of history and the upheavals of politics, it is tempting, if not necessary, to seek some measure of agency in understanding identity. While Dorfman describes his isolation in the hospital and its inevitable connection to English, he wavers between emphasizing his control-that is, the degree to which adopting English was his choice-and admitting his submission to external forces requiring, or at least encouraging, him to use that language only. This struggle to make sense of the forces that shape personal lives, to understand history as either malleable by the human will or beyond our control, persists throughout Dorfman's writing.

After Dorfman's initial isolation in the hospital, he was to endure another separation that caused him further anguish and confusion. Shortly after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, Dorfman's mother, Fanny, suffered a bout of severe depression. The stresses of being separated from her exiled husband for over a year, of being thrust into the unwelcoming environment of New York City, and of losing the one political figure who she felt could steer the world to a better place overwhelmed her, and she had a breakdown. Once again, the twists of history had intense consequences for Dorfman and his family: "My mother felt as if Roosevelt's death were wresting a father from her, as if what was about to end was not the war but the world, as if nothing would ever be sane again.... She could not deal with what the orphaned world was sending her way" (Heading, 47). She was institutionalized, and Vlady and Eleonora spent six months in a foster home, where English was, again, essential for survival. By the time his parents came to pick him up on November 1, 1945, to move the family into a new apartment on Morningside Drive, they discovered that they had lost their son "to the charisma of America" (47).

In these early years of his life, Dorfman eagerly consumed U.S. media culture: "Listen to me in the car as we drive home ...: I was coming around the mountain when she comes.... I was rowing the boat ashore, I was working on the railroad all the live long day, even if I sometimes felt like a motherless child, still, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah I had the whole world in my hands ... and it was marching on to the green grass of home. Home. That's where I was, where I had chosen to be.... I was home, home on the range ... this land was my land and it was made for you and me, but especially, I felt, it had been made for me" (Heading, 48). It is no surprise that this young boy felt culturally lost, completely unmoored from any sense of a stable cultural background, and reluctant to use his parents as models for his own future identity. In addition to feeling abandoned by his father when Adolfo first was forced to flee Argentina, Dorfman also had to endure the trauma of being isolated in the hospital, only to quickly lose his mother to depression.

Exiled families often experience similar challenges, and the rate of divorce and separation among them is extremely high (see Grinberg and Grinberg). Added to the ordeal of exile, young Vlady became sick with an illness that made breathing difficult and painful, an event that gave him an extreme sense of his mortal vulnerability. As he desperately craved stability and security, he was separated from both his father and his mother and momentarily lost their support, comfort, and the cultural grounding of their language. In addition, Dorfman's family was fractured at a moment in history when the United States had launched a massive global campaign for international prominence and had refashioned itself, after the Second World War, into a model society that contrasted starkly with the so-called evil of the Soviet bloc, an identity that would not only persist throughout the Cold War but would also spread with incredible speed and intensity during the 1940s and '50s. "The United States had turned me into one of its children by offering me comfort and safety and power during its most expansive and optimistic post-war phase" (Heading, 162). In this way, the cultural instability caused by Dorfman's exile and illness was exacerbated by his personal, historical, and geographical context. The desire to belong to a community is a logical consequence to Dorfman's early social dislocation and cultural loss. And even though the desire to belong to a community and to understand the self as whole and complete is a theme that runs throughout Dorfman's work, the reality of his hybrid, cross-cultural life thwarted even his earliest plans to shape his destiny.

In 1949, two years before he executed his plan to change his name to Eddie and become an all-American kid, Dorfman began attending PS 117, a New York City public school located in Queens. He was no longer sheltered in the multicultural world of the UN Children's School, which he had attended after his father became deputy head with the Council for Economic Development at the newly formed United Nations in 1946. At the same time, the mass hysteria and fear of the Cold War was erupting in the "red scare." Until then Dorfman had been able to lead a double life: at home, leftist activism and communist politics; away from home, capitalist consumption and U.S. nationalism. Attending public school during a period of extreme political paranoia caused him substantial distress because he was no longer able to keep these worlds apart. His teacher told his class about people who were a danger to the "American" way of life, people who were like "rotten apples" (Heading, 68). After a fight with his father, where he threatened to tell his teacher that his father was a communist, he finally realized the gravity of his dilemma. He could no longer love his father and his adopted country equally because with each passing day the United States was increasingly targeting men like Adolfo Dorfman as enemies of the state.

Returning to the importance of Dorfman's cruise aboard the De Grasse where the author changed his name and sought a unity of self, if even for a brief moment, a third key element of his personal history and writing surfaces: the role of literature and language in shaping his identity and his relationship to the world. He tells his readers that on this trip "literature was revealed to me as the best way to surmount the question of how to hold on to the language that defined my identity if I did not inhabit that country where it was spoken" (Heading, 81). On the ship, Dorfman met Thomas Mann, and the meeting sparked Dorfman's interest in the power of literature ("I wanted the power to reach all of humanity"), the role of language in literature ("In what language does he write?"), and the ways that exiles use literature to recreate their ties to their home (86). After embarking on the ship, his parents gave him a journal as a gift. Writing in it was the first time that he recalls using words to freeze time. What would have been ephemeral now had permanence, and the notion that the written word has a way of recording time and of keeping our lives from melting into oblivion is a theme to which his work would turn with even more urgency after the death of Chilean president Salvador Allende.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from Ariel Dorfman by Sophia A. McClennen Copyright © 2010 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Read More Show Less

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Note on Citations and Translations xxi

1 The Political Is Personal 1

2 On Becoming a Storyteller: Dorfman's Literary and Cultural Influences 31

3 An Aesthetics of Hope 60

4 Anything Else Would Have Tasted Like Ashes: From Popular Unity to Exile (1970-90) 93

5 I Am a Liar Who Always Tells the Truth: From Exile to Diaspora (1990-2005) 152

6 Creative Criticism/Critical Creativity: Media Criticism and Cultural Journalism 244

Conclusion: One among Many 280

Appendix 1 An Ariel Dorfman Chronology 285

Appendix 2 An Ariel Dorfman Bibliography 295

Notes 333

Works Cited 349

Index 361

Read More Show Less

Customer Reviews

Be the first to write a review
( 0 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(0)

4 Star

(0)

3 Star

(0)

2 Star

(0)

1 Star

(0)

Your Rating:

Review Guidelines
Add Recommendations
Your Name: Create a Pen Name or

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked, or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer. However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reviews should not contain any of the following:

  • - HTML tags, profanity, obscenities, vulgarities, or comments that defame anyone
  • - Time-sensitive information such as tour dates, signings, lectures, etc.
  • - Single-word reviews. Other people will read your review to discover why you liked or didn't like the title. Be descriptive.
  • - Comments focusing on the author or that may ruin the ending for others
  • - Phone numbers, addresses, URLs
  • - Pricing and availability information or alternative ordering information
  • - Advertisements or commercial solicitation

Reminder:

  • - By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.
  • - Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.
  • - See Terms of Use for other conditions and disclaimers.
Search for Products You'd Like to Recommend

Recommend other products that relate to your review. Just search for them below and share!

Create a Pen Name

Your Pen Name is your unique identity on BN.com. It will appear on the reviews you write and other website activities. Your Pen Name cannot be edited, changed or deleted once submitted.

 
Your Pen Name can be any combination of alphanumeric characters (plus - and _), and must be at least two characters long.

Continue Anonymously
    If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
    Why is this product inappropriate?
    Comments (optional)