Dorfman, Ariel
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1942- ) Argentinian-born academic, playwright, journalist and author, in Chile from early childhood, alternatingly in the US from the late 1960s; active from the late 1960s. His work as a writer has been intimately engaged with the fate of Chile from the election of Salvador Allende (1908-1973) in 1970, through his death after an America-inspired coup in 1973, and through the tumultuous years since. His work in general is nonfantastic, though the main protagonist of Mascara (1988) is able to command cameras to manifest, through the photographs he takes, his ability to see the truth beneath the skins of his victims (see Identity; Perception). A late novella, The Compensation Bureau (2021 chap), is set in a chaste Space Opera world described with a remoteness typical of the Mainstream Writer of SF. The inhabitants of another planet undertake to revive dead humans from planet Earth who have suffered unjust deaths, and somehow to make it up to them. There is a clear sense that this compensatory impulse on the part of these philanthropic aliens has been intensified by the fate of Homo sapiens in the twenty-first century.
Para leer al Pato Donald (1971; trans David Kunzle as How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic 1975) with Armand Mattelart is a searching study of the Imperialist agitprop lurking within the Donald Duck Comics, mostly written and drawn by Carl Barks [for Barks and Donald Duck see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], all owned by and for the benefit of the Walt Disney Company. [JC]
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman
born Buenos Aires, Argentina: 6 May 1942
works (highly selected)
- La rebelión de los conejos mágicos (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones de la Flor, 1986) [story: chap: binding unknown/]
- The Rabbits' Rebellion (London: Doubleday, 2001) [story: chap: trans of the above: illus/hb/Chris Riddell]
- Mascara (New York: Viking, 1988) [hb/]
- The Compensation Bureau (La Vergne, Tennessee: OR Books, 2021) [chap: hb/Lorser Feitelson]
nonfiction
- Para leer al Pato Donald (Valparaiso, Chile: Universitarias de Valparaiso, 1971) with Armand Mattelart [nonfiction: binding unknown/]
- How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1975) with Armand Mattelart [nonfiction: trans by David Kunzle of the above: hb/]
- The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to our Minds (London: Pluto Press, 1983) [coll: pb/]
links
- Ariel Dorfman
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Carl Barks; Donald Duck.
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