Writing the stereoscopic and cosmopolitan future: Ariel Dorfman and the interconnectedness between translation and self-translation

This dissertation is about Ariel Dorfman's urgent hope for translation and self-translation, both understood as "the capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before" (Grossman x-xi), and for the awareness of their interconnectedness in several contexts. In other words, it is about Dorfman's hope for mutual recognitions with others leading to self-knowledge and transformation, and resulting in the writing of a stereoscopic and cosmopolitan future.;Chapter One analyzes how the possibility of a stereoscopic and cosmopolitan future is being erased by the prevalence of several types of exceptionalism in many scenarios, including the exceptionalism of authorship in translation studies, which fails to see the interconnectedness of translation and self-translation and brings about the exceptionalism of self-translation and self-translators either by neglecting their very existence, or by acknowledging their transformative and authoritative qualities merely due to the author's involvement. Chapter One then discusses how this failure to notice this interconnectedness is reflected in hegemonic discourses where "identity exceptionalism," that is, the perception of identity as either global or local, is reinforced.;Chapter Two explores Dorfman's English-Spanish self-translated autobiography Heading South, Looking North. A Bilingual Journey /Rumbo al sur, deseando al norte: Un romance en dos lenguas. It analyzes Dorfman's geographical self-translations, that is, his failures to conceive his own cosmopolitanism for many decades, and Dorfman's textual self-translations, which show how Dorfman's identity is constructed in his bilingual text through a notion of translation that incorporates the traces of difference and commonalities of his bilingual identity.;Chapter Three explores how his painful exile experiences made Dorfman reach self-knowledge and transformation that allowed his stereoscopic, culturally cosmopolitan vision to emerge. It also examines how Dorfman's stereoscopic vision is also able to translate potential local "cosmopolitan" moments, that is, dialogical encounters leading to self-translations in intracultural contexts such as post-Pinochet Chile. This dissertation argues for a notion of the cosmopolitan such as Dorfman's: a cosmopolitan vision that defines specificities through and not against multiplicity, self-translation through and not against translation, and the local through and not against the global.