Bloomsbury Roberto Bolaño as World Literature (Literatures as World Literature)

Roberto Bolaño 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 Bolaño'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 Bolaño 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. Review After a substantial introduction by Birns and De Castro, <i>Roberto Bolaño as World Literature</i> proceeds with eleven refreshing critical readings of Bolaño’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 Bolaño’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 Bolaño through world literature and world literature through Bolaño. … 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 Bolaño’s both is world literature and constitutes a radical challenge to it. --Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Aarhus University, Denmark, Recherche littéraire/Literary Research (Fall 2020)Arguably, <i>Roberto Bolaño as World Literature</i> 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 Bolaño’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 StudiesTwelve chapters comprise the anthology, including the exemplary Introduction. It is the best Bolaño critical ensemble since <i>Bolaño Salvaje</i> (2006). --Comparative Literature Studies About the Author 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).