DOCSLIB.ORG

Imagining the Inoperative Community: Documentary Aesthetic in Roberto Bolaño and Alfredo Jaar

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Imagining the Inoperative Community: Documentary Aesthetic in Roberto Bolaño and Alfredo Jaar Imagining the Inoperative Community: Documentary Aesthetic in Roberto Bolaño and Alfredo Jaar by Sebastian Ferrari A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Katherine M. Jenckes, Chair Professor Michèle A. Hannoosh Professor Gareth Williams Associate Professor Santiago Colás Associate Professor Daniel Noemi © Sebastian Ferrari, 2012 Dedication a mis padres / til mine forældre / to my parents ii Acknowledgments This dissertation represents the culmination of much research and writing but also many conversations, for which I am in debt to many individuals. I would like to thank first of all Kate Jenckes, the chair of my committee, for being in many ways the ideal interlocutor for my project. She has helped my ideas grow and take shape while also pushing back constructively when those ideas reached the limits of coherence. I feel fortunate and privileged to have been able to work under her mentorship. Many thanks as well to the other members of my committee. Santiago Colás shepherded me through many stages of my graduate career, even as early as the day I arrived on campus as a prospective student. His excellent teaching and precision in thought and expression have been an inspiration. Daniel Noemi was incredibly generous with his detailed and thorough feedback. Conversations over the years with Michèle Hannoosh have helped to crystallize my thought process and deepen my ideas on images and text-image relations. Gareth Williams’ excellent comments and questions at the defense were especially insightful and helpful in imagining future iterations of my project. I am indebted to several institutions for their funding of my research and writing: the Rackham Graduate School, the Sweetland Dissertation Writing Institute, and the Mellon Dissertation Seminar in the Humanities. Thanks to the Department of Comparative Literature for its constant support over the years. Special thanks go to Yopie Prins and Silke-Maria Weineck for their guidance and solidarity in administrative battles; and to Paula Frank and Nancy Harris for their daily conversation and good cheer. Thank you as well to the many students in Comparative Literature who made grad school a worthwhile and enjoyable endeavor. In the early and middle stages of the writing process I found great support and camaraderie in my writing group, due to the wit and insight of Andrea, Rebecca, Christina, and Vera. I’m glad to now be on the other side with all of you. Many friends and family have helped me along the way, whether they knew it or not. Thanks to Joe H. for getting me started on this literature thing way back in the mid-90’s. I’m with you in Rockland and beyond. Joe N., Annie, Yusuf, Carly, Jeremy, and Bashar, thanks for your companionship, whether near or far. Thanks to Alan, Robert, Carrie, Chris, Topher, and John R. for their solidarity and friendship over many cups of coffee and drinks. William and Frances, Kat and Colin, thanks for everything. Richard and Katherine, David and Nicole: thanks for your encouragement and support! Gracias Alicia, por todos los libros. Tusind tak Casper, Inger, René og Michael! iii This dissertation is dedicated to my parents. Gracias Jorge, por todo. Tak Irene, your presence is never forgotten. Thanks Sue, for being there for me. Finally, thanks to Joy, without whom this dissertation would never have been completed. Every day I’m amazed at my luck to have you in my life and to be a part of yours. - whatever a sun will always sing is you - iv Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………... ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………. iii Chapter One : Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter Two : The Encyclopedia and The Story: Political and Literary Identity in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante and La literatura nazi en América ............................ 41 Chapter Three : The Catalogue of Femicides in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: A Failure of Witnessing, the Beginnings of an Account ..................................................................... 113 Chapter Four : The Burial of the Image: Alfredo Jaar’s Inoperative Documentation .... 159 Chapter Five : Conclusion .............................................................................................. 210 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………… 216 v Chapter One: Introduction At the heart of this dissertation is a concern for and interest in how a certain genre, form, and intentionality change when placed into a different context and used for a different means. The genre in question here is the particularly nebulous one of documentary, whether it be expressed in photography, writing, actual documentation, or some other form. The gap between the theory and practice of what documentary work does creates a space for the intervention of aesthetic practices, in which it is possible to reconfigure the documentary impulse and form. The literary and artistic works I examine here come out of a background in which the circulation of documentation is immense and its importance is viewed with great urgency while also being delegitimized or problematized in important ways. Genocidal or mass crimes committed by the state or other actors in Latin America and elsewhere must be documented and communicated; at the same time, the means through which such documentation is formulated and communicated have come into question in several different ways: traditional documentary work has undergone severe questioning in the last three decades; the value of a photograph has changed with the emergence of digital media; and the structures of the state which previously underwrote the cultural value and weight of documents have been corrupted by ties to previous orders (some of which committed the crimes in question), handicapped by amnesty laws, or weakened by the ascending power of the neoliberal market. And perhaps most importantly, there is the dilemma posed by having to document erasure and disappearance. Confronted with this problem, documentary 1 work, I suggest, turns toward more literary or figurative forms of gesturing at what remains beyond and before the typical frame of documentary work. The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño and the Chilean artist Alfredo both saw the burden placed on documentary forms and documentation and its precarious nature under that weight. In their work they incorporate documentary forms and expectations, even as they attempt to exceed their typical principals of production and meaning-making. Unlike the sharp bifurcation drawn by the Chilean theorist Nelly Richard between the avant- garde and the social sciences in their responses to the coup in Chile, Bolaño and Jaar show a lack of fear in inhabiting either set of discourses, and pass between each with fluency; this fluency and dialectic is an integral part of what I’ve called “documentary aesthetic.” I also describe this as a kind of inoperative or suspended documentation which occurs when the gesture of documenting is lifted up from its traditional coordinates and network of meaning-making and reference, and becomes free to join forces with other aesthetic techniques. In this separation the documentary apparatus is divorced from the ideology which traditionally sustains the authority of documentation, and it thus becomes capable of questioning, if not indicting, that ideology. This is what happens, for instance, in the creative reuse and recontextualization of identity documents in Jaar’s work or as instrumentalized by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This dissertation also contributes to the work of understanding Bolaño’s oeuvre by examining in greater specificity one aspect of his style. His writings are marked by forms strongly associated with the dictatorships and their aftermath: the testimonial or confessional voice (in Nocturno de Chile (2000), Amuleto (1999)); the portfolio of interviews assembled from an investigation (Los detectives salvajes (1998)); the 2 catalogue of the dead (2666 (2005)) or the encyclopedia of artists, itself another form of catalogue (La literatura nazi en América (1996)); the phone calls, letters and correspondence between exiles (Llamadas telefónicas (1997)). This dissertation attends to the impact of these forms on our reading of Bolaño. In chapter two, I attempt to read how the narrative techniques of Estrella distante, in response specifically to the fake anthology of fascist writers that composes the entirety of La literatura nazi en América, offer an understanding and expression of identity and community that reflect the fact that, in the post-coup era in Chile, identity and community are essentially fractured and always haunted by the possibilities foreclosed by the coup. By dialectizing the isolated entries of the encyclopedic form of La literatura nazi en América with the hyperactive and overdetermined doubling of stories and identities in Estrella distante, we glimpse a first instance of how the documentary aesthetic works at pointing out the foreclosure inherent in documentary form while absorbing and reconfiguring the ordering discourse of the encyclopedia into its own aesthetic framework. Similarly, I argue that in the novel 2666 the reworking of the catalogue form, a poetic form extracted from ancient epic poetry which traditionally is supposed to give the listener or reader a sense of order and place, represents the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Roberto Bolaño: Horror, Beauty, and the Infrareal
    ROBERTO BOLAÑO: HORROR, BEAUTY, AND THE INFRAREAL by Adam Jonathan Burling Bredenberg English Literature and Fiction Writing, University of Pittsburgh, 2013 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of University of Pittsburgh Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH HONORS COLLEGE This thesis was presented by Adam Bredenberg It was defended on April 18, 2013 A.D. and approved by Jeff Aziz, Associate Professor of English Literature Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies Joshua Lund, Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies Committee Chair: Ronald Judy, Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies, Department of English ii Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.5) You are free: • to copy, distribute and transmit the work • to adapt the work • to make commercial use of the work Adam Bredenberg 2013 iii HORROR, BEAUTY, AND THE INFRAREAL Adam Bredenberg University of Pittsburgh, 2013 ABSTRACT Routines of ignorance and inaction perpetuate destructive systems. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE PART ABOUT THE DETECTIVE AND THE LABYRINTH 6 III. THE PART ABOUT THE PHYSICAL CENTER 21 IV. THE PART ABOUT POWER AND THE FEMALE 34 V. THE PART ABOUT NEW CHILEAN POETRY 41 VI. THE PART ABOUT THE BASEMENT 50 v PREFACE I wish to thank my loved ones, my sources of support, my friends, my colleagues, and my editors: R. A. Judy, Danial Mohammed Khan-Yousufzai, and Lauren Rygg. vi I. INTRODUCTION In 2666, Roberto Bolaño creates Santa Teresa, an industrial town on the Mexican- American border where women and girls are routinely raped, murdered, and left in the desert or in garbage dumps.
    [Show full text]
  • TOURING DOSSIER2013 Centre De Cultura Contemporània De Barcelona 2013
    DOSSIER ITINERANCIA Centre de CulturaEXHIBITION Contemporània de Barcelona TOURING DOSSIER2013 Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona 2013 Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 ArchivoA CCCB production Bolaño. with the participation 1977-2003 of the Casa del Lector and the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes CREDITS PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT CCCB Exhibitions Service CURATORS Juan Insua Valerie Miles SPACE DESIGN AND GRAPHIC DESIGN Ignasi Bonjoch — www.bonjoch.com Anna Catasús AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTIONS Juan Insua, Toni Curcó Maria Padró PHOTOGRAPHY WORK Adrià Goula INTERACTIVE DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING Currysauce.net — http://www.currymedia.net/ COORDINATION Liliana Antoniucci [email protected] TOURING Carlota Broggi [email protected] A CCCB production with the participation of the Casa del Lector and the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION 2. EXHIBITION LAYOUT 2.1. THE UNKNOWN UNIVERSITY 2.2. INSIDE THE KALEIDOSCOPE 2.3. THE VISITOR FROM THE FUTURE 3. TECHNICAL DETAILS 4. PARALLEL ACTIVITIES 5. CATALOGUE 1. INTRODUCTION Bolaño Archive. 1977-2003 Curators: Valérie Miles, Juan Insua Dates: 5 March - 30 June 2013 Planned venues: NY, Berlin, Chile, Madrid The CCCB organised the Bolaño Archive exhibition as a tribute to the exceptional Chilean writer coinciding with the tenth anni- versary of his death in 2013, and with the sixth biennial edition of Kosmopolis, Amplified Literature Fest. Roberto Bolaño (Santiago de Chile 1953 – Barcelona 2003) is one of the most important writers of recent decades. His books have become an indisputable reference point for all lovers of literature. This exhibition aims to pay tribute to his work on the tenth an- niversary of his death, while also offering a first exploration of his personal archive.
    [Show full text]
  • Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 By
    The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Chair Professor Estelle Tarica Professor Tom McEnaney Summer 2018 The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ¬ 2018 Francisco Brito 1 Abstract The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Francine Masiello, Chair This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole.
    [Show full text]
  • Distant Star by Roberto Bolano
    Distant Star by Roberto Bolano Ebook Distant Star currently available for review only, if you need complete ebook Distant Star please fill out registration form to access in our databases Download here >> Series:::: New Directions Paperbook+++Paperback:::: 150 pages+++Publisher:::: New Directions (December 2004)+++Language:::: English+++ISBN-10:::: 9780811215862+++ISBN-13:::: 978-0811215862+++ASIN:::: 0811215865+++Product Dimensions::::5.3 x 0.4 x 8 inches++++++ ISBN10 9780811215862 ISBN13 978-0811215 Download here >> Description: A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.The star of Roberto Bolanos hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions.For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this star in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz- Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochets regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz- Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolanos darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolanos world theres a big graveyard and theres a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.)Many Chilean authors have written about the bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders, Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano.
    [Show full text]
  • Yahoo Hot Zone
    1 Sovereignty, Secrecy, and the Question of Magic in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star Cory Stockwell Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey “I would much rather have been a homicide detective than a writer. That’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of.” – Roberto Bolaño (2011, 369) That sovereignty possesses a mystical quality, one that at times borders on the occult, is something on which many theorists have commented. We could think here of the way Schmitt positions the sovereign as simultaneously inside and outside of the political order, and of his claim that “[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (2006, 36); we could also mention the sustained engagement with magic in the work of the most important theorist working in Schmitt’s wake, Giorgio Agamben.1 We could also think of the way Derrida, drawing upon Benjamin, refers to the “mystical foundation of authority”;2 or of Hardt and Negri, who, in seeking to chart the “new global form of sovereignty” (2000, xii) that they call Empire, refer, in the preface to the book of this name, to Marx’s invitation, in Capital, to “descend into the hidden abode of production” (xvii) – the place at which, according to Marx, we will finally witness “the secret of profit making.” Indeed, haven’t many of the most important thinkers of modern political philosophy, from de la Boétie through Rousseau and beyond, sought to interrogate an element of politics that it would be no exaggeration to label a mystery: why the many acquiesce to the power of the few? Few recent theorists, however, have gone so far as to use the term “magic” to refer to the workings of sovereignty.
    [Show full text]
  • '2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - Nytimes.Com
    Book Review - '2666,' by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Review - NYTimes.com November 9, 2008 The Departed By JONATHAN LETHEM Skip to next paragraph 2666 By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer By 898 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Cloth and paper, $30 In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music — the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth — by feeding it into a device that transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles and animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences — irregularities, ferocities — disguised within the classical pieces to begin with? Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm that brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Con­versely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.
    [Show full text]
  • Monstrosity and Social Violence: Challenges to Our Perception of Evil in Roberto Bolaño’S Estrella Distante
    6 Monstrosity and Social Violence: Challenges to Our Perception of Evil in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella Distante Carlos Vargas-Salgado This my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature’s bottomless cesspools.* Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star In Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella Distante (1996) (Distant Star), a group of Chilean university students is infiltrated by a murderer shortly before Pinochet’s coup. The murderer is also a poet (or at least he pretends to be so), who goes by the name of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle. Following the September 1973 putsch by Pinochet, there were disappearances, mostly of leftist students, as well as many poets. Among the victims in Distant Star: the Garmendia twins, two young women who were seduced by the murderer, who becomes famous right after the putsch under the name Carlos Wieder. The poet/murderer is almost perfect in his evilness and seems unassailable. He invents new forms of poetry, writing in Writing Monsters: Essays on Iberian and Latin American Cultures Hispanic Issues On Line 15 (2014) VARGAS-SALGADO ♦ 100 delusional Latin lines. He also organizes events with photographs of actual executions for the benefit of a distracted bourgeoisie and with the approval of the dreaded DINA (the intelligence office and secret police in Pinochet’s regime). Are we talking here about a monster, in a canonical sense of the term? Is Roberto Bolaño resorting to the old temptation of demonizing the assassins and political criminals by bestowing all archetypal characteristics of evil on a single character? Bolaño seems to discuss the conditions under which the image of a monster is built (mainly through the reconstruction of memories), and to attribute to him the status of evil incarnate.
    [Show full text]
  • The Universe of Roberto Bolaño
    By Night in Chile: the Universe of Roberto Bolaño Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean poet who turned to fiction writing at the end of his life. He fled Chile for Mexico and Spain when Pinochet took power, and he died of liver failure in 2003. Taken together, the novels and short stories he wrote in the last ten years of his life are one of the great achievements of modern literature, and his major work, 2666, is surely the best novel of our young century. The themes of his work – exile, violence, poetry, fascism, youth, crime – connect all of his books into a single, sprawling text. My collection contains every book by Bolaño that has been translated into English, plus the short biography and interview collection by journalist Mónica Maristain. The highlight of the collection is the pair of editions of 2666. The first book I read by Bolaño was The Savage Detectives, a novel about poets and courage. I bought it on a whim after reading a positive review. Reading The Savage Detectives was so exhilarating that immediately upon putting it down, I drove to the nearest bookstore and bought every other Bolaño book they had on the shelf. My experience reading The Savage Detectives was surpassed only by reading the novel 2666, which I read next. Before even finishing 2666, I’d bought a copy for all my friends and convinced them to read it too. Why is it such a compelling book? 2666 manages to be a Latin American, American, German, and Russian novel all at once.
    [Show full text]
  • Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 by Marcela Valdes
    Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolaño's 2666 By Marcela Valdes This article appeared in the December 8, 2008 edition of The Nation. Carla Rippey The Gardens of Ciudad Juárez, 2006 Marcela Valdes: Roberto Bolaño's last novel, 2666, is his most profound exploration of art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state. Shortly before he died of liver failure in July 2003, Roberto Bolaño remarked that he would have preferred to be a detective rather than a writer. Bolaño was 50 years old at the time, and by then he was widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist since Gabriel García Márquez. But when Mexican Playboy interviewed him, Bolaño was unequivocal. "I would have liked to be a homicide detective, much more than a writer," he told the magazine. "Of that I'm absolutely sure. A string of homicides. Someone who could go back alone, at night, to the scene of the crime, and not be afraid of ghosts." Detective stories, and provocative remarks, were always passions of Bolaño's--he once declared James Ellroy among the best living writers in English--but his interest in gumshoe tales went beyond matters of plot and style. In their essence, detective stories are investigations into the motives and mechanics of violence, and Bolaño--who moved to Mexico the year of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and was imprisoned during the 1973 military coup in his native Chile--was also obsessed with such matters. The great subject of his oeuvre is the relationship between art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state.
    [Show full text]
  • Senior Honors Thesis
    Finding Historical Truth: How Literature Interrupts National Narratives and Exposes Delusional Thinking By Camille Roth Honors Thesis Appalachian State University Submitted to the Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts May, 2021 Approved by: Christopher Meade, Ph.D. Thesis Director Germán Campos-Muñoz, Ph.D. Second Reader Alexander Pitofsky, Ph.D. Third Reader In the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, By Jorge Luis Borges, the main character is introduced to an old encyclopedia edition that contains an almost limitless amount of information about a different world and planet named Tlön. This encyclopedia includes fantastical details of the geography, language, and culture of Uqbar and Tlön, revealing major differences between the Earth that we know and Tlön. As the narrator learns more about this world, he discovers that it is a complete fiction that was invented by someone in the seventeenth century. After the contents of the encyclopedia become public knowledge and widely available to everyone, people begin to forget the difference between Earth and Tlön. Despite the fact that the culture, languages, and practices in the encyclopedia were a complete fabrication, the history of Tlön gradually invades and mixes with the history and culture of Earth until both Tlön’s and Earth’s history are essentially the same. This short story is a powerful example about the dangers of capitalism and globalism, idealist philosophy, and the depth to which humans can be entranced by ridiculous beliefs. It reveals not only how history can be constructed but also how the present is manipulated to conform to a certain narrative.
    [Show full text]
  • “Bolaño and the Canon.” Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Department Of
    “Bolaño and the Canon.” Ricardo Gutiérrez-Mouat Department of Spanish & Portuguese Emory University Atlanta, Georgia 30322 Roberto Bolaño’s biography and literary career can be summarized in a few words: he was born in Santiago in 1953, left his native Chile with his family in 1968, led a group of marginal poets in the Mexico City of the mid-1970s, moved to the Catalan region of Spain later that decade – where he took up writing novels and stories--, published The Savage Detectives in 1998 (for which he won the Herralde and Rómulo Gallegos prizes in consecutive years), and died in 2003 of a liver condition shortly after being consecrated as the most important writer of his generation and a year before the publication of his monumental work 2666. He was a writer who labored in relative obscurity for over two decades before making his mark in the literary world, writing poems and authoring some hard to classify novels set in Barcelona, Girona, Paris, and Blanes but featuring Latin American characters.1 Canonization in the Hispanic world was followed by canonization in the English-speaking world, where the Bolaño boom was, however, conditioned by the repackaging of his figure for a U.S. audience. (See Pollack).2 Whereas Bolaño’s stature abroad depended to some extent on a new set of cultural stereotypes, in Latin America and Spain his standing among fellow writers and readers was grounded on Bolaño’s ability to recast the avant-garde tradition and the legacy of the Boom in a fresh narrative language that is simultaneously visionary and colloquial.
    [Show full text]
  • On Roberto Bolaño Ix Siddhartha Deb
    LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS About the series This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in litera- ture in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical bound- aries and also include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United States. Designed to explore key questions confronting contemporary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in tra- ditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist approaches. Series Editor Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, USA. She has published widely in the areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border studies. Her numerous publications include the award-winning novel, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in Laredo, Texas. The (co)edited volumes: Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, Paths to Discovery: auto- biographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science and Engineering, Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes, and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams. She is cofounder of CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has appeared in Vandal, Prairie Schooner, and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues. Books in the Series: Radical Chicana Poetics Ricardo F.
    [Show full text]