About this item
" A literary grandmaster." -- Time First published in 1971 in Chile, where the entire third edition was dumped into the ocean by the Chilean Navy and bonfires were held to destroy earlier editions, How to Read Donald Duck reveals the imperialist, capitalist ideology at work in our most beloved cartoons. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney -- curiously parentless, marginalized, always short of cash -- Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart dissect the narratives of dependency and social aspiration that define the Disney corpus. Disney recognized the challenge and, when the book was translated and imported into the United States in 1975, managed to have all 4,000 copies impounded. Ultimately, 1,500 copies of the book were allowed into the country, the rest of the shipment was blocked, and until now no American publisher has re-released the book, which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide.
About the Author
Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author born in Argentina, whose books have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His novels, poetry, essays, plays, stories and screenplays have won numerous awards. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His most recent books are a collection of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World and the forthcoming novel, Darwin's Ghosts. He contributes to major papers worldwide, including frequent contributions to The New York Times and the New York Review of Books Daily. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper's, Playboy, Index on Censorship and many other magazines and journals. A prominent human rights activist, he lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
