Roberto Bolaño as World Literature

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).

• Introduction: Fractured MasterpiecesNicholas Birns (College of New Rochelle, USA) and Juan E De Castro (Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, USA)I. Bolaño and World History1. On Fascism, history and evil in Roberto BolañoFederico Finchelstein (The New School, USA)2. “More Culture!”: The Rules of Art in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in ChileThomas Beebee (Pennsylvania State University, USA)3. Politics and Ethics in Latin America: On Roberto BolañoJuan E. De Castro (The New School,USA)4. The Repolitization of the Latin American Shore: Roberto Bolaño and the Dispersion of “World Literature” Oswaldo Zavala (City University of New York, USA)II. Bolaño’s Literary Worlds 5. Bolaño, Ethics, and the ExpertsWill H. Corral (Independent Scholar)6. Considerations on the Real and Reality in Juan Luis Martínez’s La nueva novela and in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage DetectivesPatricia Espinosa H. (Instituto de Estética, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)7. Global Bolaño: Reading, Writing and Publishing in a Neoliberal World José Enrique Navarro (Wichita State University, USA)III. Bolaño’s Global Readers8. Mocking World Literature and Canon Parodies in Roberto Bolaño’s FictionBenjamin Loy (University of Köln, Germany)9. On Depoliticized Politics: Roberto Bolaño’s Reception in ChinaTeng Wei (South China Normal University, China)10. Black Dawn: Roberto Bolaño as (North) American WriterNicholas Birns (College of New Rochelle, USA)11. Roberto Bolaño and the Remapping of World-LiteratureSharae Deckard (University College Dublin,UK)Index

After a substantial introduction by Birns and De Castro, Roberto Bolaño as World Literature 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.