The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied literary tradition, criticism of exile writing has tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures offers a theory of exile writing that accounts for the persistence of these dual impulses and for the ways that they often co-exist within the same literary works. Focusing on writers working in the latter part of the 2 century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, Sophia A. McClennen proposes that exile literature is best understood as a series of dialectic tensions about cultural identity. Through comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile) and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), this book explores how these writers represent exile identity. Each chapter addresses dilemmas central to debates over cultural identity such as nationalism versus globalization, time as historical or cyclical, language as representationally accurate or disconnected from reality, and social space as utopic or dystopic. McClennen demonstrates how the complex writing of these three authors functions as an alternative discourse of cultural identity that not only challenges official versions imposed by authoritarian regimes, but also tests the limits of much cultural criticism.
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About the Author
Sophia A. McClennen is associate professor and co-director of the graduate program in comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University
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Sophia A. McClennen is Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women's Studies and Affiliate Faculty of the School of International Affairs at Pennsylvania State University. Her books focus on cultural responses to social conflict such as that associated with war, imperialism, dictatorship, and globalization. This interest in culture and conflict has led her to write on things as varied as the literature of exile and the satire of Stephen Colbert. She is most fascinated by the ways that authors and artists creatively respond to crisis.
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