1
Introduction
1
Midway through my first semester in graduate school, my Latin American politics
professor surprised us one day by showing up to seminar with a box full of the recently
published novel Burning Patience by Antonio Skármeta.
2
Distributing a copy to each of
us, he explained that for the next week we were going to take a break from learning about
Latin American politics through social science. As I recall, our discussion the following
week of Skármeta’s novel about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his postman, and the
momentous early 1970s Chilean political context in which the story was set, was as lively
as always in that unusually participatory seminar. What made that week’s conversation
different from our previous weeks’ discussions of competing theories of development;
models of political regime change; and public policy approaches was that Burning
Patience permitted us to take some precious time – in that graduate political science
seminar – to discuss varieties of political engagement and to consider the advantages and
the limitations of different methods of seeking truth(s) about politics and society.
This paper assumes that while political science instructors have a rich assortment
of old and new methods at their disposal to enhance learning in their courses, one of the
most important pedagogical decisions remains the choice and combination of required
readings. With that in mind, this paper focuses on three types of non-traditional texts that
are sometimes used as supplements in political science courses: journalism, fiction, and
1
I thank Dr. Valerie Simms for reading and commenting on the first draft of this paper.
2
This novel, published in English in 1987 and later retitled The Postman/El Cartero, was the basis in 1994
of the popular and award-winning film, Il Postino, a loose adaptation of the book. In that unusually
international cinematic production, the new setting of Skármeta’s story was Italy in the early 1950s rather
than Chile in the early 1970s; the actor playing Pablo Neruda, Philippe Noiret, was French; the director,
Michael Radford, was British; and the languages spoken were Italian and Spanish (with English sub-titles).
Convention