The Dialectics of Exile

Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures

by Sophia A. McClennen

Click here to order online!

Endorsements of The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures
    

"In this superb book, Sophia A. McClennen illuminates the dilemmas of language, identity, and disapora in ways that are refreshing and original." Ariel Dorfman, Duke University

"From the shores of exile, writing in Spanish  has engaged in the politics of memory as an urgent challenge to the politics of oblivion. Sophia A. McClennen's much-needed and long overdue book bridges this transatlantic dialogue.   Her analysis proves that thse literatures are a revision of reading that moves literature from a monological archive towards the unsheltered territory of radical dialogue." Julio Ortega, Brown University

" By inverting the conventional interpretive logic in which literary texts are simply made to   " prove  " the claims of theory and setting out to show how the texts might also be capable of criticizing and even disproving certain theoretical arguments, McClennen succeeds in a truly theoretically-based critique. I am especially impressed with McClennen's grasp of the real centrality of the concept of nation, in its broadest sense, to the question of exile. " Neil Larsen, University of California Davis

Learn more about our Comparative Cultural Studies

The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied tradition, in criticism exile writing is is perceived according to a binary logic where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. In her book, Sophia A. McClennen 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 twentieth century who were exiled during a historical moment of increasing globalization, transnational economics, and the theoretical shifts of postmodernism, 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), McClennen explores how these writers represent exile identity. In each chapter of the book, the author 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. The author 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.