Framing Roberto Bolano: Poetry, Fiction, Literary History, Politics

Description

Poetry, fiction, literary history, and politics. These four cornerstone concerns of Roberto Bolano's work have established him as a representative, generational figure in not only Chile, Mexico, and Spain, the three principal locations of his life and work, but throughout Europe and the Americas, increasingly on a global scale. At the heart of Bolano's 'poemas-novela', his poet- and poetry-centered novels, is the history and legacy of the prose poem. Challenging the policing of boundaries between verse and prose, poetry and fiction, the literary and the non-literary, the aesthetic and the political, his prose poem novels offer a sustained literary history by other means, a pivotal intervention that restores poetry and literature to full capacity. Framing Roberto Bolano is one of the first books to trace the full arc and development of Bolano's work from the beginning to the end of his career.

Jonathan Beck Monroe is a former DAAD and American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow and member of the IIEE's national Fulbright selection committee. He is the author of A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (1987) and Demosthenes' Legacy (2009), a book of prose poems and short fiction. Co-author and editor of Writing and Revising the Disciplines (2002), Local Knowledges, Local Practices: Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell (2003), editor of the special issue 'Poetry, Community, Movement' of the journal Diacritics, and 'Poetics of Avant-Garde Poetries' in Poetics Today. He has published widely on questions of genre, writing and disciplinary practices, innovative poetries of the past two centuries, and avant-garde movements and their contemporary legacies.

'Jonathan Monroe's excellent monograph offers an original take that combines the best of close reading with theoretical reflection. The author explores Bolano's broad-ranging literary culture with great success. He offers a detailed portrait not just of a writer, but of a reader. This is, in short, a significant contribution that will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the whole of Bolano's oeuvre.' Hector Hoyos, Stanford University, California 'Eye-opening and unique, Framing Roberto Bolano is a brilliant, comparative study of literary genres through the analysis of Bolano's oeuvre. Tracing the evolution of Bolano's writing from the minimal (the anti-narrative prose poems in Antwerp) to the maximal (the monumental 2666), it contextualizes Bolano's understanding of western literary history and politics, as well as his attitude toward readers and critics. Monroe's erudite familiarity with American and European as well as Latin American literature facilitates the insightful identification of important literary influences, leitmotifs, and themes in Bolano's works. Revealing Bolano's itinerary as a voracious reader, the book contextualizes his literature, and, along the way, defends its canonicity and importance in the World's Republic of Letters. An amazing research effort, with many innovative and original insights into a literature that seemed to have reached its limits for future literary analysis, it will be of interest to students and professors in Latin American and Western literature.' Ignacio Lopoez-Calvo, University of California, Merced