Across cultures and across history, people have used political satire to call out abuses of power, manipulation, deception, and absurdity.
While there are examples of satire everywhere, its growth as a form of political resistance and as a reference for political behavior has been on the rise in the modern era and has been particularly visible in the internet age. Yet, despite the fact that examples of political satire are everywhere, it remains an elusive concept.
How does satire differ from mockery? What is the role of irony in satire? Can making fun of something have a serious impact? What is the purpose of satire and what are its social effects?
This book offers an introduction to modern political satire in an easy-to-access format designed for both beginners and readers looking to refine their understanding of this complex genre.
Drawing on examples from Stephen Colbert to Bassem Youssef to Charlie Hebdo, and studying a range of different types of satirical media, this one-of-a-kind introduction to political satire examines the role that satire has played in shaping political discourse, promoting civic engagement, and influencing audiences.
She is Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at Penn State University and founding director of the Center for Global Studies. She has published 14 books, including Trump Was a Joke: How Satire Made Sense of a President Who Didn’t (2023), Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism (2020, with Srdja Popovic), and Globalization and Latin American Cinema (2018).
"Satire and comedy have long been a form of respite and relief for society, allowing comedians and audiences to make sense of a patently absurd world. But where did it come from? What are its historical roots? And how does it connect to our modern world? Sophia McClennen brilliantly lays out the technical craft and artistry of political satire, its historical context, and why it’s so valuable in modern society. I have spent my entire career loving political satire, making comedy slideshows, and Sophia’s work is a dazzling love letter to the craft I cherish dearly. This is a fantastic and much needed book codifying the machinations and inner workings of an art form that is so deeply needed now more than ever."
"This book delivers exactly what it promises: a smart, interactive, in-depth introduction to the complex practice of modern political satire. As a collaborative work of teacher and students, this textbook offers essential instructional tools such as keywords, infographics, and “dig deep” group activities designed to ensure accessibility in the classroom. As an academic work by an expert in the field, this overview insightfully covers the Basics, the Forms, and the Effects of political satire. Modern Political Satire is a perfect combination of teaching and scholarship that will prove indispensable to any course on satire."
Written by a scholar of satire and politics, Trump Was a Joke explains why satire is an exceptional foil for absurd political times and why it did a particularly good job of making sense of Trump.
Covering a range of comedic interventions, it analyzes why political satire is surprisingly effective at keeping us sane when politics is making us crazy. Its goal is to highlight the unique power of political satire to encourage critical thinking, foster civic action, and further rational debate in moments of political hubris and hysteria. The book has been endorsed by Bassem Youssef, referred to as the Jon Stewart of Egypt, and Srdja Popovic, author of Blueprint for Revolution, who used satirical activism to bring down Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
With a foreword by award-winning filmmaker, satirist and activist Michael Moore, this study will be of interest to readers who follow politics and enjoy political comedy and will appeal to the communications, comedy studies, media studies, political science, rhetoric, cultural studies, and American studies markets.
(Paperback)
“Sophia McClennen’s new book is a fantastically readable analysis of why ironic comedy has become so important in politics today. It confirms what I witnessed myself as a political comedian in Egypt during the Arab Spring: The crazier the politicians get; the more valuable political comedy becomes for the public. As I learned myself and as this book proves, when absurd politicians take power, it is hard to use reason against them, but it can be easy to use satire. McClennen convincingly shows how satirical comedy helps reason triumph over political repression. Even better, Trump Was a Joke reminds us that when you’re laughing, you can’t be afraid.”
“Trump Was a Joke offers the best, most-comprehensive guide yet to the power of political satire in shaping public opinion during turbulent political times. It is a must-read account of how political satire has come to play such a dominant role in contemporary politics, especially in the era of populist leaders and the global war on truth. It does an excellent job of explaining how being seriously funny can have serious impact on keeping us sane and it shows us how satire can work as a powerful political tactic.”
Do you want to overthrow a dictator, expose political corruption, or advance democratic goals? Pranksters vs. Autocrats presents a proven method to help advance the goals of non-violent activists. We offer in-depth analysis and a how-to guide to dilemma actions – a tactic that helps put political opponents in a lose-lose situation and gain visibility for your movement. Non-violent activists have long known that dilemma actions are especially effective, but this is the first book to offer empirical data to prove how and why dilemma actions work.
From Gandhi’s Salt March to the Arab Spring and from Estonia’s Laughing Revolution to local activism in sub-Saharan Africa, this book offers readers a diverse array of forty-four case studies that have shaped popular struggles for democracy and a wide range of human rights struggles across the globe. As you read this, we’ll explain how and why dilemma actions work and how to think like an effective organizer. If you already are an organizer, you’ll learn how to design actions that are fun, funny, and effective. Most importantly, you’ll learn about the power of creativity and wit in some of most important social change struggles of the last century.
(Hardcover)
Edited By Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Sophia A. Mcclennen
The alt-right movement in the United States has actively been endorsing the use of left theory to achieve its ends—and with varying degrees of success.
Tracing occasions where figures on the alt-right reference left theory, this volume asks if the alt-right’s reference of left theory is just bad reading, or are there troubling ways that certain types of left theory encourage such interpretations? What if the connections between left theory and the alt-right lie in the shared disdain for certain types of institutions, structures of power, and the status quo?
Are there lessons to be learned in what can often appear as an overlapping desire to deconstruct concepts like truth, justice, freedom, and democracy? Drawing on the longer history of right-wing readings of left theory, this volume seeks to unpack these recent developments and consider their impact on the future of theory.
"Language has always been a site of struggle and when understood in the context of theorizing political strategies it becomes even more problematic. Di Leo and McClennen address this debate in a unique and brilliant way by asking why and how the language of the left is often successfully appropriated by the alt-right. This is a brilliant book that rethinks and reworks language and theory both in terms of misleading appropriations and a path through which language offers a more focused educational focus on culture and a commitment to making education central to politics itself."
"Left Theory and the Alt Right is the only book that takes on the difficult analysis, from a variety of perspectives, of how the excess of leftish theory fuels the alt-right, even as the alt-right inspires the most powerful critiques to emerge from leftish theory. As such, this book is of enormous value for understanding and moving beyond the dead-ends of contemporary society, national and global."
"Left Theory and the Alt Right makes a crucial intervention into one of the most surprising and dismaying intellectual developments of the present: the appropriation of left-wing theory by the alt-right. Rather than blaming academic theory or conceding aspects of it to the neo-fascist right, the essays in this volume bring theoretical expertise to bear on this phenomenon, demonstrating that the right gets theory wrong. It also demonstrates that precise and clear-eyed theorizing, as is present in this volume, is a crucial weapon in the war against the racist and class-stratified imaginary of the alt-right. The left concedes the terrain of theory only at its own peril."
"This book takes the bull by the horns and addresses the common trope that upon which the left and the right ultimately converge. Did Derrida bring us Trump? On one level, of course not. And yet there are echoes and sometimes direct appropriations. How do we make sense of this phenomenon? How do we not capitulate to a simplistic both-sidesism? How do we resist oppression without undoing the very tools necessary for that resistance? These are the stakes of this book. Left Theory and the Alt Right is an extremely timely book edited by two top scholars in the field with a very impressive list of contributors. It is a very important book."
Studying the case of Latin American cinema, this book analyzes one of the most public – and most exportable- forms of postcolonial national culture to argue that millennial era globalization demands entirely new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between politics, culture, and economic policies.
Concerns that globalization would bring the downfall of national culture were common in the 1990s as economies across the globe began implementing neoliberal, free market policies and abolishing state protections for culture industries.
Simultaneously, new technologies and the increased mobility of people and information caused others to see globalization as an era of heightened connectivity and progressive contact. Twenty-five years later, we are now able to examine the actual impact of globalization on local and regional cultures, especially those of postcolonial societies.
Tracing the full life-cycle of films and studying blockbusters like City of God, Motorcycle Diaries, and Children of Men this book argues that neoliberal globalization has created a highly ambivalent space for cultural expression, one willing to market against itself as long as the stories sell. The result is an innovative and ground-breaking text suited to scholars interested in globalization studies, Latin-American studies and film studies.
(Hardcover)
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to this emerging field, offering a broad overview of human rights and literature while providing innovative readings on key topics. The first of its kind, this volume covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines between the social sciences and humanities. Sections cover:
Drawn from many different global contexts, the essays offer an ideal introduction for those approaching the study of literature and human rights for the first time, looking for new insights and interdisciplinary perspectives, or interested in new directions for future scholarship.
(Hardcover)
This collection of essays, by some of the most distinguished public intellectuals and cultural critics in America explores various dimensions of what it means to live in the age of debt.
They ask, what is the debt age?
For that matter, what is debt?
Is its meaning transhistorical or transcultural?
Or is it imbued in ideology and thus historically contingent?
What is the relationship between debt and theory?
Whose debt is acknowledged and whose is ignored?
Who is the paradigmatic subject of debt?
How has debt affected contemporary academic culture?
Their responses to these and other aspects of debt are sure to become required reading for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live in the debt age.
(Hardcover)
Do you watch satire TV? Have you re-posted a hilarious, yet biting graphic on facebook or tweeted round the clock jabs at inane politicians? Does it sometimes seem to you that Jon Stewart is a better journalist than most of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC? And were you a bit disappointed when Stephen Colbert did not actually run for president? If you or someone you know has done any of the above, then you’ll want to read this book. Is Satire Saving Our Nation? surveys the broad landscape of satire today and situates it within our nation’s history.
We are witnessing an unprecedented growth and importance of satire in the public sphere, but is that fact good or bad for the health of our nation? Co-written by a millennial and a scholar, Is Satire Saving Our Nation? shows how satire has become a central part of today’s youth culture and it explains why it might just save our democracy after all.
(Hardcover)
“A thrill ride from beginning to end! As incredibly thorough studies of the effects of political satire go, of course. This book is loaded with truthiness and it confirms my long-held suspicion that McClennen and Maisel have been secretly following me around for the past 18 years.”
“McClennen and Maisel move us well beyond the assumption that satire is something ‘done’ to us, recognizing instead that satire is a tool through which citizens—professional and amateur provocateurs alike—engage the political world in playful, critical, and positive ways. This most helpful book lets us see that satire is, ultimately, a language through which citizen engagement is being redefined through media activism.”
“Is Satire Saving Our Nation? The authors of this important book make a compelling case. Far from turning politics into a joke, satire demands intellectual engagement, critical imagination, and a community of understanding — the very ingredients necessary for a healthy democracy. With their seemingly paradoxical, but accurate, observation that satirists may be the only ones speaking sanely in our increasingly absurd public sphere, McClennen and Maisel have challenged and enriched our thinking about what constitutes ‘serious’ politics.”
Caught between the well-worn grooves the Boom and the Gen-X have left on the Latin American literary canon, the writing intellectuals that comprise what the Generation of ‘72 have not enjoyed the same editorial acclaim or philological framing as the literary cohorts that bookend them.
In sociopolitical terms, they neither fed into the Cold War-inflected literary prizes that sustained the Boom nor the surge in cultural capital in Latin American cities from which the writers associated with the Crack and McOndo have tended to write.
This book seeks to approach the Generation of ‘72 from the perspective of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship, a theoretical framework that lends a fresh and critical architecture to the unique experiences and formal responses of a group of intellectuals that wrote alongside globalization’s first wave.
(Hardcover)
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 20th 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.
(Hardcover)
“In this superb book, Sophia A. McClennen illuminates the dilemmas of language, identity, and diaspora in ways that are refreshing and original.”
“Sophia McClennen’s fine Dialectics of Exile, which is not meant to be a comprehensive overview but rather a reconsideration of a particular period along thematic lines. McClennen’s book limits itself to three case studies, analyzing the works and lives of the Chilean Ariel Dorfman, the Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, and the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo (the inclusion of Goytisolo places this book under the rubric of transatlantic studies, a growing academic niche in recent years). […]
“This book offers a theoretically aware argument that draws from established concepts from theories of national identity, postnationalism, and postmodernism, as well as from linguistics, feminism, and Marxism. What is unusual about it is that it does not deal with exile as a negative, traumatic event that is in effect all aftermath, as is commonly the case. Instead, it casts exile as a positive and ongoing mode of evolving cultural identity. McClennen presents exile as the initiation of an ongoing ‘dialectic,’ a word rich with Marxist, linguistic, and aesthetic resonances, all of which she mines successfully. The cultural production of exile, she rightly notes, needs to be read as a series of ‘dialectical tensions,’ rather than as static, binary oppositions where one end of the binary is favored in the interpretation (28).
“This book engages with fundamental questions head on: what is the difference between an exile and an immigrant? What is the concept of ‘homeland?’ How is the process of representation, never a simple one, complicated by displacement? “The crisis of language” of the exile, writes McClennen, ‘while revealing a crisis in the subject, does not lead to the end of representation’ (119). Rather, the literature of exile ‘often revolves around the exile’s sense of loss,’ or the ’exile’s sense of freedom once the bonds of the nation are loosened. The exile often attempts to rewrite national history and also often attempts to rewrite [. . . ] notions of community that are not predicated on the nation’ (222). McClennen’s insightful ruminations on the dynamics of exile are well-taken and their implications wide-ranging.”
“From the shores of exile, writing in Spanish has engaged in the politics of memory as un 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 these literatures are a revision of reading that moves literature from a monological archive towards the unsheltered territory of radical dialogue.”
“Sophia McClennen’s book responds to a pressing need to theorize an issue that involves many questions concerning notions of power, identity, and memory—all of them pivotal to the study of Hispanic culture on both sides of the Atlantic.”
“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 theoretically-based critique, McClennen succeeds in a truly theoretically-based critique. I am especially impressed with her grasp of the real centrality of the concept of narration, in its broadest sense, to the question of exile.”
“Our analysis of literary exile, McClennen insists, and I agree, should transcend the facile dichotomies as to whether ’exile produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia.'”
In 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert left the cast of The Daily Show for his own show, The Colbert Report, which has since become famous for satirizing personality-driven political shows like The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity. Since the show’s first episode, Colbert’s program has entertained its audience, encouraged political discourse, and stirred some of the most complacent members of society.
In her new book Colbert’s America: Satire and Democracy, Penn State professor, Sophia A. McClennen, examines how the comedy of Stephen Colbert packs enough political punch to change the way a nation thinks. The first book to cover the various themes and features of Colbert’s satire, Colbert’s America gives readers insight into the powerful ways that Colbert’s comedy challenges the cult of ignorance that has been threatening meaningful public debate since 9/11.
McClennen suggests that Colbert does more than mock pundits and politicians: he actually has helped influence a new generation of actively involved citizens. As Colbert’s America explains, satire offers the public a medium through which to express resistance to reigning political policies and social attitudes. But Colbert’s satire goes even further, offering viewers myriad ways to engage with society.
Colbert’s America also claims that the ability to speak truth to power through parody or mockery is at the heart of political satire. McClennen suggests, for instance, that Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when he mocked the President to his face, was a watershed moment—for Colbert’s career, for the Bush presidency, and for highlighting a new era in media. Some of these same innovations can be seen in his recent engagement with the 2012 elections.
McClennen’s book makes a number of key arguments:
But all is not glory for Colbert’s satire. McClennen also shows that there are risks to his approach. His parody of a cult of personality likewise advances a cult of personality—that of the Colbert Nation. Some worry that some of his stunts have “crossed the line” and disrespected the democratic process. Also, his in-character performances are occasionally so funny that they risk reinforcing ideas he means to critique. And, most importantly, some viewers don’t even realize that he is actually performing a character.
Despite these potential pitfalls to his form of satire, McClennen argues that ultimately Colbert’s show offers his audience a way to “amuse itself to activism.” Against claims that suggest that satire encourages cynicism, apathy, or disrespect for democracy, Colbert’s America argues that Colbert’s satire is a powerful tool for fostering civic engagement.
McClennen writes, “Watch Colbert. Night after night, he does a show where he has a bunch of fun and raises viewer awareness of a range of major social issues. Even more, he lets his viewers in on the fun. What they do after they turn off their televisions is up to them.”
(Hardcover)
“America According to Colbert demonstrates that Colbert’s work is also a form of public education, teaching his audiences to be distrustful of power and fools, and to view all politicians, pundits, and politics itself with mistrust. McClennen’s well-written and documented study brilliantly illuminates the Colbert phenomenon and its importance for contemporary politics, journalism, and popular culture today.”
“Colbert’s America is beautifully readable and delightfully smart; rich in examples and conceptual frame. McClennen gives us a master class in the critical pedagogy of Colbert.”
“An always insightful and often delightful reading of the most sustained and successful exercise in political satire in modern American life. Stephen Colbert would no doubt agree – well, about all but the ‘satire’ part. Let the eagle soar!”
Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues is a collaborative effort among four established public intellectuals who deeply care about the future of education in America and who are concerned about the dangerous effects of neoliberalism on American society and culture. It aims to provide a clear, concise, and thought-provoking account of the problems facing education in America under the dual shadows of neoliberalism and terrorism. Through collaborative and individual essays, the authors provide a provocative account that will be of interest to anyone who concerning with the opportunities and dangers facing the future of education at this critical moment in history.
“In times like these, Neoliberalism, Education, and Terrorism is essential reading for any concerned American.” — Teachers College Record
“The contributors to Neoliberalism, Education, and Terrorism call for academics to recognize and resist neoliberal economic policies and the state’s conduct of the war on terror as forces eroding what they call “progressive education” in post–September 11 America. By concretely analyzing how these forces are working to appropriate education at all levels, studies like this not only provide useful sociopolitical insight into the challenges educators face but also remind us of the need to do something about them.” — Academe
(Hardcover)
Is the comedy of Stephen Colbert simply fun or is it powerful political satire?
Does it entertain viewers or does it empower them?
Or does it teach us that in today’s media-saturated world those binaries make no sense?
America According to Colbert: Satire as Public Pedagogy claims that Colbert’s satire fosters critical thinking about social issues, encourages active citizenship, and entertains the viewer—all at the same time.
The first book to cover the various themes and features of The Colbert Report, America According to Colbert offers readers insight into the powerful ways that Colbert’s comedy challenges the cult of ignorance that has threatened meaningful public debate and social dialogue since 9/11.
(Hardcover)
‘"America According to Colbert demonstrates that Colbert’s work is also a form of public pedagogy, teaching his audiences to be distrustful of power and fools, and to view all politicians, pundits, and politics itself with mistrust. McClennen’s well-written and documented study brilliantly illuminates the Colbert phenomenon and its importance for contemporary politics, journalism, and popular culture today."’
Written in the context of critical dialogues about the war on terror and the global crisis in human rights violations, authors of the collected volume Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror, edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello, ask a series of questions:
What definitions of humanity account for the persistence of human rights violations?
How do we define terror and how do we understand the ways that terror affects the representation of those that both suffer and profit from it?
Why is it that the representation of terror often depends on a distorted (for example, racist, fascist, xenophobic, essentialist, eliminationist) representation of human beings?
And, most importantly, can representation, especially forms of art, rescue humanity from the forces of terror or does it run the risk of making it possible?
The authors of the volume’s articles discuss aspects of terror with regard to human rights events across the globe, but especially in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.
Their discussion and reflection demonstrate that the need to question continuously and to engage in permanent critique does not contradict the need to seek answers, to advocate social change, and to intervene critically.
With contributions by scholars, activists, and artists, the articles collected here offer strategies for intervening critically in debates about the connections between terror and human rights as they are taking place across contemporary society.
The work presented in the volume is intended for scholars, as well as undergraduate and graduate students in fields of the humanities and social sciences including political science, sociology, history, literary study, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology.
(Paperback)
“The article move deftly between high theory and practical politics, guiding the reader through an impressive range of material (poetry, prose, music, film, and photography) with broad historical scope (the French Revolution, post World War II decolonization, the ‘Global War on Terror’)—all the while retaining a strong sense of cohesion and unity of purpose. This is a spirited collection, simultaneously provocative and rigorous. It is not only an urgent appeal for engaged public scholarship, but also a first-rate example of it.”
“Some suggest that comparative literature is a dead discipline. This book proves them wrong by showing the engaged responsiveness of post-contemporary comparativism to current social and political problems. Rather than fashioning itself as an alibi for Western imperialism, the volume reveals the emerging role of comparative literature and comparative cultural studies as an active agent in progressive social understanding and change—particularly in an ‘age of terror.’”
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.
(Hardcover)
‘“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.”’
‘“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.”’
“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.”
“[A] welcome overview of Ariel Dorfman’s huge corpus of literary, journalistic, cinematographic, and critical work. … McClennen’s book … makes the reader aware of the monumental and diversely composed project that is Dorfman’s corpus.”
“[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.”
This volume’s genesis stems from the contributors’ conviction that, given its vitality and excellence, Latin American literature deserves a more prominent place in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions.
The editors introduce the volume arguing, first, that there still exists, in some quarters, a lingering bias against literature written in Spanish and Portuguese and, second, that by embracing Latin American literature and culture more enthusiastically, comparative literature would find itself reinvigorated, placed into productive discourse with a host of issues, languages, literatures, and cultures that have too long been paid scant academic attention.
(Hardcover)
“In this new collection of essays, some of which read like manifestos, Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz attempt to rectify the persistent and altogether unwarranted tendencies among some comparatists of privileging European literatures (especially those written in English, French, and German), as well as classifying Latin American literature written in Spanish and Portuguese as “peripheral” and therefor not nearly as worthy of study. The twelve essays represent a wide range of investigation and critical inquiry into Latin American literature, and will undoubtedly spark debate—and perhaps self-examination—among comparatists.”
“In this essential, and soon-to-be controversial, volume, Sophia A. McClennen and Earl Fitz have gathered together some of the most important and eloquent scholars working in the US and Canadian academy today.”
Author/editor of 15 books; regular Salon columnist; featured in national and international media including CNN, NPR, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, and PBS NewsHour.
© 2026 Sophia McClennen. All rights reserved. Created by Argomedia INC
Author/editor of 15 books; regular Salon columnist; featured in national and international media including CNN, NPR, BBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, and PBS NewsHour.
© 2026 Sophia McClennen. All rights reserved. Created by Argomedia INC
