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Chapter 23 - The Abomination of Literature

from Part IV - Aesthetics, Culture, and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2022

Jonathan B. Monroe
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

This essay explores the relationship of literature and perversity in Roberto’s Bolaño’s short fictions “The Secret of Evil,” “The Insufferable Gaucho,” and Distant Star. While literature within the history of Latin American letters often provides a critique of or antidote to political and economic atrocities, in Bolaño’s texts literature is complicit in the very horrors it depicts. In Bolaño’s view, any effort to pit fiction and social actuality against each other in the interest of rescuing either represents a means to avoid the disturbance that, for Bolaño, defines contemporary existence.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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