Exilic Perspectives on Alien Nations

Sophia A. McClennen\u27s paper, Exilic Perspectives on \u27Alien Nations\u27, is an excerpt from her book, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures (Purdue UP , 2004). In the paper, McClennen summarizes her theory that exile writing is inherently dialectical. 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 a comparative analysis of Juan Goytisolo (Spain), Ariel Dorfman (Chile) and Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), McClennen 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. After presenting an overview of her book, McClennen then focuses on the ways exile writers construct what she calls an Alien Nation where competing and contrasting visions of the relationship between the exile and the nation intersect and contradict

Cultural Politics, Rhetoric, and the Essay: A Comparison of Emerson and Rodó

In her article, Cultural Politics, Rhetoric, and the Essay: A Comparison of Emerson and Rodó, Sophia McClennen compares two essays which have been central to debates over American cultural identity. Her work is a detailed comparison of the persuasive language used in The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ariel by José Enrique Rodó. She focuses on the specific ways that the rhetoric of the persuasive essay binds Emerson and Rodó to a literary tradition and consequently impedes each author\u27s ability to construct a liberated culture. She also demonstrates how the comparative method is a useful tool for analyzing representations of cultural autonomy. For in both essays the author is intent on resisting cultural colonization from a dominant power; yet the tools employed in such resistance ultimately resort to thoughts derived from others. The similar literary and intellectual framework of these essays suggests that a correlative historical moment -- nation-building -- and political motivation -- the quest for an autonomous cultural identity -- can lead two authors from different places and different periods to produce very similar types of rhetoric or persuasive discourse. The conflict between these essays\u27 cultural politics and their use of rhetoric explains one of the fundamental pitfalls of these texts: On the one hand, each essay wants to convince the reader to think freely yet, on the other hand, clearly articulates and dictates the guidelines for such behavior

Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue

In her paper, Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue, Sophia A. McClennen surveys the profound changes that characterize Latin American cultural studies today. McClennen reads these changes in light of recent transformations in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies and suggests that scholars in these fields are now in a position to embark on productive dialogue and exchange. Before such interaction takes place, however, McClennen cautions, we should recall why there has historically been little intellectual exchange between comparatists and scholars of Latin American literature. Barriers to exchange between these areas have been: The traditional US-Eurocentric bias of comparative literature, the history of culturally colonizing Latin America, comparative literature\u27s repudiation of inter-Spanish American comparative work, and the different tendencies in critical approaches and methods used by comparative literature scholars versus their counterparts in Latin American Studies. If scholars remain mindful of this history, she argues, there are several key areas of study that would be strengthened and enriched by greater collaboration between comparatists and Latin Americanists and McClennen outlines five key areas of collaborative research

The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination

In her paper The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination Sophia A. McClennen argues that understanding the relationship between culture and human rights depends on humanist perspectives attentive to the relationship between storytelling and identity, mass culture and ideology, text and audience, critical thinking and engaged citizenship. After briefly considering how the divide between the humanities and human rights advocates developed and how it might best be overcome, she suggests that comparative cultural studies grounded in an ethical commitment to study the relationship between culture and society offers an indispensable perspective on the ties between culture and identity integral to any effort to promote global respect for human rights. Calling attention to the tyrannies of comparison that facilitate contemporary ideologies of absolutism, imperialism, and neoliberalism, she suggests that an ethical process of comparison requires translation, recognition, and imagination. Each of these comparative processes depends on a vision of the self and its other that is meaningfully relational, intertwined in conflict and tension as well as in collaboration and mutual representation