La modernidad insufrible ISBN: 9781469637877 Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / The University of North Carolina Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Has Chilean author Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) written the final word on Latin America's insufferable modernity? This investigation asserts that Bolano's novels, short stories, poetry and essays examine to a point of exhaustion the most important aspects of Latin America's modern literary tradition. Bolano's critique of modernity as a violent historical condition is a radical mode of literary articulation. With it, the current models of criticism--world literature, the global novel, postcolonial and transatlantic studies--are undermined, while the very notions of margin and center are ultimately disolved. Oswaldo Zavala contends that Bolano deliberately dismantles the symbolic capital of the Western literary tradition by generating a counterhegemonic horizon of meaning that arises from and defines Latin American writing. The book offers innovative readings of Distant Star , By Night in Chile , The Savage Detectives , Last Evenings on Earth and 2666 , among other works. It ultimately demonstrates that Bolano transcends the neoliberal dream of a global consciousness by revealing the discontinuous, contingent and savage reality of our pernicious modernity. Bolano forges the most urgent critique of 21st century Latin American and Western literature alike.