Roberto Bolano as World Literature

Description

Roberto Bolano as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolano's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolano as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.

Nicholas Birns is Associate Professor at New York University, USA. His books include The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel (co-edited, 2013) and Theory After Theory (2010). Juan E. De Castro is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, New York, USA. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Mario Vargas Llosa: Public Intellectual in Neoliberal Latin America (2011). He is the co-editor of The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel (2013).

After a substantial introduction by Birns and De Castro, Roberto Bolano as World Literature proceeds with eleven refreshing critical readings of Bolano's works in light of the notion of world literature. ... [M]any of the engaged essays it contains offer innovative perspectives. Reading the articles together provides significant insights into both Bolano's works and the very concept of world literature. One of the common strengths of the articles lies in their critical approach to some of the most well-known theories of world literature (e.g. those elaborated by Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch) and their simultaneous exploration of new understandings of world literature construed as a literary category and a creative or critical practice. Thus, this book follows a chiastic pattern: it reads Bolano through world literature and world literature through Bolano. ... Some of the best essays in this collection are 'political,' not in an ideological way but in the sense that they investigate the system underlying world literature. In this way, they strive to understand how an oeuvre like Roberto Bolano's both is world literature and constitutes a radical challenge to it. * Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Aarhus University, Denmark, Recherche litteraire/Literary Research (Fall 2020) * Arguably, Roberto Bolano as World Literature is the most significant book in the series up to now. ... The Introduction, 'Fractured Masterpieces' not only sets up the subject of the book in all its complexity, it could also be seen as a model for how to articulate the individual subjects and the wider, theoretical interests of World Literature. ... More than in any other volume so far, this one shows how in every single chapter a questioning of World Literature through a consideration, even close reading, of Bolano's works, was made into a key directive and focus. Throughout the volume questions of politics, ethics and aesthetics constantly intersect, and even though each essay on its own is worth reading, the collected volume is certainly more than just the sum of its various parts. * Journal of European Studies * Twelve chapters comprise the anthology, including the exemplary Introduction. It is the best Bolano critical ensemble since Bolano Salvaje (2006). * Comparative Literature Studies * Not and world literature, but as world literature, and here resides this volume's decisive and effective critical intervention. Not world literature (the tired substitute for a sociology of markets, prizes, and canonizing institutions), but rather literature as world, or rather, literature as non-world, the void that sits where the reassuring presence of the world used to be: Bolano as the topological writer of the traumatic wound that splits totalizing imaginaries, unworlds a world turned against itself, and dislocates the very possibility of universal emancipation as the horizon for political and aesthetic agency. This urgent book is a crucial contribution to the collective process of redefining the critical and theoretical scope of world literature as a concept and a practice in need to be rescued from itself. * Mariano Siskind, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA * This timely collection of essays on the place of Bolano's oeuvre in world literature explores the Chilean author's vision of history, his literary worlds, and the reception he has had worldwide. Essays by renowned experts analyze, through the analysis of some of Bolano's main works, his cosmopolitanism, the global framework in which his plots take place, and the reasons behind his impressive success as a writer that embodies Latin American literature after the Boom. Ultimately, the author emerges as a figure beyond one particular nation, political inclination, or cause. * Ignacio Lopez-Calvo, Professor of Latin American Literature, University of California, Merced, USA * Expertly assembled and introduced by the editors, this collection offers incisive explorations of Roberto Bolano's politics and of his place on the complex map of world literature. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in the great Chilean author's work, and in the cosmopolitan dimension of Latin American literature. * Maarten van Delden, Professor of Latin American Literature, University of California, Los Angeles, USA * Birns (NYU) and De Castro (Eugene Lang College, New School) present the 11 essays in this collection in three parts: "Bolan~o and World History," "Bolan~o's Literary Worlds," and "Bolan~o's Global Readers." The contributors are from the US, Ireland, Germany, China, and Chile, a geographic range that reflects the title. In the introduction, "Fractured Masterpieces," the editors write that they find Bolan~o (1953-2003) difficult to characterize politically and artistically but not canonically-that is, as globally significant. In her essay, Oswaldo Zavala describes Bolan~o's work as taking "a subversive approach to Western literary modernity as it intersects the Latin American intellectual difference." Birns notes that Bolan~o shares affinities with Melville and, even more strikingly, Twain. Noting the irony of a writer whose posthumously commodified works explore "geometries of power and economy that shape capitalist modernity," Sharae Deckard explicates Bolan~o's "paradoxical relation to world literature." Bolan~o's distaste for marketing practices did not prevent the writer from becoming profitable for the marketers. These essays will encourage readers to visit Bolan~o again or for the first time. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE * Some of the best essays in this collection are "political," not in an ideological way but in the sense that they investigate the system underlying world literature. * Recherche Litteraire *