Roberto Bolaño Conference
Wellesley College’s program in Comparative Literature, the Department of Spanish, and the Department of German will be hosting a conference (November 3–5, 2017) to explore how the work of Roberto Bolaño allows us to look at the way Latin America writes about Europe and how European narrative legacies have been impacting Latin American writing.
While critics have looked at the novels of Bolaño as examples of the “Global Latin American novel” (Hoyos), his critical fascination with European right-wing culture of the 1920s and 1930s and with aesthetic traditions that probe the limits of literature as a humanist endeavor has yet to be understood. We are interested in papers that address Bolaño’s heteroglossic appropriations of aesthetic and political legacies including the writings of de Sade, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernst Jünger or Pier Paolo Pasolini. Related topics of interest: the relationship between violence and writing / the violation of literary decorum; narratives as literary metacritique of Fascist writing; contamination of space by physical terror; female sexuality and male destructive fantasies (Theweleit); disruption of national traditions of writing; censorship and modes of oppression in authoritarian societies.
Please send (one page) abstracts by April 1st to both Professor Marjorie Agosin (magosin@wellesley.edu) and Professor Thomas Nolden (tnolden@wellesley.edu). All papers will be delivered in English.
Professor Marjorie Agosin, Department of Spanish, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481 (USA)
Professor Thomas Nolden, Comparative Literature Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts 02481 (USA)