Ariel Dorfman

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Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942 Buenos Aires) is a Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist.

Dorfman, who is Jewish, was born in Argentina but his family moved to the United States shortly after his birth, and then moved to Chile in 1954. He attended and was later a professor at the University of Chile and adopted Chilean Citizenship in 1967.

From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman was part of the administration of president Salvador Allende. He was forced into exile following the military coup in which General Augusto Pinochet came to power.

Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies.

Since the restoration of democracy in Chile (1990), he divides his time between Santiago and the United States.

Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believed tortured her; it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

Dorfman, a critic of Pinochet, has written extensively about the general's extradition case for the Spanish newspaper El País and other publications.

Dorfman's play, Picasso’s Closet, a conuterfactual history in which the Nazis murder Picasso, had its premier at Theater J in Washington, D.C. ^[1]

He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, A Promise to the Dead, based on his memoir Heading South, Looking North and directed by Peter Raymont. The film had its world premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2007. (In November 2007, the film was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar shortlist. The list was narrowed to five films on January 22, 2008,^[2] and A Promise to the Dead was not among the five Oscar-nominated documentaries.)

Contents 1 Controversy 2 Selected books 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Controversy

Dorfman also is one of the Group of 88 professors who, in the wake of the Lacrosse players scandal, signed a controversial letter calling for a wide on campus discussion about the way the Duke Community viewed race and gender.

[edit] Selected books

• How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (with Armand Mattelart) ISBN 0-88477-023-0
• Widows (1983) ISBN 1-58322-483-1
• The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1988) 0140088962
• Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1999) ISBN 0-14-028253-X
• Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (2002) ISBN 1-58322-542-0
• Burning City (with Joaquin Dorfman) (2006) ISBN 0-375-83204-1

[edit] References

1. ^ [www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900740.html ]
2. ^ Shortlist for docu Oscar unveiled. The Hollywood Reporter (2007-11-20). Retrieved on 2007-12-21.

[edit] External links

• Ariel Dorfman's website
• Ariel Dorfman's memoir, Heading South, Looking North
• Ariel Dorfman at the Internet Movie Database
• Death and the Maiden at the Internet Movie Database
• Peter Raymont director of A Promise to the Dead
• feature documentary on Ariel Dorfman's experiences of exile
• 1988 interview with Ariel Dorfman by Don Swaim at Wired for Books.
• Ariel Dorfman Interview on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos